Page:The Gates of Morning - Henry De Vere Stacpoole.pdf/196

 the people had taken to the trees; some to the near trees, some racing along the reef sought the great trees of the canoe-builders.

It was not climbing, as we know it. These people, like the people of Tahiti, could literally walk up a tree, bodies bent, hands clinging to the trunk and feet clutching at the bark.

Katafa could climb like this; Dick, less expert but a good climber, followed her, making her go first, seizing before he left the ground a child that held on to his neck. The child was laughing.

Fifty feet above the ground they clung and looked.

From east to west across the sea stretched a line of light, lovely and strange and infinite in length, swift moving, changing in brilliancy yet ever brilliant. Ever advancing, whilst now from tree top to tree top came the cry, shrill on the windless air:

“Amiana—amiana!—the wave—the wave!”

It met the Karaka rock and a great white ghost of foam rose towards the sun. A few seconds later came the boom of the impact followed by the clanging of the reef gulls rising in clouds and spirals; it passed the rock, re-forming, forward sweeping, bearing straight for the reef; a mound of sea towards which the shore waters rushed out as it checked, curved, paled and burst in thunder on the reef, sweeping houses to ruin and flooding into the lagoon.

The trees held though the foam dashed thirty feet up their trunks. Aioma unterrified, with one thought only, the schooner, could see from his eerieaerie [sic] that she