Page:The Gates of Morning - Henry De Vere Stacpoole.pdf/81

 the reef rose nowhere to more than twice the height of a man, the sea was a glittering plain of freedom and a sound and a scent.

Worse even than the monstrous height of Levua, its strange cañons and gloomy woods, was the scent of the foliage, cossi and vanilla and sandalwood, unknown flowers, unknown plants, all mixed with the smell of earth and breathing from the glasshouse atmosphere of the groves.

An extraordinary thing was the way in which the forms and perfumes of Levua permeated the Kermadec itself, so that, turning her eyes away from the land, the deck of the schooner, the rails, masts and spars, all seemed hostile to her as the land itself. Sru alone gave her comfort as she watched him superintending the fellows busy with the anchor—Sru, who had promised that she would return.

The anchor fell in twelve-fathom water and as the rumble-tumble of the anchor chain came back in echoes from the moist-throated woods, a boat put out from the beach. It was Sanders the white trader, the man who lived here alone year in, year out, taking toll of the sandalwood trees, paying the natives for their labour in trade goods; cut off from the world, without books, without friends, and with no interest beyond the zone of sea encircling the island, except the interest of his steadily accumulating money in the hands of his agents—the Bank of California.

The face of the white man showed thin and expressionless as a wedge of ice as he came over the