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A public garden by night, a rich and fashionable watering-place in a by-season, offer sights and vistas not dissimilar. And still, on the one side, stretched the lapping mere, and from the other the deep sea still growled in the night. But it was most of all on board, in the dead hours, when I had been better sleeping, that the spell of Fakarava seized and held me. The moon was down.
According to M. Cuzent, the whole number of plants on an atoll such as Fakarava will scarce exceed, even if it reaches to, one score. Not a blade of grass appears; not a grain of humus, save when a sack or two has been imported to make the semblance of a garden; such gardens as bloom in cities on the window-sill.
It was not a squall, but a regular breeze the disrupted trade wind, eight points out of its direction but resuming business once more. "Hold her up, Captain," McCoy said as soon as he reached the poop. "That's the easterly point of Fakarava, and we'll go in through the passage full-tilt, the wind abeam, and every sail drawing."
By a little before noon we were running down the coast of our destination, Fakarava: the air very light, the sea near smooth; though still we were accompanied by a continuous murmur from the beach, like the sound of a distant train.
"What good will the house do you?" Raoul demanded. "The first hurricane that comes along will wash it away. You ought to know." "Captain Raffy says it looks like a hurricane right now." "Not on Fakarava," said Mapuhi. "The land is much higher there. On this island, yes. Any hurricane can sweep Hikueru. I will have the house on Fakarava. It must be six fathoms long with a porch all around "
Insect life is sometimes dense; a cloud o' mosquitoes, and, what is far worse, a plague of flies blackening our food, has sometimes driven us from a meal on Apemama; and even in Fakarava the mosquitoes were a pest. The land crab may be seen scuttling to his hole, and at night the rats besiege the houses and the artificial gardens. The crab is good eating; possibly so is the rat; I have not tried.
And you must build the house on my island, which is Fakarava." "Is that all?" Raoul asked incredulously. "There must be a sewing machine," spoke up Tefara, Mapuhi's wife. "Not forgetting the octagon-drop-clock," added Nauri, Mapuhi's mother. "Yes, that is all," said Mapuhi. Young Raoul laughed. He laughed long and heartily. But while he laughed he secretly performed problems in mental arithmetic.
The surface of that narrow strip is for the more part of broken coral lime-stone, like volcanic clinkers, and excruciating to the naked foot; in some atolls, I believe, not in Fakarava, it gives a fine metallic ring when struck. Here and there you come upon a bank of sand, exceeding fine and white, and these parts are the least productive.
For some time the voyage went otherwise well. They weathered Fakarava with one board; and the wind holding well to the southward, and blowing fresh, they passed between Ranaka and Ratiu, and ran some days north-east by east-half-east under the lee of Takume and Honden, neither of which they made. In about 14° south, and between 134° and 135° west, it fell a dead calm, with rather a heavy sea.
When he came to his senses in the cold grey of the morning he found the ship in possession of the people of Fakarava, and of all his shipmates but two remained alive Captain Shelley and a seaman named Ray; all the rest had been slain and thrown overboard.
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