"We must be close to Iriatai," he said to me on the morning of the last day, "but in these shifting currents, and without a chance for a shot at the sun, it's hard to say just where we are! Risky business, this knocking about at night--if we don't raise the land to-day, I'm going to heave to." I had been gazing idly at the clouds drifting overhead, and had noticed several flocks of sea birds, passing high above us, all heading southward. As my uncle spoke, another flock appeared in the north. He saw them, too, and shouted a command to alter the schooner's course. "That's the third lot of birds I've seen this morning," he remarked; "there's a chance that they are coming from Iriatai. We'll beat up to the north a bit, and have a look." An hour later I heard a long-drawn cry from the crosstrees, and soon from the deck I made out the familiar atoll-landfall--a level dark line of palm-tops, low on the northern horizon. It was Iriatai. The island differs from most of the atolls in that the pass is on the weather side. The lagoon is nearly circular, ten miles long and about eight across, and the surrounding land is composed of three long curving islands, separated by short stretches of reef over which the sea washes no more than knee-deep on a calm day. A dense growth of young palms--planted by my uncle--covered the islands, and just inside the pass, where von Tesmar's settlement had stood before the hurricane, I saw the loftier tops of the trees planted by Turia, the dead Paumotan woman. From a perch high up in the shrouds, gazing with the glasses toward the far end of the lagoon, I could make out the tall old palms of the islet where the woman and her child had fetched up in that long-ago storm. We were at the end of our voyage: somewhere between the islet and the reef lay the patch of gold-lipped shell planted by the strange Austrian wanderer! That night we anchored the Tara off the village of my uncle's laborers, natives established on the island to plant and to make copra as the trees began to bear. Next morning, with a dozen fresh helpers gossiping on deck and a man at the masthead to give us warning of shoals, the Tara sailed the length of the lagoon and found a berth close to the high islet at the farther end. Our divers made their camp on that ten-acre dot of land, shaded by old palms which had survived the hurricane. While the divers floated their canoes ashore and set to work to lash on the outriggers, the other men launched the boats to transfer the schooner's cargo to the beach. The women and children went ashore at once, stacked their belongings in individual heaps, and busied themselves with plaiting the palm-fronds with which their houses would be thatched.