"You dear and blessed Husband-Man," she murmured, a quick cloudiness of
moisture in her eyes, as with her eyes she embraced him, her arms still
around Jerry, who, sensing the ecstasy of the moment, kissed her fragrant
cheek with his ribbon-tongue of love.

CHAPTER XXIV

When the _Ariel_ cleared from Malu, on the north-west coast of Malaita,
Malaita sank down beneath the sea-rim astern and, so far as Jerry's life
was concerned, remained sunk for ever--another vanished world, that, in
his consciousness, partook of the ultimate nothingness that had befallen
Skipper. For all Jerry might have known, though he pondered it not,
Malaita was a universe, beheaded and resting on the knees of some
brooding lesser god, himself vastly mightier than Bashti whose knees bore
the brooding weight of Skipper's sun-dried, smoke-cured head, this lesser
god vexed and questing, feeling and guessing at the dual twin-mysteries
of time and space and of motion and matter, above, beneath, around, and
beyond him.

Only, in Jerry's case, there was no pondering of the problem, no
awareness of the existence of such mysteries. He merely accepted Malaita
as another world that had ceased to be. He remembered it as he
remembered dreams. Himself a live thing, solid and substantial,
possessed of weight and dimension, a reality incontrovertible, he moved
through the space and place of being, concrete, hard, quick, convincing,
an absoluteness of something surrounded by the shades and shadows of the
fluxing phantasmagoria of nothing.

He took his worlds one by one. One by one his worlds evaporated, rose
beyond his vision as vapours in the hot alembic of the sun, sank for ever
beneath sea-levels, themselves unreal and passing as the phantoms of a
dream. The totality of the minute, simple world of the humans,
microscopic and negligible as it was in the siderial universe, was as far
beyond his guessing as is the siderial universe beyond the starriest
guesses and most abysmal imaginings of man.

Jerry was never to see the dark island of savagery again, although often
in his sleeping dreams it was to return to him in vivid illusion, as he
relived his days upon it, from the destruction of the _Arangi_ and the
man-eating orgy on the beach to his flight from the shell-scattered house
and flesh of Nalasu. These dream episodes constituted for him another
land of Otherwhere, mysterious, unreal, and evanescent as clouds drifting
across the sky or bub