He and his six companions were sailing back over the thirty miles
between Manihiki and Rakahanga, two of the many little lonely ocean
islands that stud the Pacific like stars.

They sailed a strange craft, for it cannot be called raft or canoe
or hut. It was all these and yet was neither. Two canoes, forty-eight
feet long, sailed side by side. Between the canoes were spars,
stretching across from one to the other, lashed to each boat and
making a platform between them six feet wide. On this was built a hut,
roofed with the beautiful braided leaves of the cocoa-nut palm.

Overhead stretched the infinite sky. Underneath lay thousands of
fathoms of blue-green ocean, whose cold, hidden deeps among the
mountains and valleys of the awful ocean under-world held strange
goblin fish-shapes. And on the surface this hut of leaves and bamboo
swung dizzily between sky and ocean on the frail canoes. And in the
canoes and the hut were six brown Rakahangan men, two women, and a
chubby, dark-eyed child, who sat contented and tired, being lapped to
sleep by the swaying waters.

Above them the great sail made of matting of fibre, strained in
the breeze that drove them nearer to the haven where they would be.
Already they could see the gleam of the Rakahanga beach with the rim
of silver where the waves broke into foam. Then the breeze dropped.
The fibre-sail flapped uneasily against the mast, while the two little
canvas sails hung loosely, as the wind, with little warning, swung
round, and smiting them in the face began to drive them back into the
ocean again.

Elikana and his friends knew the sea almost like fish, from the time