egan to
ascend, grasping the bushes and the branches. He could find no path.
What did it matter? All sense of fatigue had left him. With the activity
of a cat he mounted. A tree struck him across the face. Another swept off
his hat. He felt that he had antagonists who wished to beat him back to
the sea, and his blood rose against them. He tore down a branch that
impeded him, broke it with his strong hands, and flung it away viciously.
His teeth were set and his nerves tingled, and he was conscious of the
almost angry joy of keen bodily exertion. The body--that was his God
to-night. How he loved it, its health and strength, its willingness, its
capacities! How he gloried in it! It had bounded down the mountain. It
had gone into the sea and revelled there. It had fished and swum. Now it
mounted upward to discovery, defying the weapons that nature launched
against it. Splendid, splendid body!

He fought with the trees and conquered them. His trampling feet sent the
stones leaping downward to be drowned in the sea. His swift eyes found
the likely places for a foothold. His sinewy hands forced his enemies to
assist him in the enterprise they hated. He came out on to the plateau at
the summit of the island and stood still, panting, beside the house that
hid there.

Its blind, gray wall confronted him coldly in the dimness, one shuttered
window, like a shut eye, concealing the interior, the soul of the house
that lay inside its body. In this window must have been set the light he
had seen from the terrace. He wished there were a light burning now. Had
he swum across the inlet and fought his way up through the wood only to
see a gray wall, a shuttered window? That cry had come from the rocks,
yet he had been driven by something within him to this house,
connecting--he knew not why--the cry with it and with the far-off light
that had been like a star caught in the sea. Now he said to himself that
he should have gone back to the rocks and sought the siren there. Should
he go now? He hesitated for a moment, leaning against the wall of the
house.

"Maju torna, maju veni
Cu li belli soi ciureri;
Oh chi pompa chi nni fa;
Maju torna, maju e cca!

"Maju torna, maju vinni,
Duna isca a li disinni;
Vinni riccu e ricchi fa,
Maju viva! Maju e cca!"

He heard a girl's voice singing near him, whether inside the house