say, and I will learn them. The
past is going to show me some of its secrets, to tell me how men of long
ago lived and died and how far they had advanced to that point on the
road of civilisation at which I stand in my little hour of existence.

That of Bastin was mildly interested, no more. Obviously, with half his
mind he was thinking of something else, probably of his converts on
the main island and of the school class fixed for this hour which
circumstances prevented him from attending. Indeed, like Lot's wife he
was casting glances behind him towards the wicked place from which he
had been forced to flee.

Neither the past nor the future had much real interest for Bastin; any
more than they had for Bickley, though for different reasons. The former
was done with; the latter he was quite content to leave in other hands.
If he had any clear idea thereof, probably that undiscovered land
appeared to him as a big, pleasant place where are no unbelievers or
erroneous doctrines, and all sinners will be sternly repressed,
in which, clad in a white surplice with all proper ecclesiastical
trappings, he would argue eternally with the Early Fathers and in due
course utterly annihilate Bickley, that is in a moral sense. Personally
and as a man he was extremely attached to Bickley as a necessary and
wrong-headed nuisance to which he had become accustomed.

And I! What did I feel? I do not know; I cannot describe. An
extraordinary attraction, a semi-spiritual exaltation, I think. That
cave mouth might have been a magnet drawing my soul. With my body I
should have been afraid, as I daresay I was, for our circumstances were
sufficiently desperate. Here we were, castaways upon an island, probably
uncharted, one of thousands in the recesses of a vast ocean, from which
we had little chance of escape. More, having offended the religious
instincts of the primeval inhabitants of that island, we had been forced
to flee to a rocky mountain in the centre of a lake, where, after the
food we had brought with us by accident was consumed, we should no doubt
be forced to choose between death by starvation, or, if we attempted to
retreat, at the hands of justly infuriated savages. Yet these facts did
not oppress me, for I was being drawn, drawn to I knew not what, and if
it were to doom--well, no matter.

Therefore, none of us cared: Bastin because his faith was equal to any
emergency and there was always that white-robed heaven waiting for him