their skins. Their dead floated about them, or were stepped upon where
they still lay upon the bottom. On the third day the people buried
their dead and sat down to wait for the rescue steamers.

In the meantime, Nauri, torn from her family by the hurricane, had
been swept away on an adventure of her own. Clinging to a rough plank
that wounded and bruised her and that filled her body with splinters,
she was thrown clear over the atoll and carried away to sea. Here,
under the amazing buffets of mountains of water, she lost her plank.
She was an old woman nearly sixty; but she was Paumotan-born, and she
had never been out of sight of the sea in her life. Swimming in the
darkness, strangling, suffocating, fighting for air, she was struck a
heavy blow on the shoulder by a cocoanut. On the instant her plan was
formed, and she seized the nut. In the next hour she captured seven
more. Tied together, they formed a life-buoy that preserved her life
while at the same time it threatened to pound her to a jelly. She was
a fat woman, and she bruised easily; but she had had experience of
hurricanes, and while she prayed to her shark god for protection from
sharks, she waited for the wind to break. But at three o'clock she was
in such a stupor that she did not know. Nor did she know at six
o'clock when the dead calm settled down. She was shocked into
consciousness when she was thrown upon the sand. She dug in with raw
and bleeding hands and feet and clawed against the backwash until she
was beyond the reach of the waves.

She knew where she was. This land could be no other than the tiny
islet of Takokota. It had no lagoon. No one lived upon it.

Hikueru was fifteen miles away. She could not see Hikueru, but she
knew that it lay to the south. The days went by, and she lived on the