Yet their most awful danger still lay before them. The roar of the
breakers on the cruel coral reef caught their ears. But there was
nothing for it but to risk the peril. They were among the breakers
which caught and tossed them on like eggshells. The scourge of the
surf swept them; a woman, a man--even the child, were torn from them
and ground on the ghastly teeth of the coral. Five were swept over
with the craft into the still, blue lagoon, and landing they fell
prone upon the shore, just breathing and no more, after the giant
buffeting of the thundering rollers, following the long, slow
starvation of their wonderful journey in the hut on the canoes among
"the waters of the wondrous isles."

"Wake: the silver dusk returning
Up the beach of darkness brims,
And the ship of sunrise burning
Strands upon the eastern rims."


II

Thrown up by the ocean in the darkness like driftwood, Elikana and his
companions lay on the grey shore. Against the dim light of the stars
and beyond the beach of darkness they could see the fronds of
the palms waving. The five survivors were starving, and the green
cocoa-nuts hung above them, filled with food and drink. But their
bodies, broken and tormented as they were by hunger and the battering
breakers, refused even to rise and climb for the food that meant life.
So they lay there, as though dead.