Physically, Pete was the black type of Celt. The wild thatch of his
scrubbing-brush hair shone purple in the light. Scrape his face as he
would, the purple shadow of his beard seemed ingrained in his white
white skin. Black-browed and black-lashed, he had the luminous
blue-gray-green eyes of the colleen. There was a curious untamable
quality in his look that was the mixture of two mad strains, the
aloofness of the Celt and the aloofness of the genius.
Three weeks passed. The clear, warm-cool, lucid, sunny weather kept up.
The ocean flattened, gradually. Twice every twenty-four hours the tide
brought treasure; but it brought less and less every day. Occasionally
came a stiffened human reminder of their great disaster. But calloused
as they were now to these experiences, the men buried it with hasty
ceremony and forgot.
By this time an incongruous collection stretched in parallel lines above
the high-water mark. "Something, anything, everything - and then some,"
remarked Honey Smith. Wood wreckage of all descriptions, acres of
furniture, broken, split, blistered, discolored, swollen; piles of
carpets, rugs, towels, bed-linen, stained, faded, shrunken, torn; files
of swollen mattresses, pillows, cushions, life-preservers; heaps of
table-silver and kitchen-ware tarnished and rusty; mounds of china and
glass; mountains of tinned goods, barrels boxes, books, suit-cases,
leather bags; trunks and trunks and more trunks and still more trunks;
for, mainly, the trunks had saved themselves.
Part of the time, in between tides, they tried to separate the grain of
this huge collection of lumber from the chaff; part of the time they
made exploring trips into the interior. At night they sat about their
huge fire and talked.
The island proved to be about twenty miles in length by seven in width.
It was uninhabited and there were no large animals on it. It was Frank
Merrill's theory that it was the exposed peak of a huge extinct volcano.
In the center, filling the crater, was a little fresh-water lake. The
island was heavily wooded; but in contour it presented only diminutive
contrasts of hill and valley. And except as the semi-tropical foliage
offered novelties of leaf and flower, the beauties of unfamiliar shapes
and colors, it did not seem particularly interesting. Ralph Addington
was the guide of these expeditions. From this tree, he pointed out, the
South Sea Islander manufactured the tappa cloth, from that the
poeepooee, from yonder the arva. Honey Smith used to say that the only
depressing thing about these trips was the utter silence of the gorgeous
birds which they saw on every side. On the other hand, they extracted
what comfort they could from Merrill's and Addington's assurance that,
should the ship's supply give out, they could live comfortably enough on
birds' eggs, fruit, and fish.