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Updated: May 4, 2025
"I missed him! I missed him! His voice died away in a choking sob, and I imagine he swooned away. As we were being towed by the legs, I guessed that Holman was suffering excruciating pain from the limb that he had injured by the fall from the maupei tree, and the lapse into unconsciousness came as a blessed relief. To me the rush through the jungle seemed a superlative nightmare.
The threshing limb of the maupei tree that was within a yard or two of the spot where Kaipi and I stood waiting disappeared in the night, and the scratching of Holman's shoes high above our heads came down to us through the intense silence and proved that he was holding his position with difficulty. A small piece of shale hit me on the shoulder after a long wait, and I turned my face upward.
Whether his fears had increased to such an extent that they had forced him to leave the place, or whether he had come to the conclusion that we had returned to the camp by some other route, we could not determine; so wasting no time on useless conjecture we hurried toward the big maupei tree up which we had climbed to reach the ledge. But Holman's hurry proved disastrous.
A lone parrakeet startled us with its harsh cry as it rose from a maupei tree, and the bird even seemed to recognize that it had committed a breach in sending its unmusical cry out upon the awful quiet of the place.
The big clump of maupei, or Pacific chestnut, that we had taken as a landmark when we were running through the moonlit night, grew close to the barrier, and the limbs of several of the trees scraped the sides of the basalt columns as the faint night breeze moved them backward and forward. "There's a ledge up there," whispered the youngster. "Look! It's about fifty feet from the ground.
Leith sat silent and gloomy, his head pillowed against the trunk of a maupei tree, his face in the shadow of his hat, which he had pulled down over his forehead. The supper had been eaten with little conversation, the Professor being the only one who showed conversational powers of any note.
Sudden puffs of wind rustled the leaves of the maupei and fled hurriedly, and from somewhere in the coral rocks one of those red-striped lizards that are sometimes found in the rocky parts of the Carolines sent his unearthly shik-shuck into the stillness, where one fancied it a little projectile of sound crushed in its efforts to pierce the tremendous silence of the night.
"He put his head up, looked across at us for about five minutes, then dodged quickly back." "You weren't dreaming?" "Dreaming? Rot! I haven't closed my eyes since we retired!" I threw off the rug and looked around. Leith lay under the maupei tree in the same position as we had seen him in at the moment I lay down.
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