The Garden of God

I THE CORMORANT II DAWN III THE VISION IV DICK EM V THE GARDEN OF GOD VI HERE ONCE THEY DWELT VII THE KEEPER OF THE LAGOON VIII SUNSET IX THE ROLLERS

I TIME PASSES II THE RETURN OF THE CHILDREN III IN THE GARDEN OF GOD THERE IS TRUTH IV THE FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE DEMON V OUT OF THE GLOOM VI KATAFA VII BLOWN TO SEA VIII AT DAWN...

The whale boat and the dinghy lay together, gunnels grinding as they lifted to the swell. Two cable lengths away lay the schooner from which the whale boat had come; beyond and...

“Mr. Lestrange is still asleep, and thank God for it,” said Stanistreet, “and the child’s well. It woke and I gave it a pannikin of condensed and water and it’s in the starboard...

The place was gay with the morning beams shining through the ports and skylight. Lestrange, who had been looking into the starboard after-bunk, turned, and as the two men came f...

Meanwhile the fo’c’sle had got wind of happenings on deck and even the watch that had turned in, turned out. Eight men, all told, schooner men of the old South Sea type, hard-bi...

The _Ranatonga_ on a level keel, and spilling the wind from her sails, came round in a great curve on the dazzling water, her great shadow following her across the coral gardens...

Just before entering the shadow of the trees, Stanistreet paused. His quick eye had noticed something lying on the sand a little to the left. A great banana bunch half eaten by...

The _Ranatonga_ was a schooner of the old Pacific type built at Velego and for the sandalwood trade by men who recognised that speed and cargo space are almost synonymous terms....

The tide was at half-full and the _Ranatonga_, swinging to it, showed a ripple at her stern and a ripple where the anchor chain broke the luminous blue of the water.

Kearney must have been up a good while, for a fire was alight in a little slip to the right where there was evidence that the old occupants of the place had often done their coo...

For weeks after that night Kearney, though busy and contented enough, was possessed by the uneasy feeling that maybe they were marooned for good and all. If the _Ranatonga_ neve...

One day, moved by a spirit of restlessness, Lestrange went off by himself through the woods, making towards the hill-top. It was the first time he had gone there alone, and when...

If you have been waiting years for the return of someone you love, will you be satisfied with a likeness, however vivid and living, even if that likeness is wrought from flesh a...

The child was asleep in the house, and he had taken his seat alone by the water’s edge. The tide was running out of the lagoon under the sunset and a faint chuckle of water agai...

A little over three and a half years of age, he was as strong and big as a child of five, but he was neither big nor strong enough to man the sculls, and the dinghy was drifting...

Standing on the summit of Palm Tree Island and gazing sou’west, one saw above the horizon line something that was not land; the sky just then altered in colour, as though dimmed...

Near by some native girls were helping to unload a canoe that had come over from the southern beach, and as they talked and laughed over the work, flat-nosed and plain, muscular...

At dawn the wind had sunk to a steady sailing breeze and the swell had lost its steepness, as the great blaze came in the east and the brow of the sun shattered the horizon. Kat...

The bananas were ripe on the eastern side of the island and he had arranged in his mind to go and fetch a bunch, taking the quickest way—that is to say, right over the hill-top...

The shack behind the house where the provisions had been stored still held, though the roof had gone pretty much to pieces, and here the sailor had fixed the sleeping quarters o...

Katafa, when she had arranged her hair and made her bed of blankets in the bottom of the canoe, lay down, but she did not close her eyes. She lay watching the last glow of the s...

They were seated at breakfast and Katafa had drawn close for her food. Katafa could be ugly, she could be pretty; never was anything more protean than the looks of this Spanish...

Island life had not quickened Mr. Kearney’s intellectual powers, and for eight or nine months after that day things happened to him that he could not account for. Sometimes fish...

Kearney seemed to have recovered his temper, and presently, putting the ship away on the shelf till to-morrow, he helped the boy to prepare supper. They scarcely spoke over this...

He was standing before the house in the early sunlight; he had just come out and Kearney was nowhere to be seen. A breeze had broken the heat, and the absolute loveliness of the...

Under the sea surface lies a world ruled by laws of which we know little or nothing. We know that the shoals have roads that they follow, and that some master law keeps the bala...

The rainy season came and made Dick busy mending a hole that had suddenly come in the roof of the house. It passed, leaving the island greener than ever and the birds preparing...

He had said nothing of the affair till now, a fact that spoke volumes as to their mental relationship. Between Dick and Kearney there had been little of what we call conversatio...

Next day and for days after, Katafa, drawing apart from Dick, would sit brooding, watchful, waiting, but wherever she might be, by the wood edge or lagoon bank, if Dick were in...

We see in nature forms of which perhaps the highest images of men are only compound reflections and symbols. If there had never been birds, would men ever have imagined angels?...

Dick, who had heard the first thunder of the battle in the woods, running from the trees had seen Katafa standing watching the cachalot come into the pool, but he had no eyes fo...

Next morning Dick, who had spent the night hunting cachalots in dreamland, came out to find Katafa lighting the fire for breakfast. She seemed just the same as ever, save for th...

Just as a person in some phases of the state we call the dream condition has to run or finds himself rooted to the spot, Katafa bent aside with no more volition than a reed poss...

There was a girl of the islands, Nalia by name, who, living under the tabu of _taminan_ and pursued by a lover, found refuge in the sea. Swimming far out, she could not return,...

The canoe, driving north free of its anchor rope and towed by the fish, left him far behind, and without a moment’s hesitation he struck due west, swimming for his life.

Le Juan had seen the canoe men land and heard their story. She had been on the outskirts of the crowd and, having got the gist of the matter, retired to her hut, waiting for the...

The wind had changed and was blowing now dead from the south, and as they passed the break the mat sails went up and the four great canoes shot away to the north, urged by wind,...

Dick, when sleep took him that night, passed straight into dreamland. He rarely dreamed. When he did, his dreams had always one origin, some vexation or irritation experienced d...

She had taken the upward way towards the hill-top. The great sward, moon-stricken and surmounted by the rock, gleamed at her through the trees on her right; below, and to her le...

Creeping close to the wood edge, she had watched like a person in a dream whilst Dick rose to his feet and faced the spearman. She had heard the words of Laminai, she had seen h...

When the fighting men of Karolin began their assault on the woods, they broke into two companies, one under Laminai and Ma, the other under Utah, a son of Makara, once chief of...

The gulls were crying above the reef, and away in the east, below the sea-line, a rose-red fire was burning, paling gradually, passing into the starless, infinite distance of th...

If the blue parua birds resting above the house were indeed the birds of long ago, they might have fancied nothing changed since those days when the father of Dick returned from...

When the _Portsoy_ had turned her stern to the reef long ago, she had done more than fire the shot that smashed the canoe of Katafa. She had logged the position of Palm Tree, an...

On the morning when Laminai and all his host set out, never to return, Uta Matu, sitting where his women had placed him on the sand of the beach, watched the canoes depart.

Awakening with the first beam of light, she had heard vague and far-away sounds, sounds caught and repeated by the echoes of the hated woods—the woods that had imprisoned her on...

The pasht of Karolin might almost have been called a sword, almost likened to a hockey stick. Four feet two inches from extremity to extremity, curved and broadened and flattene...

At the break it was racing strong, but here the water seemed hardly to move. The wind still held from the north, and as Dick untied from the tree roots, it parted and closed the...

Here there was peace. The great dark swell coming up and passing in the moonlight, the following wind, the stars—nothing remained but these, these and the whisper of the reef fa...

They had with them food and water enough for a week. Dick had left little to chance. When a tiny child, he had almost frightened Kearney by putting the fish away in the shadow o...

Broad as the reef break was at Karolin, no ship under sail could enter at the full ebb. Sweeping with an eight-knot clip and boiling round the coral piers, the waters of the gre...