A clamor and a stench arose from the rocks. The cannibals seemed to be recovering from a drinking-bout. They writhed in the sun like wounded snakes. Bill counted sixty or seventy. Their bodies were hideously tattooed, and they wore monstrous shell rings through their ears and noses. The women joined with the men in dancing and spitting venom. The hubbub was deafening. Ages of savagery and blood had shaped them into capering devils. They were all the more terrible because they had seen other white men. Bill did not expect much from them. He confessed a frank horror at the situation. "If we only had something to give 'em," he groaned. Van Wyck had somehow expected Bill to rally and come to his support. He needed a moral prop and he noted with horror that Bill had lost his solid, comforting manner. Van Wyck's lips were so dry that he could scarcely get his tongue to shape words of rebuff. "I don't like it," he finally blurted out. "They certainly mean business. You might swim in and test 'em!" "Don't be an ass!" roared Bill. "All right, then. But if one of us doesn't swim in, both of us are goners. And since I've never talked with savages I'm hardly the man. You have a way with you. You could pacify a Java ape-man! Get 'em laughing--tell 'em a funny story!" Bill protested venomously. "Those cannibals aren't children," he groaned. "You can't spoof 'em. This is serious business, Van Wyck." Van Wyck refused to be convinced and he would have gone on urging Bill to commit suicide to save his own precious skin if something had not made all conversation ridiculous. They both saw it at the same time. They looked at each other and said nothing. Then Van Wyck began frantically swimming toward the rocks. The fin divided the water into two glassy walls. As it passed along it turned the dark surface to shining quicksilver. Bill had barely grasped the meaning of it when something touched his ankles and he knew that the water was infested. He gave a sudden, defiant shriek. But the sharks did not molest him. They made straight for Van Wyck. They approached in vicious circles, and Bill saw the whites of their stomachs through the dark green water. The mouth of the largest opened and closed; and then there followed a clashing of teeth that sounded like the clanging to of iron-clad portcullises. Once the horrible gray back of the fish showed above the surface, and glittered lethally in the sun, and Bill knew that Van Wyck was done for. Van Wyck was almost near enough to the rocks to climb them, and he might reasonably have pushed the shark off with his foot, but Bill knew that he wouldn't. Bill knew that Van Wyck was as good as eaten, and he thought: "That shark will hardly be content with Van Wyck alone!" A dozen fins intersected on the surface and occasionally one of the ravenous monsters would jump clear of the water in its eagerness to taste satisfying human flesh.