A naked bronze arm lighted from above pointed out the direction and Mrs. Travers began to walk toward the featureless black mass of the stockade.  When after a few steps she looked back over her shoulder, the lagoon, the beach, the canoe, the men she had just left had become already invisible.  She was alone bearing up a blazing torch on an earth that was a dumb shadow shifting under her feet.  At last she reached firmer ground and the dark length of the palisade untouched as yet by the light of the torch seemed to her immense, intimidating.  She felt ready to drop from sheer emotion.  But she moved on.

“A little more to the left,” shouted a strong voice.

It vibrated through all her fibres, rousing like the call of a trumpet, went far beyond her, filled all the space.  Mrs. Travers stood still for a moment, then casting far away from her the burning torch ran forward blindly with her hands extended toward the great sound of Lingard’s voice, leaving behind her the light flaring and spluttering on the ground.  She stumbled and was only saved from a fall by her hands coming in contact with the rough stakes.  The stockade rose high above her head and she clung to it with widely open arms, pressing her whole body against the rugged surface of that enormous and unscalable palisade.  She heard through it low voices inside, heavy thuds; and felt at every blow a slight vibration of the ground under her feet.  She glanced fearfully over her shoulder and saw nothing in the darkness but the expiring glow of the torch she had thrown away and the sombre shimmer of the lagoon bordering the opaque darkness of the shore.  Her strained eyeballs seemed to detect mysterious movements in the darkness and she gave way to irresistible terror, to a shrinking agony of apprehension.  Was she to be transfixed by a broad blade, to the high, immovable wall of wood against which she was flattening herself desperately, as though she could hope to penetrate it by the mere force of her fear?  She had no idea where she was, but as a matter of fact she was a little to the left of the principal gate and almost exactly under one of the loopholes of the stockade.  Her excessive anguish passed into insensibility.  She ceased to hear, to see, and even to feel the contact of the surface to which she clung.  Lingard’s voice somewhere from the sky above her head was directing her, distinct, very close, full of concern.

“You must stoop low.  Lower yet.”

The stagnant blood of her body began to pulsate languidly.  She stooped low—­lower yet—­so low that she had to sink on her knees, and then became aware of a faint smell of wood smoke mingled with the confused murmur of agitated voices.  This came to her through an opening no higher than her head in her kneeling posture, and no wider than the breadth of two stakes.  Lingard was saying in a tone of distress: 

“I couldn’t get any of them to unbar the gate.”