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 bubbles taking iridescent form and bursting on the
surface of the sea. Froth and foam it was, quick-vanishing as he awoke,
non-existent as Skipper, Skipper's head on the withered knees of Bashti
in the lofty grass house. Malaita the real, Malaita the concrete and
ponderable, vanished and vanished for ever, as Meringe had vanished, as
Skipper had vanished, into the nothingness.
From Malaita the _Ariel_ steered west of north to Ongtong Java and to
Tasman--great atolls that sweltered under the Line not quite awash in the
vast waste of the West South Pacific. After Tasman was another wide sea-
stretch to the high island of Bougainville. Thence, bearing generally
south-east and making slow progress in the dead beat to windward, the
_Ariel_ dropped anchor in nearly every harbour of the Solomons, from
Choiseul and Ronongo islands, to the islands of Kulambangra, Vangunu,
Pavuvu, and New Georgia. Even did she ride to anchor, desolately lonely,
in the Bay of a Thousand Ships.
Last of all, so far as concerned the Solomons, her anchor rumbled down
and bit into the coral-sanded bottom of the harbour of Tulagi, where,
ashore on Florida Island, lived and ruled the Resident Commissioner.
To the Commissioner, Harley Kennan duly turned over Makawao, who was
committed to a grass-house jail, well guarded, to sit in leg-irons
against the time of trial for his many crimes. And Johnny, the pilot,
ere he returned to the service of the Commissioner, received a fair
portion of the twenty pounds of head money that Kennan divided among the
members of the launch crew who had raced through the jungle to the rescue
the day Jerry had taken Makawao by the back of the neck and startled him
into pulling the trigger of his unaimed rifle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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