Coughing and struggling, she massaged the muscle. It finally eased. She lay back, exhausted. She was afraid that if she moved the cramp would return. When she felt better, she carefully reoriented herself and faced the Southern Cross.

She craned, waiting. Finally she saw the flash once more.

Cramps or not, while the flash drew her on, she had better not stop swimming.

She began to move again.

Mitch awakened from his nap to find Louie strutting the deck and Tahiti dead ahead, all purples and hazy greens, under a broil of cumulus. Moorea rose even more grandly off the starboard bow. A plume of cloud trailed from Tahiti’s Mont Oroheana, seven thousand feet high. Below it lay Venus Point, where Wallis and Cook had landed.

He caught a scent of jasmine and the heavy smell of copra. He also caught a whiff of smog. For Tahiti, you were always 100 years too late, or fifty years, or twenty. Even Cook had complained on his second voyage at the degradation of the noble savages he had corrupted on his first. Bligh, Melville, Slocum, and Jack London had bitched, too. Tahiti was never like it used to be.

In the loom of peaks looking down on a flat blazing harbor, they drew close to the entrance to Papeete Pass. A black bell-buoy clanged at the channel. After Takarava, the clearance seemed immense. They shot under sail toward the notch in the sawtooth coral ledges, astern of a giant U.S. tanker.

As they entered the slot, a Pan Am jet labored up from a runway to starboard. Louie gaped and forgot the wheel, slewing them to port toward an underwater curb. Mitch grabbed the helm and straightened them out.

The jet, seen head-on, seemed to pause to gather strength. Then, climbing suddenly, it roared overhead in a gut-shaking crescendo. Louie grinned excitedly. When he saw Mitch looking at him, he composed his face.

Eh bien, he yawned. If his new school did not suit him, he might take a plane to Bora Bora to see his father, who was un pilot, and who flew such aircraft.

But un pilote, Mitch pressed him, surely only of boats, not airplanes?

Boats and airplanes, Louie insisted. He scanned the harbor, spotted a church by the beach, and suggested anchoring well out, off the white église, where they would be safe from thieves.

Mitch laughed and began to look for a slot in the long line of yachts, tied stern-to, downtown.