Page:The Gates of Morning - Henry De Vere Stacpoole.pdf/277

 unselfish like the love of Katafa and Taori. Who moreover, above most other mortals, stood apart in a world there was no room for little things—where the sky was their roof and the ocean their floor and storm and war and cataclysm, halcyon weather, and the blaze of a tropic sun their environment, where the love that bound them together had, woven into it—after the fashion of the rope of Rantan—their past.

The thousand little and great and beautiful and terrific things that made up their past, all these were woven into the passion that bound them together.

To cut this bond, to separate them forcibly one from the other, was death.

In hot climates, in the tropics where the convolvulus grows so rapidly that the eye can all but see it grow, people can die quickly of love. Death grows when released with the fountain speed of the rocketing datura and the disruptive fury of corruption.

Dick cut away from Katafa was going to die. It was not only the cutting away, but the manner of it, that made his case hopeless.

Not only was he cut away from Katafa, but he was also divorced from his environment. His universe had consisted of Palm Tree and Karolin, the sea that held them, the sky above them: Katafa—nothing more.

Then Palm Tree had vanished and Karolin had been taken from him and nothing was left but the great vacant world of the sea, that and the grief for the loss of Katafa.