Page:The Gates of Morning - Henry De Vere Stacpoole.pdf/205

 they would be dark against the moon, now away like blown smoke.

Sometimes the battle would drift towards the southern beach only to return gliding towards the northern. It was truly the battle that drifted, not the birds.

Just as a flock flies like one bird, moving here, heading there, under the dominion of a common mind, so these two great flocks fought—each not as a congregation, but as an individual; till, of a sudden and as if at the sounding of a trumpet, the combat broke, the storm ceased, the clouds parted, one still circling above the reef, the other drifting away southeast beneath the moon.

Southeast to find some more likely home, to die in the waves, to split up into companies seeking shelter in the Paumotuan atolls—no man could say, or whether the birds of Karolin were the victors or the strangers from the north. Wanderers lost for ever to sight as their home sunk beneath the waves.