. He clutched
a tree that yet stood, and clung on, holding the girl and sobbing for
air, while the waters of the lagoon washed by knee-high and at times
waist-high.

At three in the morning the backbone of the hurricane broke. By five no
more than a stiff breeze was blowing. And by six it was dead calm and
the sun was shining. The sea had gone down. On the yet restless edge of
the lagoon, Mapuhi saw the broken bodies of those that had failed in the
landing. Undoubtedly Tefara and Nauri were among them. He went along the
beach examining them, and came upon his wife, lying half in and half out
of the water. He sat down and wept, making harsh animal noises after the
manner of primitive grief. Then she stirred uneasily, and groaned. He
looked more closely. Not only was she alive, but she was uninjured. She
was merely sleeping. Hers also had been the one chance in ten.

Of the twelve hundred alive the night before but three hundred remained.
The Mormon missionary and a gendarme made the census. The lagoon was
cluttered with corpses. Not a house nor a hut was standing. In the whole
atoll not two stones remained one upon another. One in fifty of the
cocoanut palms still stood, and they were wrecks, while on not one of
them remained a single nut.

There was no fresh water. The shallow wells that caught the surface
seepage of the rain were filled with salt. Out of the lagoon a few
soaked bags of flour were recovered. The survivors cut the hearts out of
the fallen cocoanut trees and ate them. Here and there they crawled
into tiny hutches, made by hollowing out the sand and covering over with
fragments of metal roofing. The missionary made a crude still, but he
could not distill water for three hundred persons. By the end of the
second day, Raoul, taking a bath in the lagoon, discovered that his
thirst was somewhat relieved. He cried out the news, and thereupon three
hundred men, women, and children could have been seen, standing up to
their necks in the lagoon and trying to drink water in through their
skins. Their dead floated about them, or were stepped upon where they
still lay upon the bottom. On the third day the people buried their dead
and sat down to wait for the rescue steamers.

In the meantime, Nauri, torn from her family by the hurricane, had been
swept away on an adventure of her own. Clinging to a rough plank that
wounded and bruised her and that filled her body with splinters, she
was thrown clear over the atol