A FIRE ON THE REEF (Continued)

Katafa, when she had arranged her hair and made her bed of blankets in the bottom of the canoe, lay down, but she did not close her eyes. She lay watching the last glow of the sunset, and then the instantly following stars held her gaze, talking to her of Karolin and the great sea spaces she had been suddenly caught away from.

The atoll island has never been adequately described by pen or brush—never will be. What brush or pen could paint the starlight on the great lagoons, the sunrises and sunsets, the vastness of the distances unbroken by any land but just the low ring of reef? Life on an atoll is like life on a raft: immensity on every side—and the sea.

Here the girl felt herself suddenly shut in, the groves rising to the hill-top fretted her spirit, the bit of lagoon was nothing, and even the reef was different from the reef of Karolin. Kearney had raised something deep down in her mind against him and he seemed somehow now the centre and core of all her trouble. Dick she scarcely thought of; he, like other human beings, was of little account to her.

Thoughts came to her of trying to get the canoe out and escaping back to the freedom which was the only thing she loved, but it was hopeless. She could never do the business single-handed; she was trapped and she knew it.

Now, when Le Juan wanted help from Nanawa, the shark-toothed god, she had several methods of invoking the deity. One of the simplest was by fire. She would go off, build a little fire and, as she fed it, repeat over it a formula, always the same string of words representing the wish of her heart, which was never spoken.

Something generally happened after that. Sometimes the wish would be granted, long overdue rain would come, or some enemy already dying would die, or the palu that had forsaken for a while the palu bank would come back.

But the shark-toothed one was a tricky deity and had a habit of sending other gifts along by way of Laggniappe.

For instance, in that great drought long years ago, Le Juan had sacrificed stacks of fuel to the god, and weeks after he had sent the rain, but he also sent the Spanish ship with Katafa on board of it, and Katafa had given Le Juan a lot of trouble and heart-searching.

Again, two years ago, he had sent the palu back to the bank but at the same time he had extended the season in the lagoon when the fish were poisonous by a fortnight.

Sometimes he was quite amiable and would cure an indigestion without killing the patient as well—but it was all a toss-up. He was a dark force, and even Le Juan recognised in a dim way that she was playing with evil, and was never easy till the effects of her invocations were over and done with.

Katafa had often helped to stoke the little fires and she knew the ritual in all its simplicity. The thing had never interested her much till now.

Maybe Nanawa could help her, take the island away or knock it to pieces without hurting her, or lift it like a dish cover to the sky as she had seen it lifted by mirage, or free her in some way—any way.

She brooded for an hour or more over this business. Then, having made up her mind, she rose, skipped lightly on to the bank and, moving silently as a shadow, approached the house. She could tell by their breathing that the occupants were asleep, and she could see the box of matches on the little shelf in the moonlight.

She took it and, as she held the strange fire box in her hand, the sudden impulse came to her, maybe from the shark-toothed one, to fire the house. The mysterious antagonism against Kearney urged her to destroy him; it seemed also a way out of her trouble.

The little ships saved the sleepers.

The remembrance of them suddenly came to the girl, and the thought that some god of whom they were the insignia might be on the watch. She could not see them in the darkness of the house, but they were doubtless there on their shelves, put there to protect the sleepers just as Le Juan hung over her bed place a shrunken human hand.

Maybe she was right; maybe Kearney, without knowing, had placed them there under higher direction, but, right or wrong, the things acted as efficiently as a spell.

She turned away and, taking the paddle from the canoe, unmoored the dinghy and pushed off for the reef.

She found, as she had expected, plenty of fuel, and the match-box gave her no trouble. She had watched the process of striking a match carefully with those eyes from which no detail escaped, and in a minute the stuff she had collected was alight and burning.

Then, standing in the windless night and piling on dead weed, bits of wood and dried fish fragments that popped and blazed like gas jets, Katafa, with hands pressed against her ridi so that the flames might not catch its dracÆna leaves, put up her prayers to the shark-toothed one, repeating the old formula of Le Juan and backing it with the unspoken wish that the island might be taken away and freedom restored to her.

An hour later she returned across the lagoon, tied up the dinghy and, snuggling down in the canoe, went to sleep.