 18 I was awaiting Hall's arrival in Tahiti, confident that sooner or later he would keep a vague rendezvous set months before. I knew that by this time he must have penetrated far into the sea of atolls, travelling in the leisurely manner, of the latitudes transferring from one schooner to the next and stopping over for weeks at a time, perhaps in the tranquil and lonely communities he had grown to love. Once or twice, when a dinghy, palmutu schooner, deep laden with cobra and crowded with pearl-divers eager for a whirl at Vieti in the island capital, crept into the pass, I had word of him, but there was no hint of return. It was a month of calms, long days when the lagoon, unruffled by the faintest cats-paw, shimmered in blinding sunlight while the sea outside seemed to slumber, stirring gently and drowsily along the reef. Once at midday a three-masted schooner with all sails furled and diesel engines going came in to waken the town with the horse-climber of a hurr-exhaust. An hour later I met her skipper on the street. Your friend Hall is homeward bound, he told me. I spoke the Poti Rivera, a bit of thirty-ton schooner, off Nakatakawaki, and he was aboard of her. She ought to be in some time this week. The days passed in a rapid and dreamy fashion, peculiar to the South Seas. From time to time I thought of Hall and his diminutive schooner drifting about becalmed among the Coral Islands or, perhaps, only a score of miles off Tahiti, helpless to reach the sighted land. The Poti Rivera was a full week overdue when the calm weather came to an end. The heat was intense that afternoon, and towards sunset towering masses of cloud began to pile up along the horizon to the north. The sky grew black. There was a tense hush in the air, vibrant with the far-off rumble of thunder. When I strolled out along the waterfront, the people were gathering in anxious groups before their houses. I heard snatches of talk. Have you noticed a glass? Things have an ugly look. Hope it doesn't mean another cyclone. The town will catch it if the sea begins to rise. I had heard of the hurricane of 1906 when the sea rose and reached clean into the harbor, driving the population of Papati to the hills. On Motu Uta, an island in the bay, a white man was living with his Pamamotian wife. When the angry seas began to race in over the reef without a pause, sweeping the island from end to end, the watchers ashore gave the pair up for lost. But the woman was a low-highlander, and just before dawn, when the coconut palm in which she had taken refuge was swept away, she swam six hundred yards to shore and landed through a surf of a sea otter would have hesitated to attempt. Next day they found the drowned and battered body of her husband, drifting with dead pigs and horses, and a litter of wreckage from the lower portions of the town. The city Tahiti was in for another hurricane. When I glanced at my barometer after dinner it was following with ominous rapidity, and at bedtime the glass stood lower than I had seen it in the South Seas. In the small hours of the morning a servant came to wake in me. There was a new sound in the air, the uproar of surth breaking on the inner shore of the lagoon. The sea is rising, said Tara. The waves are breaking under the paru trees, and if you do not come quickly, to help me our canoe will be washed away. The stars were hidden by black clouds, and though scarcely a breath of air stirred the level of the lagoon was four feet above its normal limit, and the sheltered water usually so calm was agitated by a heavy swell. Then the rain came, drumming a thunderous monotone on my tin roof, and after the rain the wind. At dawn the was seventy-mile gale was blowing out of the northeast. It was obvious that all danger of a hurricane was passed. At midday the glass began to rise, and before dark the wind was falling away perceptibly. More than once during the night I had thought of haul out somewhere on the wild and lonely sea to the east. The bowtie Rivera reputed to be an able little boat with proper offing she would probably come through worse than this. But she had no engine, and if she had been caught in the Pomoto the dangerous archipelago where unknown currents and a maze of reefs make navigation ticklish in the best of weather there was cause for anxiety. The storm blew itself out in two days time, and on the evening of the third day I was standing on the waterfront with a group of traders and schooner captains. They were speaking of the bowtie Rivera. By this time the object of mild misgivings when one of the skippers gave a sudden shout, there she is now. He announced and looking up I saw a deeply laden little schooner, with patched gray sails rounding the point of Vacherette. Presently she turned into the wind, dropped anchor, and sent a boat ashore. A few moments later I was welcoming home, very thin, raggedly dressed, and brown as a Pomotian. His eyes were smiling, but they had in them a look unmistakable, when once seen the expression of a hunger greater than most of us have been known. Who always said, come along to the hotel, it must be dinner time. Find Joe Vivellis though I could eat a raw shark. When he had eaten two dinners complete from soup to black coffee, and beginning with soup again, he lit a cigarette and told me the story of his return from the Low Islands. It was all right he began, until we left Hale. The palm tops were still in sight on the horizon when the breeze died away, and we drifted for seven whole days in a broiling glassy calm. It was a curious experience, but one I would not care to repeat. You've seen the schooner. She's not much bigger than a sea-going canoe. There were four of us aboard. Mittai, the skipper, a Pomotonian, and a seaman by instinct, though he knows nothing of latitude or longitude. Two sailors, one of whom has a horrible case of elephantitis and myself. We had a tremendous load of copra for so small a boat. The hold was crammed with it, and the cabin stuffed to the ceiling. Opposite the companion away, they had left out a few bags at the top, giving a space two feet high and just wide enough for two men to sleep side by side in case of rain or bad weather. Our stove was merely a box of sand in which a fire could be lighted, set in a little box of a galley tacked to the forward deck. If we had anything to cook, the galley might have been useful, but Mittai had given away nearly all the ship's provisions to his relatives in Hale. He gave him a feast while some copra was being loaded, and when the job was finished he gave a feast in return. The two sailors looked sour, while they watched the people opening their biscuit and salmon and bully-beef, but after all, the prevailing Windsor Fair, normally the passage to Tahiti wouldn't take more than ten days. Mittai overdid the giving away business, however. When we took stock of our kauke on the first day of the calm, I found he had saved only half a tin of biscuit and a few cans of salmon. In addition to this, we had a parting gift of a sack of drinking nuts and a couple of dozen ripe nuts someone was sending to Tahiti for seed. I had grown fed up on the sort of water these schooners carry, stale and full of wiggily young mosquitoes, and by great good fortune I had a three-gallon demi-john sent by Tino of the Windship, which I filled with fresh rain water in hail. My demi-john lasted precisely a day and a half, all hands drank out of it, but I did not complain of their lavishness. There was supposed to be a barrel of water somewhere below. Those were thirsty days. We rigged up an awning with a part of an old mainsail. I spent most of my time lying in the hot shade, reading the one book I had with me. Forestats, Chronicles of England, France and Spain. The days seemed interminable. The starlight pale, the sun rose to glare down hour after hour on the face of a motionless and empty sea and sent it last on a horizon void of clouds. Sometimes I dozed, sometimes I watched the reflections of the bospirate. It was painted gray with a bright red tip, and seen in the faintly heaving water it looked like a long gray snake spitting fire as it writhed in gracious underlations. The sufferer from elf and Titus turned out to be an extraordinary man. It was not worthwhile to keep watches during the calm, and, as there was no work of any importance, he retired to this stifling cubby-hole among the copper sacks and slept. Slept from dawn to darkness and from dark to dawn again. Now then, at long intervals, he appeared on deck. Once I went aft to look at him. Lying naked except for a Peru, mouth open and swollen limbs sprawled on the uneven surface of the cobra. Metis and Terra showed a different side of native character. The schooner belonged to their captain, and, keeping her trim, giving the same delight a man feels in buying pretty clothes for his mistress. The young sailor was Metis Nefu. And the pair of them worked tirelessly in the sun, scraping a rail and top sides in preparation for a French coat of paint. It was strange, when I was deep in forested sieges and battles and stories of court life, to glance up from my book and see the vacant rim of the horizon. The silhouette of the foremast against the hot blue sky, and it took Kanakas endlessly at work, scrape, scrape, scrape, and exchange of low-toned remarks at chuckle as they heard the gentle snores of the sleeping man below. Nearly every day our hopes were raised by deceitful cat-paws, heralded by far-off streaks of blue. Some died before they reached us, others, after a preliminary rustle and flutter, filled our sails and set the schooner to moving gently on her course, only to die away and leave the sea glassy as before. On the second day the sharks began to gather in their uncanny fashion, as they always do about a vessel be calmed or in distress. I spent hours watching them, ugly blots in the clear blue water, waiting with a grim and hopeful patience for some happening which would provide them with a meal. They circled about the schooner in deliberate zig-zags, or lay motionless in the shadow of her side, attended always by their odd little striped pilot fish. I learned to recognize one ponderous old gray shark. He had a brace of pilot fish, one swimming on each side of his head, and he wasn't afraid of us in the least. Sometimes he lay for an hour within a yard of the vessel side. I could see the texture of his rough skin and the almost imperceptible motions of fins and tail. I could understand now the hatred sharks inspiring men who follow the sea. It wasn't long before I had decided to try to kill the big, insolent brute. We hadn't as much as a hook and line on board, but finally with a file and the point of a rusty boat hook I improvised a makeshift sort of spear. Armed with this I waited by the rail until my victim came in range, and then lunged down with all my strength. The spear glanced off his tough hide. He swam away in a leisurely manner. Turned, and a moment later was again beneath me. This time I struck him fair on the back. But it was like trying to kill an elephant with a pen-knife. I think the point of my boat hook punctured him. But he only circled off again and returned to give me another chance. In the end I gave up and left him in possession of the field. The nights when the air had cooled and the stars were blazing overhead were so beautiful that one hated to fall asleep. Reflection made sky and sea alike dark backgrounds for the mirrored lights of the constellations. Lying on deck while the other slept I used to regret that I had not learned something of astronomy. The average native sailor knows more about the stars than I. Orion I know. The Pleiades, which the natives, with a rather pretty fancy, call Mataraki, the little eyes, and the scorpion, believed in heathen times to be the great fish hook of Maui, flung into the sky by the god when he had finished pulling up islands from the bottom of the Pacific. Each night I watched the rising of the Southern Cross, and low down in the south I saw the Magellanic clouds, streamers of stardust, like vapor, impallible, and remote. In spite of my companions sleeping quietly on the deck, those nights gave me a sense of overwhelming loneliness, the languid air, the solitary ship, immobile on the face of a lifeless sea, the immense expanse of the universe, a blaze with the light of distant suns. When our water gave out I began to prefer the nights to the days. My damage on, as I told you, lasted only a day and a half. After that, we used the drinking-nuts, and not until the last of them was gone, did anyone think of investigating the water-cask. There was consternation when we discovered that it contained only three or four inches of rusty water. Either it leaked or the skipper was remarkably careless. Hoping all the time for a breeze or a squall of rain, we began on the half sack of ripe nuts, thin, sharp stuff for drinking. But a lot of them went in a day. Then we went on rations, dealt out from the barrel with a soup-spoon. Finally the barrel was dry. And we went two days with nothing of any kind to drink. It was no joke. If you've ever had a real thirst, you'll know what I mean. The natives stood it wonderfully well. Mity did not once complain, though he remarked to me that when he got ashore he was planning to drink too much coconut. The victim of Fifi continued his slumberous routine. I wondered if he were dreaming of rustling palms and shaded gurgling riblets. It was my first experience of thirst, odd what an utter animal one becomes at such a time. Waking and sleeping my head was filled with dreams of water, brooks, rivers, lakes, of cool, fresh water, in which to bury one's face and drink. I dreamed of locks and highland burns in Scotland. Of the gorge of Fontana, on Tahiti, where only a few months before I had stood in the mist, listening to the roar of the cataract. Well, it wasn't much fun. Another day or two might have been unendable. In one comfort, at any rate, if you're thirsty enough, you don't worry about eating. By the time we had finished the salmon and biscuit we had ceased to bother about food. On the last night of the calm none of us slept, unless it was the sailor in his den among the copper sacks. At dawn Mity touched my shoulder and pointed to the south, where the pailing stars were obscured by banks of cloud. An hour later the rain water was streaming out of these scuppers and spouting off one end of our awning into the barrel, hastily recouped in case of leaks. When the squall passed and the sun shone down on a dark blue leaping sea, we were running before a fine breeze from the southeast. Now that our thirst was satisfied and we had plenty of water and reserve, we discovered suddenly that we were starving. Mity prowled about below and came on deck with a package of rice stowed away during some previous voyage. It was a valuable find for we had nothing else to eat. There was copper, of course, which the native will eat in a pinch, but the rancid smell of the stuff was too much for me. The wind held and finally a day came when the skipper announced that we ought to raise Tahiti soon. About midday his nephew, who was perched in the shrouds, sang out that he had sighted land. I had a look and saw on the horizon a flat blur, like the palm tops of a distant atoll. As we drew near the land rose higher and higher out of the sea, it was Macatea, and we were more than a hundred miles north of our course. No meal I have ever eaten tasted so good as the dinner Mity's relatives gave us that night. We got away next morning with a liberal stock of provisions and an additional passenger for Tahiti, a philosophic pig who traveled lashed under one of the seats of the ship's boat. For three hours we ran before a fresh northwesterly breeze, but about nine o'clock the wind dropped and soon the sails were hanging limp in a dead calm. I began to suspect that the man with the swollen legs was a Jonah of the First Order. This time, however, the calm was soon over. Heavy, greenish black clouds were drifting down on us from the north. The sunrise gave place to an evil, violent gloom. Mity and his two men sprang into a sudden activity. They battered down the forward hatch, put extra lashings on the boat, double reefed the foresail, and got in everything else. Then in a breathless calm a downpour of rain began to lash the sea with a strange murmuring sound. I thought of an ominous old verse. If the wind before the rain sheets your top sails home again, if the rain before the wind, then your top sails hail your mind. It was a disagreeable moment, even the pig felt it, for when the sailors moved him to a place in the bow of the dory, he refrained from the usual shrill protest. One detail sticks in my memory. When the skipper had taken his place at the wheel, he gave a sudden order. The man with the swollen legs shuffled hastily to where the boat was lashed down and pulled out the plug from its bottom. Then came the wind. It swept down on us from the north-northeast, from the quarter in which hurricanes begin, and the first furious gust was a mild sample of what was to come. The matigotter laid to, heading at a slight angle into the seas. I realized the splendid qualities of the little potei revera. No small vessel would have kept her decks dry in the sea that made up within an hour. The captain never left the wheel, and I doubt if there's a finer helmsman in the south seas, but before noon the galley, with our entire supply of food, was swept clean overboard, and time after time the lashed-down boat was filled. The pig had worked himself free except for one hind leg tied to a bottom board with a rough strip of hibiscus bark. And as the water drained out slowly through the unplugged hole a stern, the agitated surface would be broken by his snout, emitting sputtering screams. He lived through it, by the way. All of us, I believe, thought that we were in for a hurricane. Every hour the violence of the wind increased. It was agailed from the north-northeast, the wind called by the ancient Polynesians the terrible Meilke. It seemed to rush at us in paroxysms of fury. Tearing off the entire crest of waves and hurling, solid water about us as though it were spray. The forward hatch leaked badly. When I think of that storm, my memory is filled with a nightmare of endless pumping. A day and a night passed, and Don found us riding a mountainous sea, but the wind was abating and our decks were dry. The victim of elephantitis had been taking spells with me at the pump. He is a man that fellow in spite of his loathsome infirmity. The pump began to suck up bubbles and froth. Mitty's eyes are sharp. Enough pumping, he shouted. Go and sleep, you two. We obeyed the order with alacrity. Sleeping on deck was out of the question. Without an instant of hesitation I crawled in among the copress-axe, besides my repulsive companion. When I awoke it was evening and we were running, with a heavy following wind. Mitty was still at the helm, red-eyed from want of sleep, but whirling the spokes dexterously as each big sea past beneath us, engaging ahead for the first glimpse of Tahiti. The clouds broke just before dark, and we had a glimpse of the high ridges of Terrapu. Dead ahead. We got sail on earth at that, and stood off to the north-west, past the bay of Tavaro, and the sunken reefs of Hitya. Toward morning we raised point venus light, but the wind failed in the leaoth of the island and it took us all day to reach Papati Harbor. All finished his story in the dark. The last of the diners had gone long since, and, safe for ourselves, the broad veranda was empty. What are your plans, I asked? Our year in the south seas is up. Where are you going now? I have no plans, he said, except that I doubt if I shall ever go north again. I may be wrong, but I believe I have had enough of civilization to last me the rest of my life. We are happy here. Why should we leave the islands? I fancy the south seas have claimed the pair of us.