They found the pass, with the village at its head, another hour beyond. He had worked out the tides from the phase of the moon. There should be a slack in another half hour, maybe. The Sailing Directions implied that here, one never knew. “Let’s shoot the pass,” he decided.

She begged him to stand off tonight, and try at slack tomorrow, hoping that they would drift away from the island and never see it again.

“No, honey,” he said. “New moon, too dark. If the current set us out, we’d lose the island, and if it set us in, we’d lose the boat.”

It answered her question but somehow avoided the real one, which was why the hell they were there anyway. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask it, but she did not want to add further to his problems, so she climbed to her appointed station on the yardarm.

A long herringbone rip was racing far to sea. It was the six-knot ebb, she was sure, at its ebbingest. She pointed to it, longing to ride it away from the island into open water. He merely glanced at it and shrugged.

From the spreader, she gaped down at the pass. At its mouth ran great seas. They had been unhindered, probably, since the Chilean coast five thousand miles to the east. Now, suddenly frustrated, they were trying to pound the obstacle to dust. Combers shouldered over the reefs in a deep, throbbing rhythm. Only a narrow notch in the coral seemed free of the rolling surf, and that was wrinkled with outgoing tide.

Using the exaggerated, slow-motion signals they had practiced at home, she sliced her hand toward the center of the notch, afraid that she was raising the curtain on a drama she had no desire to act in. He headed in. They began to pitch in the swell as they nosed into shallower water. The motion caught her unaware and almost flung her off the yardarm. If they grounded, she thought suddenly, she would be hurled from the mast like a boulder from a catapult.

The mouth of the pass seemed more like ten yards wide than the eighty yards the Sailing Directions had promised, but the pass itself was easily as long and snaky as advertised. Through binoculars, she inspected the little village and red-roofed church which nosed the channel on the left. It offered the promise of human companionship if they struck, but not much else. And it seemed deserted now. In the lull between the cannon-salvos of the surf behind her, she caught voices raised in a hymn. Church services explained the empty coral street.

Maybe the villagers had gathered to help them through the pass in the only way they could, or perhaps to warm up for a requiem.