|
Walter E. Traprock - The Cruise of the Kawa
That was the sort Triplett was. He'd done his trick and there was an end of it. The next day he had
William Henry Thomas busy re-rigging the Kawa. William Henry Thomas, by the way, insisted on living
on board in happy but unholy wedlock, and Whinney, Swank and I felt that it was better so. Somehow
we considered him the village scandal.
During these peaceful days I wrote a great deal, posting up my diary as far as we had gone and jotting
down a lot of valuable material. Swank had got his impediments off the boat and began daubing
furiously, landscapes, seascapes, monotypes, ideographs, everything. Most of them were hideously
funny, but he did one thing, - inspired by love, I suppose - a portrait of his wife that was a hummer. She
was a lovely little thing with a lovely name, Lupoba-Tilaana, "Mist-on-the-Mountain."
"Swank," I said, "that's a ten-strike. The mountain is a little out of focus but the mist is immense!"
He squirted me with yellow ochre.
Whinney was in his element. Ornithology, botany, ethulology, he took them all on single-handed.
"Listen to that," he said to me one night as we were strolling back from a friendly game of
Kahooti with Baahaabaa and some of our friends.
I listened. It was the most unearthly and at the same time the most beautiful bird-song I have ever heard.
"What is it?" I asked, as the cry resounded again, a piercing screech of pain ending in a long yowl of joy.
"It is the motherhood cry of the fatu-liva," he said. "She has just laid an egg."
"But why the note of suffering?" I queried.
"The eggs of the fatu-liva are square," said Whinney, and I was silenced.
Motherhood is indeed the great mystery. Little did I realize that night how much I was to owe to the
fatu-liva and her strange maternal gift which saved my life in one of the weirdest adventures that has
ever befallen mortal man.
It was a placid day on the sea and Kippy and I were returning from a ten-mile swim to a neighboring
island whither I had been taken to be shown off to some relatives.
"Wak-wak," I had said when she first proposed the expedition, but she had laughed gaily and
nodded her head to indicate that there was not the slightest danger, and, shamed into it, we had set forth
and made an excellent crossing.
On the return trip, midway between the two islands, I was floating lazily, supported by a girdle of
inflated dew-fish bladders and towed by Kippy. She had propped over my head her verdant
taa-taa without which the natives never swim for fear of the tropical sun, and I think I must have
dozed off for I was suddenly roused by a hoarse Klaxon-bellow "Kaaraschaa-gha!" which told me all too
plainly that I was in the most hideous peril.
"Wak-wak!" I barked, and all my past life began to unfold before me.
It was a horrid sight - the wak-wak, I mean. He was swimming on the surface, and at ten feet I
saw his great jaws open, lined with row upon row of teeth that stretched back into his interior as far as
|
