l and carried away to sea. Here, under the
amazing buffets of mountains of water, she lost her plank. She was an
old woman nearly sixty; but she was Paumotan-born, and she had never
been out of sight of the sea in her life. Swimming in the darkness,
strangling, suffocating, fighting for air, she was struck a heavy blow
on the shoulder by a cocoanut. On the instant her plan was formed,
and she seized the nut. In the next hour she captured seven more. Tied
together, they formed a life-buoy that preserved her life while at the
same time it threatened to pound her to a jelly. She was a fat woman,
and she bruised easily; but she had had experience of hurricanes, and
while she prayed to her shark god for protection from sharks, she waited
for the wind to break. But at three o'clock she was in such a stupor
that she did not know. Nor did she know at six o'clock when the dead
calm settled down. She was shocked into consciousness when she was
thrown upon the sand. She dug in with raw and bleeding hands and feet
and clawed against the backwash until she was beyond the reach of the
waves.

She knew where she was. This land could be no other than the tiny islet
of Takokota. It had no lagoon. No one lived upon it.

Hikueru was fifteen miles away. She could not see Hikueru, but she
knew that it lay to the south. The days went by, and she lived on the
cocoanuts that had kept her afloat. They supplied her with drinking
water and with food. But she did not drink all she wanted, nor eat all
she wanted. Rescue was problematical. She saw the smoke of the rescue
steamers on the horizon, but what steamer could be expected to come to
lonely, uninhabited Takokota?

From the first she was tormented by corpses. The sea persisted in
flinging them upon her bit of sand, and she persisted, until her
strength failed, in thrusting them back into the sea where the sharks
tore at them and devoured them. When her strength failed, the bodies
festooned her beach with ghastly horror, and she withdrew from them as
far as she could, which was not far.

By the tenth day her last cocoanut was gone, and she was shrivelling
from thirst. She dragged herself along the sand, looking for cocoanuts.
It was strange that so many bodies floated up, and no nuts. Surely,
there were more cocoanuts afloat than dead men! She gave up at last, and
lay exhausted. The end had come. Nothing remained but to wait for death.

Coming out of a stupor, she became slowly aware that