Then the breeze dropped.
The fibre-sail flapped uneasily against the mast, while the two little
canvas sails hung loosely, as the wind, with little warning, swung
round, and smiting them in the face began to drive them back into the
ocean again.
Elikana and his friends knew the sea almost like fish, from the time
they were babies. And they were little troubled by the turn of the
breeze, save that it would delay their homecoming. They tried in vain
to make headway. Slowly, but surely they were driven back from land,
till they could see that there was no other thing but just to turn
about and let her run back to Manihiki. In the canoes were enough
cocoa-nuts to feed them for days if need be, and two large calabashes
of water.
The swift night fell, but the wind held strong, and one man sat at
the tiller while two others baled out the water that leaked into the
canoes. They kept a keen watch, expecting to sight Manihiki; but when
the dawn flashed out of the sky in the East, where the island should
have been, there was neither Manihiki nor any other land at all. They
had no chart nor compass; north and south and east and west stretched
the wastes of the Pacific for hundreds of leagues. Only here and there
in the ocean, and all unseen to them, like little groups of mushrooms
on a limitless prairie, lay groups of islets.
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