The Gates of Morning

I The Canoe Builder II The Revolt of the Old Men III The Little Ships IV The Gates of Morning V Civilization Peeps in VI The Men of the “Kermadec” VII The Pearl VIII The Mind of...

I The Maid of Aioma II War III The Return to the “Kermadec” IV The Mind of Kanoa and the Rising Moon V Night, Death and Passion VI Morning VII The Vision VIII The Cassi Flowers...

I Le Moan Will Know II The Three Great Waves III The Second Apparition IV What Has Happened to the Reef? V Mainsail Haul VI Voices of the Sea and Sky VII Islands at War—the Open...

I E Haya II Aioma Curses the Wind III He Has Turned His Face from the Sun IV What Happened to Rantan V What Happened to Rantan (continued) VI What Happened to Rantan (continued)...

Behind him the breakers of the outer sea thundered and the spindrift scattered on the wind; before him stretched an ocean calm as a lake, infinite, blue, and flown about by the...

Two women were in it, and as they drove it ashore beaching it with the outrigger a-tilt, Dick, followed by Katafa, approached, and resting his hand on the mast stays attached to...

The primitive canoe of the Pacific is a dugout—the trunk of a tree hollowed and shaped into the form of a boat, so narrow in proportion to its length as to be absolutely unstabl...

The break on the reef of Karolin faced due east. Like a harbour mouth it stood, the only entrance to the lagoon, and through it at ebb and flood the sea raced dancing round the...

Without looking back, she turned the nose of her canoe straight for the southern beach. To left of her as she paddled lay the sea gate where the tide was flooding round the cora...

Now on board that ship there were three men set there by circumstance as pawns in a game of which Taori was king, Katafa queen, and Le Moan perhaps the hand of the player, and t...

They were seated on the main deck near the galley, their coffee mugs beside them and their plates on their knees and the _Kermadec_ on a steady seven-knot clip was heeled slight...

Now the mind of Sru had sat down to talk with Le Moan, having in it no plan—nothing but a desire for pearls and what pearls would bring, and the knowledge sure and instinctive t...

Le Moan had never known pity. She had lived amongst the pitiless, and if any seed of the divine flower lay in her heart it had never grown nor come to blossom. She had seen her...

They came in on a dying wind, the outlying reefs creaming to the swell and the great high island opening its cañons and mountain glades as they drew towards it pursued by the ch...

The Pacific has many industries but none more appealing to the imagination than the old sandalwood trade, a perfumed business that died when copra found its own, before the nove...

Then from the shore you might have seen the _Kermadec_ like a frightened bird unfolding her wings as the boat came on board and the anchor came home, mainsail, foresail and jib...

Le Moan, crouching in the bow with the risen sun hot on her left shoulder, saw the long levels of the marching swell as they came and passed, the Kermadec bowing to them; saw th...

Not a soul had seen her go and it was not for some days that Aioma, busy with the tree felling, recollected her existence, and the fact that she had not followed him to the nort...

Rantan was at the wheel, and Le Moan forward, with swelling heart, stood watching as they passed the break, the Gates of Morning, through which the tide was flooding like a mill...

As they rowed making for the schooner with the light of the westering sun in their eyes, they could see the head of the swimmer as he made back for the shore, and away on the be...

The crew, numbering now only six, and deprived of the leadership of Sru, watched Rantan go aft and disappear down the saloon hatch, then they fell to discussing the fate of Sru...

Then she talked to them respecting what she had already told to Kanoa, telling them also that the men of Karolin were not enemies but friends, that Rantan and the red-bearded ma...

When the firing had ceased and the boat had returned to the ship the wretched people hiding amongst the mammee apple had come out and grouped themselves around Aioma and Taori....

Now when Katafa led Le Moan away into the shelter of the trees, Le Moan, with the kiss of Katafa warm upon her forehead, knew nothing, nothing of the fact that Katafa was Taori’...

If the sea had risen above the reef destroying the village and sweeping the population of Karolin to ruin whilst leaving her untouched, Le Moan would have stood as she stood now...

Rantan, when they cast him in the fishing canoe, could see nothing but the roughly shaped sides, bright here and there where the scale of a palu had stuck and dried, the after o...

Dick had promised that to-day they would board her and the canoe-builder in him craved to get to work, and the boy—the boy wanted to sail her, to feel the wind settling in the g...

The schooner had two boats, the four-oar and a smaller one black painted, battered by rough usage, but still serviceable. Later that day Aioma brought both boats on to the beach...

He nearly stepped on the spinous back of a great fish, a fish such as he had never seen before, larger than a full-grown man and tangled amongst the bushes and the trees.

Three weeks’ work had recreated the houses broken by the great waves, and put a top knob to the work of the builders. Nan had been recovered. A boy found him cast up in the sand...

Now could be heard Aioma’s voice calling up the hands from the foc’sle and now Katafa, watching from the shore, could hear the sound of the winch heaving the anchor chain short.

He was nothing to Le Moan. Though he had saved her from Rantan, he was less to her than the ground she trod on, the sea that washed the reef, the gulls that flew in the air; for...

The truth is Marua was calling to him. He wished to see it again if only for a moment. The hilltop and the groves and the coloured birds sent their voices across the sea to Karo...

Tahuku had struck it in idleness, just as a child might, but the unaccustomed sound coming just then seemed to Aioma a response to the words of the other. But he said nothing. T...

The sun touched the sea line, the blazing water leaping to meet him, and then in a west golden and desolate, in a sea whose water had turned to living light, he began to drown.

The words of Aioma were repeated by the sky, by the sun, and the sea. Never more would he see Katafa, hear her voice, feel her arms about him. The hard hot deck beneath him, the...

The Ocean is a congregation of rivers, the drift currents and the stream currents; rivers, some constant in their flow, some intermittent and variable; some wide, as in the case...

When Rantan awoke from sleep it was morning. He had slept the clock round. He awoke hungry and full of vigour, and coming out from amongst the trees he stood for a moment by the...

He sprang to his feet and came running out on to the sands. For a moment he could not tell where he was, then he remembered. It was past noon and the tide was beginning to ebb....

He fell asleep on the thought and for days and days he hugged it, and every day a dozen times he would go to the flat space on the coral and look over the sea for the ship.

Poni at the wheel, his eyes wrinkled against the sun, steered; Aioma beside him, Le Moan near Aioma and Dick forward near the galley. Dick had taken his seat on the deck in a pa...

Safe hidden amongst the bushes he listened. It would take a full hour yet before the schooner could make the break, yet he listened as he lay, his rope beside him, his mind acti...

Le Moan steered. Tireless and heedless of time as when she had brought the schooner first to Karolin, she kept the wheel all that day and through the night, giving it over to Po...

From her place amidst the trees where Le Moan had settled herself like a hare in its forme she heard the silky whisper of the sands and the voice of the beach and the wind in th...

The island was without a single canoe, and he intended to build one as swiftly as might be for the fishing; that being done he would destroy the boat and so obliterate the last...

One night, when the disease seemed past and only ten people were left of all those who had watched the burning of the schooner, Le Moan, sleeping by Kanoa, was awakened by Katafa.