The sight of Tikei, thrown direct against the splendour of the morning, robbed of all its colour, and deformed with disproportioned trees like bristles on a broom, had scarce prepared us to be much in love with atolls.  Later the same day we saw under more fit conditions the island of Taiaro.  Lost in the Sea is possibly the meaning of the name.  And it was so we saw it; lost in blue sea and sky:  a ring of white beach, green underwood, and tossing palms, gem-like in colour; of a fairy, of a heavenly prettiness.  The surf ran all around it, white as snow, and broke at one point, far to seaward, on what seems an uncharted reef.  There was no smoke, no sign of man; indeed, the isle is not inhabited, only visited at intervals.  And yet a trader (Mr. Narii Salmon) was watching from the shore and wondering at the unexpected ship.  I have spent since then long months upon low islands; I know the tedium of their undistinguished days; I know the burden of their diet.  With whatever envy we may have looked from the deck on these green coverts, it was with a tenfold greater that Mr. Salmon and his comrades saw us steer, in our trim ship, to seaward.

The night fell lovely in the extreme.  After the moon went down, the heaven was a thing to wonder at for stars.  And as I lay in the cockpit and looked upon the steersman I was haunted by Emerson’s verses: 

’And the lone seaman all the night
Sails astonished among stars.’

By this glittering and imperfect brightness, about four bells in the first watch we made our third atoll, Raraka.  The low line of the isle lay straight along the sky; so that I was at first reminded of a towpath, and we seemed to be mounting some engineered and navigable stream.  Presently a red star appeared, about the height and brightness of a danger signal, and with that my simile was changed; we seemed rather to skirt the embankment of a railway, and the eye began to look instinctively for the telegraph-posts, and the ear to expect the coming of a train.  Here and there, but rarely, faint tree-tops broke the level.  And the sound of the surf accompanied us, now in a drowsy monotone, now with a menacing swing.

The isle lay nearly east and west, barring our advance on Fakarava.  We must, therefore, hug the coast until we gained the western end, where, through a passage eight miles wide, we might sail southward between Raraka and the next isle, Kauehi.  We had the wind free, a lightish air; but clouds of an inky blackness were beginning to arise, and at times it lightened—­without thunder.  Something, I know not what, continually set us up upon the island.  We lay more and more to the nor’ard; and you would have thought the shore copied our manoeuvre and outsailed us.  Once and twice Raraka headed us again—­again, in the sea fashion, the quite innocent steersman was abused—­and again the Casco kept away.  Had I been called on, with no more light than that of our experience, to draw the configuration of that island, I should have shown a series of bow-window promontories, each overlapping the other to the nor’ard, and the trend of the land from the south-east to the north-west, and behold, on the chart it lay near east and west in a straight line.