CHAPTER X
THE HIGH ISLAND
THEY came in on a dying wind, the outlying reefs creaming to the swell and the great high island opening its cañons and mountain glades as they drew towards it pursued by the chanting gulls.
Le Moan, who had never seen a high island or only the vision of Palm Tree uplifted by mirage, stood with her eyes fixed on the multitude of the trees. Palms, breadfruit, tree ferns, aoas, sandalwood groves, trees mounting towards the skies, reaching ever upwards, changing in form and misted by the smoke of torrents.
Here there was no freedom, the great spaces of the sea had vanished, Levua like an ogre had seized her mind and made it a prisoner.
For the first time in her life something came to her heart, terrible as her grief for the loss of Taori, yet even more far searching and taking its bitterness from the remote past as well as the present. It was the homesickness of the atoll-bred islander encompassed by the new world of the high island; of the caged gull taken from the freedom of the wind and the sea.
At Karolin you could see the sun from his rising to his setting, and the stars from sea line to sea line;
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