twenty miles broad along that low shore there is much more coral, mud,
sand, and stones than actual sea water. It was amongst the outlying
shoals of this stretch that the yacht had gone ashore and the events
consequent upon her stranding took place.

The diffused light of the short daybreak showed the open water to the
westward, sleeping, smooth and grey, under a faded heaven. The straight
coast threw a heavy belt of gloom along the shoals, which, in the calm
of expiring night, were unmarked by the slightest ripple. In the faint
dawn the low clumps of bushes on the sandbanks appeared immense.

Two figures, noiseless like two shadows, moved slowly over the beach of
a rocky islet, and stopped side by side on the very edge of the water.
Behind them, between the mats from which they had arisen, a small heap
of black embers smouldered quietly. They stood upright and perfectly
still, but for the slight movement of their heads from right to left and
back again as they swept their gaze through the grey emptiness of the
waters where, about two miles distant, the hull of the yacht loomed up
to seaward, black and shapeless, against the wan sky.

The two figures looked beyond without exchanging as much as a murmur.
The taller of the two grounded, at arm's length, the stock of a gun with
a long barrel; the hair of the other fell down to its waist; and, near
by, the leaves of creepers drooping from the summit of the steep rock
stirred no more than the festooned stone. The faint light, disclosing
here and there a gleam of white sandbanks and the blurred hummocks of
islets scattered within the gloom of the coast, the profound silence,
the vast stillness all round, accentuated the loneliness of the two
human beings who, urged by a sleepless hope, had risen thus, at break of
day, to look afar upon the veiled face of the sea.