Elikana looked ahead to where his own island of Rakahanga grew clearer every moment on the sky-line ahead of them, though each time his craft dropped into the trough of the sea between the green curves of the league-long ocean rollers the island was lost from sight.

He and his six companions were sailing back over the thirty miles between Manihiki and Rakahanga, two of the many little lonely ocean islands that stud the Pacific like stars.

They sailed a strange craft, for it cannot be called raft or canoe or hut.  It was all these and yet was neither.  Two canoes, forty-eight feet long, sailed side by side.  Between the canoes were spars, stretching across from one to the other, lashed to each boat and making a platform between them six feet wide.  On this was built a hut, roofed with the beautiful braided leaves of the cocoa-nut palm.

Overhead stretched the infinite sky.  Underneath lay thousands of fathoms of blue-green ocean, whose cold, hidden deeps among the mountains and valleys of the awful ocean under-world held strange goblin fish-shapes.  And on the surface this hut of leaves and bamboo swung dizzily between sky and ocean on the frail canoes.  And in the canoes and the hut were six brown Rakahangan men, two women, and a chubby, dark-eyed child, who sat contented and tired, being lapped to sleep by the swaying waters.

Above them the great sail made of matting of fibre, strained in the breeze that drove them nearer to the haven where they would be.  Already they could see the gleam of the Rakahanga beach with the rim of silver where the waves broke into foam.  Then the breeze dropped.  The fibre-sail flapped uneasily against the mast, while the two little canvas sails hung loosely, as the wind, with little warning, swung round, and smiting them in the face began to drive them back into the ocean again.

Elikana and his friends knew the sea almost like fish, from the time they were babies.  And they were little troubled by the turn of the breeze, save that it would delay their homecoming.  They tried in vain to make headway.  Slowly, but surely they were driven back from land, till they could see that there was no other thing but just to turn about and let her run back to Manihiki.  In the canoes were enough cocoa-nuts to feed them for days if need be, and two large calabashes of water.

The swift night fell, but the wind held strong, and one man sat at the tiller while two others baled out the water that leaked into the canoes.  They kept a keen watch, expecting to sight Manihiki; but when the dawn flashed out of the sky in the East, where the island should have been, there was neither Manihiki nor any other land at all.  They had no chart nor compass; north and south and east and west stretched the wastes of the Pacific for hundreds of leagues.  Only here and there in the ocean, and all unseen to them, like little groups of mushrooms on a limitless prairie, lay groups of islets.