She saw a stealthy, distant flash. Her first thought was lightning, since the rising swell must be coming from a squall. Not knowing north from south or east from west, confused by the aimless sea, she had no way of knowing where the storm was. Upwind and approaching, she hoped. If the full strength of a tropical squall swept down on her, she was not sure she could survive its seas, or the torrents of rain it would bring, but she would take her chances for the feel of fresh water on her lips.

She kept her eyes open. In a little while she saw the lightning again, one single flash of it.

Lightning? Or the strobe?

She thought she remembered seeing the strobe before dawn, a century ago, just after it happened.

Or had she? It didn’t matter.

It could be a strobe, their own light in the water, or a strobe light from some other boat, called in from Papeete, and helping him search.

Tossing in rising seas, there was no way to judge the beat. But the next time she saw the flash, she began to swim toward it.

She found no way to keep her direction. She did not see it again and after a while she quit.

If it was the strobe, it would somehow just have to find her. He could not expect her to find it, in the rising seas.

Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4

He stood at the helm as they cut close to the eastern tip of Nuku Hiva, sailing under the spire of Cape Martin. The boat seemed very small, dwarfed by cliffs that seemed ready to topple on them. After a month at sea, where the highest point was the crest of a following wave, the crags and pinnacles of Nuku Hiva overpowered him.

He called Lindy topside again and again, to show her formations he found beautiful. He spotted the gorge that Melville’s hero, and perhaps Melville himself, had crossed escaping from the frying-pan of the whaler Dolly to the fire of the Vale of Typee. Lindy seemed more interested in cleaning the boat for the customs officers they expected.

With the Sailing Directions lying opened on the deckhouse, he found the large white cross it promised, formed in the strata of the mountainside, and Arch Point, and the Sentinels. They passed through the steep entrance of Taio Hae Bay, seat of Marquesan civilization, and were back in the world of people.

“Shit!” murmured Mitch. “Lindy?”

Lindy popped topside. She looked around. Seeing at first only that the dark green mountainsides cradled a bright green bay, and that the crags leading to the water shone with moss, she nodded appreciatively. After the long passage, green was twice as green and any land at all had beauty, and all the colors you never saw at sea would come alive. For Mitch it evoked childhood, the first glimpse of tints never seen. “Beautiful,” Lindy breathed.

“Yeah, but look ahead,” he growled.