At three in the morning the backbone of the hurricane broke. By five
no more than a stiff breeze was blowing. And by six it was dead calm
and the sun was shining. The sea had gone down. On the yet restless
edge of the lagoon, Mapuhi saw the broken bodies of those that had
failed in the landing. Undoubtedly Tefara and Nauri were among them.
He went along the beach examining them, and came upon his wife, lying
half in and half out of the water. He sat down and wept, making harsh
animal noises after the manner of primitive grief. Then she stirred
uneasily, and groaned. He looked more closely. Not only was she alive,
but she was uninjured. She was merely sleeping. Hers also had been the
one chance in ten.

Of the twelve hundred alive the night before but three hundred
remained. The Mormon missionary and a gendarme made the census. The
lagoon was cluttered with corpses. Not a house nor a hut was standing.
In the whole atoll not two stones remained one upon another. One in
fifty of the cocoanut palms still stood, and they were wrecks, while
on not one of them remained a single nut.

There was no fresh water. The shallow wells that caught the surface
seepage of the rain were filled with salt. Out of the lagoon a few
soaked bags of flour were recovered. The survivors cut the hearts out
of the fallen cocoanut trees and ate them. Here and there they crawled
into tiny hutches, made by hollowing out the sand and covering over
with fragments of metal roofing. The missionary made a crude still,
but he could not distill water for three hundred persons. By the end
of the second day, Raoul, taking a bath in the lagoon, discovered that
his thirst was somewhat relieved. He cried out the news, and thereupon
three hundred men, women, and children could have been seen, standing
up to their necks in the lagoon and trying to drink water in through