I was awakened at daybreak by a noise of shoutings and running out of the house, my eyes still heavy with sleep, I saw the Tara standing in through the Nao Nao Pass. I called to Marama. We launched our canoe and paddled out as the schooner rounded to and dropped anchor with a prolonged rattle of chain. My uncle was standing at the wheel—a tall bronzed figure in a scarlet waist-cloth; he called out a jovial greeting as we paddled alongside. Ivi and Ofai were busy with the whaleboat; Fatu waved an enormous hand at us; I saw Pahuri standing by the rail, smiling his cynical and wrinkled smile.
"Come aboard, boys," my uncle shouted. "Eh, Charlie, the islands agree with you, I see! You're brown as a native and an inch broader than when I saw you last! Hello, Marama! Mai ai oe? How's the work coming on? All the canoes ready?"
It seemed like returning home, to breakfast once more in the Tara's saloon. Uncle Harry was in high spirits at the prospect of an early start. Everything had been arranged in Tahiti; the Tara's cargo had been unloaded, and a fresh cargo—all our supplies for the diving-season on Iriatai—taken aboard.
"An odd thing happened," remarked my uncle as we sat down. "I lost a lot of papers from my desk. Remember the letter I translated to you at home—the one about Iriatai, from the old native woman to her son? Well, that was among them; it's of no use to anyone, of course, now that we have the lagoon tied up. A piece of spite-work, I think. Rairi, that precious cook of ours, boarded the schooner one day while I was ashore—said he'd forgotten a bundle of his things.
"I wish you'd been with me," he went on, "you'd have had a look at a famous schooner and the most picturesque scoundrel in the South Seas. Ever hear of Thursday Island Schmidt? Oh yes, I remember—I mentioned him that night at the ranch. Well, this was my first glimpse of him, and I'll own that I was interested. A week ago he brought his little schooner into Papeete with a load of shell from the Gambier Islands. She's as pretty as her reputation is black, and the way he handled her was a treat to watch. She's flying the tricolor now; he transferred her to French registry in Noumea, last year. They know less than the British about her past! She's dodged Russian gunboats when Schmidt was seal-poaching in the foggy North Pacific; she's kidnapped wild bush-niggers, out in the Solomons and New Hebrides; she's posed as an Australian revenue-boat to hold up the Malay pearlers in Torres Straits, where her skipper got his name. I saw Schmidt in the club that afternoon—he's a big German, with a full beard and a pair of cold blue eyes. They say he's a cashiered naval officer—a great talker at any rate, and speaks English like a professor.
"Papeete's a gossipy place! After Schmidt had left the club, I heard some queer yarns. There's a rumor that he has a prisoner aboard the Cholita—someone who's never allowed ashore and whom visitors are never allowed to see! The traders have nothing to think about but the price of copra, and other men's affairs!
"One night on the water-front I saw Schmidt walking with a man I thought was Rairi, but the native turned away before I was close enough to make sure, and old Thursday Island gave me a long stare as I passed under a street lamp. By Jove! It set me to thinking, you know! Suppose Rairi has the letter—he may be cooking up some deviltry with the master of the Cholita! I'll be nervous as an old woman till I get that shell safely stowed away! But that's nonsense—we're living in the twentieth century, and even if Rairi knows more than is good for him, Thursday Island wouldn't dare try any of his old tricks nowadays.
"Come," concluded Uncle Harry, who had been talking as I breakfasted, "we must be getting ashore. Fatu can bring the canoes out and stow them away while we have a yarn with the chief. I hope he has found me some divers."
Taura had sent word to the small Paumotan settlements scattered around the island, and for a week past the divers had been drifting in to Faatemu, traveling by cutter or sailing-canoe with their women, their children, and their household goods. My uncle went to their camp to select his men, and soon the bay was a lively place, echoing with laughter and shouts as the laden canoes plied between the schooner and the beach. The Tara, once smart as a yacht, took on the aspect of a floating menagerie: pigs grunted disconsolately on deck; dogs barked; hens clucked; roosters crowed. A swarm of Paumotans lay about, smoking, chattering in high-pitched voices, playing accordions. The decks were littered with their mats and bedding, on which small brown babies lay asleep, unconscious of the uproar of departure.
Late in the afternoon Marama and I made our parting gifts to his family and paddled out to where the Tara lay, her engine going and her anchor up. We clambered over the rail; old Taura stood in the canoe, waving his hat while the schooner got under way and glided out toward the pass. Months were to pass before we saw the gray-haired chief again.
My uncle laid his course due east, to pass between the great atoll of Fakarava and Faaite, the smaller island to the south. The fair weather held while the Tara threaded her way through the strange Sea of Atolls—the dangerous archipelago, dreaded by mariners since the Pacific was first explored. We passed the southern end of Fakarava, a lagoon like an inland sea, surrounded by a narrow ring of palms, passed Katiu and Tuanake, turned south to skirt the treacherous reefs of Makenio, were swept eastward by the current racing between Nihiru and Marutea, and breathed freely once more as we turned north, past Reka Reka, the Island of Good Hope. Sometimes a low smudge of palms lay along the horizon; sometimes, with no land in sight, the Tara battled with the fierce uncharted currents of this maze of reefs; and there were days when a green glimmer in the sky told of the presence of some huge lagoon, hidden from our eyes by the curving slope of the world. In the open sea to the east of Reka Reka, the bad weather began.
The wind veered to the northwest—the storm wind the natives call the toerau. Black clouds closed above the Tara like a canopy; for two days and two nights she made heavy weather through squalls of wind and rain. My uncle spent much of his time at the rail, binoculars raised to scan the empty horizon east of us.
"We must be close to Iriatai," he said to me on the morning of the last day, "but in these shifting currents, and without a chance for a shot at the sun, it's hard to say just where we are! Risky business, this knocking about at night—if we don't raise the land to-day, I'm going to heave to."
I had been gazing idly at the clouds drifting overhead, and had noticed several flocks of sea birds, passing high above us, all heading southward. As my uncle spoke, another flock appeared in the north. He saw them, too, and shouted a command to alter the schooner's course.
"That's the third lot of birds I've seen this morning," he remarked; "there's a chance that they are coming from Iriatai. We'll beat up to the north a bit, and have a look."
An hour later I heard a long-drawn cry from the crosstrees, and soon from the deck I made out the familiar atoll-landfall—a level dark line of palm-tops, low on the northern horizon. It was Iriatai.
The island differs from most of the atolls in that the pass is on the weather side. The lagoon is nearly circular, ten miles long and about eight across, and the surrounding land is composed of three long curving islands, separated by short stretches of reef over which the sea washes no more than knee-deep on a calm day. A dense growth of young palms—planted by my uncle—covered the islands, and just inside the pass, where von Tesmar's settlement had stood before the hurricane, I saw the loftier tops of the trees planted by Turia, the dead Paumotan woman. From a perch high up in the shrouds, gazing with the glasses toward the far end of the lagoon, I could make out the tall old palms of the islet where the woman and her child had fetched up in that long-ago storm. We were at the end of our voyage: somewhere between the islet and the reef lay the patch of gold-lipped shell planted by the strange Austrian wanderer!
That night we anchored the Tara off the village of my uncle's laborers, natives established on the island to plant and to make copra as the trees began to bear. Next morning, with a dozen fresh helpers gossiping on deck and a man at the masthead to give us warning of shoals, the Tara sailed the length of the lagoon and found a berth close to the high islet at the farther end. Our divers made their camp on that ten-acre dot of land, shaded by old palms which had survived the hurricane.
While the divers floated their canoes ashore and set to work to lash on the outriggers, the other men launched the boats to transfer the schooner's cargo to the beach. The women and children went ashore at once, stacked their belongings in individual heaps, and busied themselves with plaiting the palm-fronds with which their houses would be thatched.
The younger women and some of the boys swarmed up the trees like monkeys, machete in hand, and soon the green fronds were crashing to the ground on every side. Their older companions chopped off the heavy butts and split each rib down the middle, making a pair of tough strips of fibrous wood, fringed along one side with the narrow leaves of the coconut. Squatting on their heels, while their fingers worked with marvelous rapidity and skill, the women braided these leaves together to form strips of coarse green matting, a foot wide and eight feet long. As each piece was finished it was stacked on the growing family pile. By nightfall the last of the canoes was assembled and they were hauled up in a line on the beach. The men were now ready for their task of housebuilding. In two days our village on the islet was complete.
They began by clearing the chosen site, a couple of acres in extent. There was a dense growth of wild hibiscus under the coconut palms, and as they chopped this away with axe and bush-knife, they took care to save the long straight poles which would be of use. Then each man selected the place for his house and set to work by himself. With the help of his wife and children he dug four holes and set the corner-posts, forked at the top to receive the long poles corresponding to plates. Midway between the corner-posts at each end of the house, a much taller post was set, to support the ridgepole. Then plates and ridgepole were laid on their forked supports and lashed in place with strips of tough hibiscus-bark. Next, the rafters were made fast at a steep pitch, laid at intervals of about a foot, and a similar light framework was lashed to the gable ends. At this stage the house was ready to be thatched.
Now the entire family went to the far end of the islet to cut armfuls of bark for tying on their thatch, and when a supply of this natural cord was on hand, they set up light temporary scaffoldings of poles and took their places,—the woman outside, the man inside the roof,—to lay the thatch of plaited fronds. Working from the eaves toward the ridgepole, the strips were laid on like shingles, each one overlapping by four or five inches the one beneath, with the split midrib tied firmly to each rafter that it crossed. After the roof, the gable ends were thatched; a doorway was framed on the leeward side, and a rustic siding of hibiscus wands, placed vertically as close together as they would go, was set up from ground to plates. Then the family gathered the snowy coral gravel on the beach and spread it several inches deep to make a floor. The house was finished—cool, airy, and weatherproof, beautifully adapted to an environment where lumber and corrugated iron were out of place.
But lumber and iron were necessary for our water supply, and while the natives were busy with their housebuilding, we set to work to build a long low shed, with a gutter along the lower edge of the roof, from which tin piping would conduct the rain water to a series of large connected tanks. The drinking-nuts would never suffice for such a gathering, and fresh water was the one important thing the islet lacked. We relied on the rains to furnish our supply, and the shed was to serve as a store, and as a warehouse for our shells when that had been cleaned and sacked.
The building was finished on a Saturday, and that night the men went out in their canoes to fish. They were all Christians and they kept the Sabbath more religiously than most of us at home. The missionaries who had converted them were of the strict old Calvinist school, which taught that it was sinful to fish, or plant, or to do any kind of work on the day of rest. My uncle respected the divers' beliefs, but he had communicated his own restless energy to the members of the Tara's crew, and on that Sunday, while the Paumotans dozed in the shade of their new houses, we took the whaleboat on an excursion to explore the diving-grounds. When we returned at sunset the others shook their heads—in their eyes we had reaped the reward of sacrilege, for our boating-party had come near to ending tragically.
The lagoon was calm that morning, calm as an inland lake, its surface ruffled at intervals by faint catspaws from the north. Looking back toward the pass, there was no land in sight—the blue water met the sky in an unbroken line. Ahead of us, at the northern end of the atoll, the seabeach was little more than a mile away, and the thunder of the breakers was borne to our ears, now loud, now soft, on flaws of air. My uncle stood in the stern and I sat beside him; Fatu was in the bow, Ivi and Ofai at the oars. Once or twice Fatu motioned my uncle to change his course, to avoid the coral mushrooms rising to within a few inches of the surface, but in general the depth of the lagoon varied from six to twenty fathoms. Gazing down through the blue translucent water, I could see the strange forms of growing coral far beneath us; and sometimes, as the bottom turned sandy and the water shoaled, the lagoon shaded to purest emerald green. Clad only in a scarlet pareu, with his bronzed back and shoulders bare, Uncle Harry was leaning over the side, gazing intently at the bottom through a water glass. He had given the word to go slowly, and the men were resting on their oars.
"This is the place," he said; "we'll anchor here and let Ofai go down for a look."
While Fatu was paying out the anchor line, I took the glass and leaned over to see what I could make out. The water was about twelve fathoms deep, and far down beneath the whaleboat's keel I could distinguish the purple coral on the floor of the lagoon. Ofai, the Rangiroa boy, was preparing himself to dive. He coiled a long cotton line in the bottom of the boat, and made fast to one end of it a thirty-pound bulb of lead, like an enormous sinker. Then he adjusted his goggles and went over the side. While he lay in the water, drawing a series of deep breaths, Fatu passed him the weight. He allowed it to sink a yard beneath him, seized the rope between the toes of one foot, and took a grip, high up on the line, with his left hand.
"A haere!" ordered Fatu—"Go ahead!"
The diver filled his lungs with air, grinned at us like some goggle-eyed creature of the sea, and let go the gunwale. Coil after coil of line flew over the side, and a train of bubbles rose to the surface, hissing faintly. When the line ceased to run out, Fatu pulled in the slack till it stood taut from the bottom, and made it fast to a cleat. Gazing downward through the water glass, I found that I could see Ofai dimly, in the twilight of the depths. He was swimming close to the bottom, with strange slow motions of his arms and legs; at times he stopped as if examining something, and finally—after what seemed a longer time than any man could hold his breath—I saw him approach the rope, pull himself upright, and heave strongly with one hand. He seemed to shoot upward faster than he had gone down; an instant later his head broke water and he was expelling his breath with the eerie whistling sound I was to know so well. Then he shouted—the long-drawn yodeling cry which announces a lucky dive.
"Never have I seen shell of such a size!" he exclaimed, as he handed up a great coral-encrusted oyster and came clambering over the side. "It grows everywhere—the bottom was covered as far as my eyes could see!"
My uncle was opening the oyster with the blade of his clasp knife. It was a rough, roundish thing, uncouth to the eye, and a full eight inches across. He cut the muscle, felt skillfully but vainly for pearls under the fringe, tossed the soft body overboard, and handed the shells—still attached at the hinge—to me. Craning their necks to see, the natives exclaimed with wonder. When closed, the oyster might have been mistaken for an ugly lump of coral, picked up at random on the floor of the lagoon; when open, it displayed the changing opalescent shades of mother-of-pearl, fringed with a band of gold.
"Get up the anchor," ordered Uncle Harry; "we'll try again, a hundred yards farther on."
"There would be a sensation on Tahiti," he went on, turning to me, "if you showed the traders that shell! It's worth twenty dollars a ton more than the black-lipped variety, and the books say that it produces a great many more pearls. We'll do a bit of prospecting to-day, mark the best places, and let the men begin diving in the morning."
We wandered on for several hours, examining the bottom at each halt and marking the more likely spots with a small buoy, moored to the coral with a few fathoms of line. By mid-afternoon, our work seemed finished—we had found more shell than our men could bring up in all the months ahead of us. Our final halt was close to the reef, and there, in about ten fathoms of water, Ofai went overboard for the last time that day.
The coral was light-colored at this place and I could see every motion of the diver beneath us. Suddenly, when he had been about a minute under water, I saw him crouch and disappear in a crevice of the rock, and an instant later a long moving shadow passed beneath the boat.
"E mao!" exclaimed Fatu. "A shark!" My uncle sprang to the side.
I leaned over with the rest, watching with acute suspense to see if the shark would move away. No—he had seen Ofai and was turning back toward the deep crevice in which the diver had taken refuge. Then the shark rose toward us and we saw him clearly—longer than our boat, livid-brown and hideous. An exclamation of horror went up from the men. There seemed nothing we could do. Thirty seconds passed; Ofai had been under water a minute and a half. My uncle had reached the limit of his endurance. He spoke to Fatu sharply: "Your goggles! That knife! The other weight!"
The shark had approached the surface again, and as he turned to go down, before any of us could utter a cry of protest Uncle Harry went over the side, plunging downward with all the impetus of the heavy leaden bulb. It was an act of the most reckless courage; for in spite of the stories one reads, men do not attack the great sharks of the South Pacific in their own element.
Half sickened with suspense, I watched what followed: a drama played out in the limpid water beneath our boat. Grasping in his right hand a keen broad-bladed knife, my uncle shot down so fast that half-way to the bottom he overtook his monstrous antagonist. The shark was still intent upon Ofai; I saw him start and turn with a sweep of his tail as the man's body struck him and the thrust of a powerful arm sent the knife deep into his side. A pink cloud of blood gushed from the wound, and at that moment I saw Ofai emerge from his hiding-place, seize the rope, and bound toward the surface of the lagoon. The diver's lungs must have been nearly bursting, and he mounted the rope with desperate speed. Now he was close to my uncle. The shark had circled, turning on his side with a livid gleam of his under parts, and was coming straight at the native. The monster reared—again I saw Uncle Harry raise his arm, saw the long knife sink home and the water reddened by a cloud of blood. The respite had been enough for Ofai; his head broke water with a gasp, and before a hand could be raised to help him he had seized the gunwale and was over the side of the boat.
My uncle was in desperate straits. He had been under water nearly a minute and was still eighteen or twenty feet beneath the surface. Fatu and Ivi were brave men and devoted to him, but it would have been insanity to think of going to his rescue now. I heard Fatu's voice, unreal and far-off, shouting to the men to move to the other side of the boat; I felt the boat list, and saw, out of the corner of my eye, the gigantic figure of the mate standing on the seat beside me, bent almost double as he watched the scene below.
Uncle Harry had dropped the weight at the first attack, and now, still grasping his knife, he made for the rope and seized it with his left hand. The shark had darted away as he felt the steel for the second time, but now he was returning straight for the antagonist he seemed to recognize at last. Moving with horrid deliberation, he reared almost vertically beneath the swimmer, and opened his great jaws. My uncle stopped himself with his left hand on the rope, gathered his body together, and drove the knife into the broad rounded snout beneath him—the shark's most vulnerable point. For a moment the monster lay stunned and motionless, and in that moment Uncle Harry nearly reached the surface of the lagoon. Fatu was bent double, his hands already in the water. Then the shark seemed to regain his senses and came rushing upward grimly. I saw the muscles of the mate's arms standing out as though cast in bronze, I saw the swimmer's goggled face within a yard of the surface, and the great fish charging with open jaws, fearfully close behind. Then the whaleboat lurched as Fatu plunged his arms deep into the water, seized my uncle and swung him up and inboard with a single mighty heave.
The shark reared almost vertically beneath the swimmer and opened his great jaws.
The shark came crashing against the side of the boat—a blow that nearly stove in the planking and started a dozen seams.
A minute passed before my uncle sat up and lifted the goggles from his eyes. "Get the oars out," he gasped, "and pull for the shallow water yonder. Bale, you two, and look lively—that fellow means mischief!"
The shark was at the surface now, swimming in swift zigzags like a hound at fault. While Ofai and I baled and the others began to row, I glanced over my shoulder and saw the tall dorsal fin heading straight for us, so swiftly that the water rippled away on either side.
"Pull hard—he's after us!" shouted my uncle, standing in the stern with a twelve foot oar in his hand.
We were making for the shallows over a large coral mushroom, a hundred yards away, and the men were rowing at top speed, for they realized that our light cranky boat gave little protection against such an enemy. The shark drew rapidly abreast of us and as his head ranged alongside Uncle Harry raised the oar and thrust down with all his strength. The blow was a glancing one, and before he recovered his weapon the three-inch shaft of tough wood was between a pair of formidable jaws. My uncle's eyebrows went up as he raised what was left of the oar, sheared off as a child bites through a stick of candy. Next moment Ivi cried out, as the monster seized his sweep and wrenched it from his hands. I saw it float to the surface with a splintered blade—felt our boat shaken violently as the shark took the keel in his teeth. Then the bow grated on coral, and we leaped out in the shallows to pull the boat into the safety of a foot of water.
After a time the ominous fin tacked away toward the reef and disappeared. We were not anxious for another encounter and allowed our enemy plenty of time to go. The men were talking excitedly in high-pitched voices, when my uncle lit one of his long cigars and turned to me.
"What a brute!" he remarked. "I thought he had me that last time! By Jove! When Fatu took hold of me I could fairly feel those teeth sinking into my legs! Well, our work is cut out for us—there'll be no diving till that fellow is dead. The men are saying that in all probability there are no other dangerous sharks in the lagoon. Do you remember the letter I read you that evening at home? This is the same shark, without a doubt,—he may have been here for a hundred years. He's of a rare kind, by good luck; so rare that I know only his Latin name: Carcharodon. They are relics of prehistoric times and seem to be nearly extinct to-day, though a few of them still linger in the warm waters close to the Line. Remember the big fossil teeth, from Florida, on the mantel at the ranch? They came from one of this fellow's ancestors who grew to be ninety feet long and swarmed in the Tertiary seas."
"But won't he die?" I asked. "I saw you stab him three times."
My uncle laughed. "No more than you will," he replied. "A shark of that size takes a lot of killing. But he's going to die to-morrow, if we have to sit up all night hammering out a lance and a harpoon. Our fish-spears would only tickle his ribs. Come, he seems to have given us up—let's be getting back to the Tara.”