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We left our boat in the lagoon, and walked a short distance over sand dunes, thickly grown with trees, to the beach, which only appeared in sight when we reached the top of the last dune. It was a gently sloping sandy stretch, upon which a fine surf was beating. There were no pebbles save bits of water-worn coral and shell.
The whaleboat, with Barry and five hands, skimmed fleetly over the smooth waters of the lagoon before the lusty breeze, and three hours after leaving the brig she was within a quarter of a mile of the shore of a narrow little bay, embowered amidst a luxuriant grove of coco and pandanus palms.
There is an awfulness about it, too, as if that sheer front of rock were the retaining-wall of a reservoir as deep as the bluffs are high, which had sprung a leak in a thousand places, and might the next instant burst and ingulf the lagoon, and wipe out the pretty island between itself and the river.
"Perhaps you can tell us where we can find you if we should want to see you again," called Hannah as the distance between them widened. "Certainly. I am at Murano." He pointed across the lagoon to a distant island. "Murano?" "Yes, I work there. Every one knows me at the glass works." He waved his hand and was soon lost to sight.
I fear we are imprisoned here for three hours at least." There was no help for it. Helen made light of the misfortune. The spot where they had landed was inclosed between the two issues of the lagoon.
There is the rustle of the myriad animals on the beach, all the little shelled things that crawl about ceaselessly, and there is the noisy scurrying of the land-crabs. Now and then in the lagoon you hear the leaping of a fish, and sometimes a hurried noisy splashing as a brown shark sends all the other fish scampering for their lives.
The more her thoughts dwelt upon the subject, the more convinced she was that she could not go to any one for help; she would have to solve the riddle by her own efforts, by some future experience. "The Dawn Pearl," he said. "The natives have foolish ways of saying things." "On the contrary, if that is a specimen, they must be poets. Tell me about your island. I have never seen a lagoon."
The extraordinary upshot of this adventure was but we have not decided yet that this is the adventure we are to narrate. Perhaps a better one would be the night attack by the redskins on the house under the ground, when several of them stuck in the hollow trees and had to be pulled out like corks. Or we might tell how Peter saved Tiger Lily's life in the Mermaids' Lagoon, and so made her his ally.
The shutters were some of them down and some open; I saw the mosquito bars still stretched, with shadows of people new-awakened sitting up inside; and all over the green others were stalking silent, wrapped in their many-coloured sleeping clothes like Bedouins in Bible pictures. It was mortal still and solemn and chilly, and the light of the dawn on the lagoon was like the shining of a fire.
In cases like that of Hogoleu and the Gambier Islands, where a few small peaks rise out of a great lagoon, the conditions scarcely differ from those of an atoll, and I have already shown, at some length, that the filling up of a true lagoon must be an extremely slow process.
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