and its ports open, looking like a big firefly.  There was music aboard.  I stood up and shouted and screamed at it.  The second day I broached one of the Aepyornis eggs, scraped the shell away at the end bit by bit, and tried it, and I was glad to find it was good enough to eat.  A bit flavoury—­not bad, I mean—­but with something of the taste of a duck’s egg.  There was a kind of circular patch, about six inches across, on one side of the yolk, and with streaks of blood and a white mark like a ladder in it that I thought queer, but I did not understand what this meant at the time, and I wasn’t inclined to be particular.  The egg lasted me three days, with biscuits and a drink of water.  I chewed coffee berries too—­invigorating stuff.  The second egg I opened about the eighth day, and it scared me.”

The man with the scar paused.  “Yes,” he said, “developing.”

“I dare say you find it hard to believe. I did, with the thing before me.  There the egg had been, sunk in that cold black mud, perhaps three hundred years.  But there was no mistaking it.  There was the—­what is it?—­embryo, with its big head and curved back, and its heart beating under its throat, and the yolk shrivelled up and great membranes spreading inside of the shell and all over the yolk.  Here was I hatching out the eggs of the biggest of all extinct birds, in a little canoe in the midst of the Indian Ocean.  If old Dawson had known that!  It was worth four years’ salary.  What do you think?

“However, I had to eat that precious thing up, every bit of it, before I sighted the reef, and some of the mouthfuls were beastly unpleasant.  I left the third one alone.  I held it up to the light, but the shell was too thick for me to get any notion of what might be happening inside; and though I fancied I heard blood pulsing, it might have been the rustle in my own ears, like what you listen to in a seashell.

“Then came the atoll.  Came out of the sunrise, as it were, suddenly, close up to me.  I drifted straight towards it until I was about half a mile from shore, not more, and then the current took a turn, and I had to paddle as hard as I could with my hands and bits of the Aepyornis shell to make the place.  However, I got there.  It was just a common atoll about four miles round, with a few trees growing and a spring in one place, and the lagoon full of parrot-fish.  I took the egg ashore and put it in a good place well above the tide lines and in the sun, to give it all the chance I could, and pulled the canoe up safe, and loafed about prospecting.  It’s rum how dull an atoll is.  As soon as I had found a spring all the interest seemed to vanish.  When I was a kid I thought nothing could be finer or more adventurous than the Robinson Crusoe business, but that place was as monotonous as a book of sermons.  I went round finding eatable things and generally thinking; but I tell you I was bored to death before the first day was out.  It shows my luck—­the very day I landed the weather changed.  A thunderstorm went by to the north and flicked its wing over the island, and in the night there came a drencher and a howling wind slap over us.  It wouldn’t have taken much, you know, to upset that canoe.