I flung back the overhanging blanket as Marie stirred and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. It was a gleaming glorious dazzling world, a peaceful sun-warmed panorama of beauty that made the long night just gone a dark nightmare that could never have been.
A string of coral isles and reefs, reefs painted in the most impossible greens and yellows and violets and browns and whites, stretched away on both sides from us in two huge curving horns that all but encircled and enclosed a huge lagoon of burnished aquamarine, and, beyond the lagoon, the most remarkably-shaped island I’d ever laid eyes on. It was as if some giant hand had cut a giant Stetson down the middle, and thrown one half away. The island reached its highest point in the extreme north, where it plunged vertically down into the sea: from this peak, it sloped down steeply to the east and south-I could only guess that it would be the same on the west-and where the wide brim of the Stetson would have been was a flat plain running down to beaches of dazzling white sand which, even at that hour of the morning and at a distance of three miles, was positively hurtful to the eyes. The mountain itself, a rich bluish-purple in that early sunlight, was bald and bare of any vegetation: the plain below was bare, too, only scrub bushes and grass, with scattered palms down near the water’s edge.
But I didn’t spend much time on the scenery: I’d like to think I’d be right in there with the next man when it came to appreciating the beauties of nature, but not after a rain-soaked and chilly night on an exposed reef: I was far more interested in the out-rigger canoe that was coming arrowing in towards us through the mirror-calm waters of that green lagoon.
There were two men in it, big sturdy brown-skinned men with huge mops of crinkly black hair, and their paddles were driving in perfect unison into and through the gleaming glass of those waters faster than I would have believed possible, moving so quickly that the flying spray from the paddles was a continuously iridescent rainbow glitter in the rays of the rising sun. Less than twenty yards away from the reef they dug their paddles deep, slowed down their outrigger canoe and brought it slewing round to a standstill less than ten feet away. One of the men jumped out into the thigh deep water, waded towards us then climbed nimbly up the coral. His feet were bare but the sharp rock didn’t worry him any that I could see. His face was a comical mixture of astonishment and good humour, astonishment at finding two white people on a reef at that hour in the morning, good humour because the world was a wonderful place and always would be. You don’t see that kind of face often, but when you do you can never mistake it. Good humour won. He gave us a huge white grin and said something that meant just nothing at all to me.
He could see that it meant nothing at all and he wasn’t the kind of man to waste time. He looked at Marie, shook his head and clucked his tongue as his eyes took in the pale face, the two unnaturally red patches on her cheeks and the purplish shadows under her eyes, then grinned again, ducked his head as in greeting, picked her up and waded out to the canoe. I made it under my own steam, lugging the two water drums along.
The canoe was fitted with a mast, but there was no wind yet, so we had to paddle across the lagoon to the island. At least the two brown men did and I was glad to leave it to them. What they did with that canoe would have had me gasping and wheezing in five minutes and in a hospital bed in ten. They’d have been a sensation at Henley. They kept it up non-stop for the twenty minutes it took us to cross the lagoon, churning up the water as if the Loch Ness monster was after them, but still finding time and energy to chatter and laugh with each other all the way. If they were representative of the rest of the island’s population, we had fallen into good hands.
And that there were others on the island was obvious. As we came close to the shore, I could count at least half a dozen houses, stilted affairs with the floor about three feet off the ground and enormously deep-eaved thatched roofs that swept down steeply from high ridge-poles to within four or five feet of the ground. The houses had neither doors nor windows, understandably enough, for they had no walls either, except for one, the largest, in a clearing near the shore, close in to a stand of coconut palms: the other houses were set further back and to the south. Still further south was a metal and corrugated iron eyesore, grey in colour, like an old-fashioned crushing plant and hopper in a quarry. Beyond this again was a long low shed, with a slightly sloping corrugated iron roof: it must have been a real pleasure to work under that when the sun was high in the sky.
We were heading in just to the right of a small pier-not a real landing-stage with anchored piles but a thirty foot long floating platform of bound logs, secured on the shore end by ropes tied round a couple of tree stumps-when I saw a man lying on the shore. A white man, sunbathing. He was a lean wiry old bird with a lot of white hair all over his face, dark spectacles on his eyes and a grubby towel strategically placed across his midriff. He appeared to be asleep, but he wasn’t, for when the bow of the canoe crunched into the sand he sat up with a jerk, whipped off his dark glasses, peered myopically in our direction, pawed around the sand till he located a pair of slightly-tinted spectacles, stuck them across the bridge of his nose, said “God bless my soul” in an agitated voice, jumped to his feet with remarkable speed for such an old duffer and hurried into a nearby palm-thatched hut, clutching his towel round him.
“Quite a tribute to you, my dear,” I murmured. “You looking like something the tide washed up and the old boy about ninety-nine, but you can still knock him for six.”
“He didn’t seem any too pleased to see us, I thought,” she said doubtfully. She smiled at the big man who’d just lifted her from the canoe and set her on her feet on the sand and went on: “Maybe he’s a recluse. Maybe he’s one of those remittance man beach-combers and other white people are the last he wants to see.”
“He’s just gone for his best bib and tucker,” I said confidently. “He’ll be back in a minute to give us the big hand.”
And he was. We’d hardly reached the top of the beach when he reappeared from the hut, dressed in a white shirt and white ducks, with a panama on his head. He’d a white beard, flowing white moustache and plentiful thick white hair. If Buffalo Bill had ever worn tropical whites and a straw hat, he’d have been a dead ringer for Buffalo Bill.
He came puffing down to meet us, his hand outstretched in greeting. I’d made no mistake about the warmth of welcome, but I had about the age: he wasn’t a day over sixty, perhaps only fifty-five, and a pretty fit fifty-five at that.
“God bless my soul, God bless my soul!” He wrung our hands as if we’d brought him the first prize in the Irish Sweepstake. “What a surprise! What a surprise! Morning dip, you know-just drying off-couldn’t believe my eyes-where in all the world have you two come from? No, no, don’t answer now. Straight up to my house. Delightful surprise. Delightful.” He scurried off in front of us, god-blessing himself with every other step. Marie smiled at me and we walked after him.
He led us along a short path, across a white-shingled front, up a wide flight of six wooden steps into his house: like the others, the floor was well clear of the ground. But once inside I could see why, unlike the other houses, it had walls: it had to have to support the large bookcases and glass-covered show-cases that lined three quarters of the wall area of the room: the rest of the walls were given over to doors and window spaces, no glass in the windows, just screens of plaited leaves that could be raised or lowered as wished. There was a peculiar smell that I couldn’t place at first. The floor seemed to be made of the mid-ribs of some type of leaf, coconut palm, probably, laid across close-set joists, and there was no ceiling as such, just steep-angled rafters with thatch above. I looked at this thatch for a long and very interested moment. There was a big old-fashioned roll-top desk in one corner and a large safe against the inside wall. There were some brightly coloured straw mats on the floor, most of which was given over to low-slung comfortable looking rattan chairs and settees, each with a low table beside it. A man could be comfortable in that room-especially with a drink in his hand.