have been simply the man in him crying out for
Love, and not knowing yet that Love was at his elbow.

The dinghy glided along, hugging the shore, past the little glades of
fern and the cathedral gloom of the breadfruit; then, rounding a
promontory, she opened the view of the break in the reef. A little bit
of the white strand was visible, but he was not looking that way--he
was looking towards the reef at a tiny, dark spot, not noticeable
unless searched for by the eye. Always when he came on these
expeditions, just here, he would hang on his oars and gaze over there,
where the gulls were flying and the breakers thundering.

A few years ago the spot filled him with dread as well as curiosity,
but from familiarity and the dullness that time casts on everything,
the dread had almost vanished, but the curiosity remained: the
curiosity that makes a child look on at the slaughter of an animal even
though his soul revolts at it. He gazed for a while, then he went on
pulling, and the dinghy approached the beach.

Something had happened on the beach. The sand was all trampled, and
stained red here and there; in the centre lay the remains of a great
fire still smouldering, and just where the water lapped the sand, lay
two deep grooves as if two heavy boats had been beached there. A South
Sea man would have told from the shape of the grooves, and the little
marks of the out-riggers, that two heavy canoes had been beached there.
And they had.

The day before, early in the afternoon, two canoes, possibly from that
far-away island which cast a stain on the horizon to the
sou'-sou'-west, had entered the lagoon, one in pursuit of the other.

What happened then had better be left veiled. A war drum with a
shark-skin head had set the woods throbbing; the victory was celebrated
all night, and at dawn the victors manned the two canoes and set sail
for the home, or hell, they had come from. Had you examined the strand
you would have found that a line had been drawn across the beach,
beyond which there were no footmarks: that meant that the rest of the
island was for some reason tabu.

Dick pulled the nose of the boat up a bit on the strand, then he looked
around him. He picked up a broken spear that had been cast away or
forgotten; it was made of some hard wood and barbed with iron. On the
right-hand side of the beach something lay between the cocoa-nut trees.
He approached; it was a mass of offal; the entrails of a dozen sheep
see