United States or Heard Island and McDonald Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He ran through the grove towards the aoa where the dinghy was moored; then he returned. "The dinghy is all right," he said. "Where on earth can he be?" "I don't know," said Emmeline, upon whose heart a feeling of loneliness had fallen. "Let's go up the hill," said Dick; "perhaps we'll find him there." They went uphill through the wood, past the water-course.
He looked towards Morton, who said nothing, but stood leaning against one of the pillars of the Aoa, with his eyes steadfastly bent upon the ground. "Ask Eiulo," said Browne, "if this man is his uncle." The question was accordingly put, and the trembling boy answered hesitatingly, that he did not know but he believed that he was. "Ask him," pursued Browne, "if he is willing to go with him."
The recollection came to him all at once, as he was walking up the strand towards the wigwam, that he had left the dinghy tied to the reef. The dinghy was, as a matter of fact, safe and sound tied to the aoa; but Mr Button's memory told him it was tied to the reef.
The artu with its delicately diamonded trunk, the great bread-fruit tall as a beech, and shadowy as a cave, the aoa, and the eternal cocoa-nut palm all grew here like brothers. Great ropes of wild vine twined like the snake of the laocoon from tree to tree, and all sorts of wonderful flowers, from the orchid shaped like a butterfly to the scarlet hibiscus, made beautiful the gloom.
The sense of surrounding danger with which we laid down that night upon our beds of fern beneath the Aoa, continued to press darkly upon our minds even in sleep, and awake us at an early hour to confront anew, the perplexities and terrors of our situation.
Twisting its roots round the rock, a gnarled "Aoa" spread itself overhead in a wilderness of foliage; the elastic branch-roots depending from the larger boughs insinuating themselves into every cleft, thus forming supports to the parent stem. In some places these pendulous branches, half-grown, had not yet reached the rock; swinging their loose fibrous ends in the air like whiplashes.
"A very curious one, as you shall see presently," replied Jack. "It is called the aoa here, if I recollect rightly, and has a wonderful peculiarity about it. What an enormous one it is, to be sure." "It!" repeated Peterkin; "why, there are dozens of banians here! What do you mean by talking bad grammar? Is your philosophy deserting you, Jack?"
One of them I at once recognised as the lithe and active leader, whom I had seen upon the shore in swift pursuit of the fugitives. Our first impulse, was to spring at once into the Aoa, according to the understanding to which we had partially come, as to what we were to do if discovered.
Varvy's hut, a mere coop of bamboos, was perched upon a level part of the rock, the ridge-pole resting at one end in a crotch of the "Aoa," and the other propped by a forked bough planted in a fissure.
Presently the dinghy put off from the reef, the sculls broke the starlit waters and great shaking circles of light made rhythmical answer to the slow and steady creak of the thole pins against the leather. He tied up to the aoa, saw that the sculls were safely shipped; then, breathing heavily, he cast off his boots for fear of waking the "childer."
Word Of The Day