“No,” Robin said, with great firmness.
After endless sailing in heaving gray water, we came near land. It would be midafternoon by then. Everything was bleached, brownish, and sandy-looking and smelling a new smell, like a fresh-caught fish. That is the smell of the sea. And the land was not in a solid line as we had thought, but in islands of heaped-up sand, with the true land just as sandy, some way beyond. In between the land and the islands the sand-colored water raced and sucked, while on the outer side of them it was all waves, crashing continually. How Hern got us ashore on the last island, I shall never know. He must be a better boatman than me.
Here was our final island. It was made of crusty sand. Sharp-edged grass grew on it and bent prickly bushes, all twisted in the wind. The wind had dug out holes and hollows in the sand. We found the largest hollow, facing back to the land we had come from—from there it looked like blue mountains—and we made a camp, dragging the boat up to give Robin some shelter. Down below was a place where all the things in that part of the flood were hurled on the island and pinned there by the racing water.
“Ugh!” said Duck when he saw it.
There were dead hens, drowned rats, cabbage stalks—many horrid remains—but there was wood and waterweed, too. We made a good fire from it. We wrapped Robin in rugcoats and blankets, and she still shivered. We offered her food.
“I couldn’t!” she said. “Just water.”
“Water!” I said. Hern and I looked at one another. There was a drop in the jar, but there was no water on the island. I went down to the gray flood and tasted it. The River here mingles with the sea, and the sea is salt. I do not know where the salt comes from, but the sea is not fit to drink.
“What do we do now?” I whispered.
“We can’t take the boat,” Hern whispered back. “She’d be cold without it, and the current’s terrible. I can’t see any sign of a stream either.”
We gazed at the low sandy land helplessly. Naturally Duck chose that moment to say in a loud voice, “I’m dreadfully thirsty!”
“Shut up!” we both said.
But there was Robin heaving herself up on one arm, with rugs dropping from her and her teeth chattering in her blue-gray mouth. “Is the water gone? I’ll go and get—”
“You lie down,” I said, glaring at Duck. “I’m just going to get some.” I took the water jar and stumped off up the sandy hill, with no idea what I was going to do. I was really depressed. When I come to think of it, I find wide-open spaces always make me unhappy. It was the same with the lake. I have been brought up where the land is hilly and close. Here it was as if the land had not been properly made. Everything was flat and sand gray or River gray and hung with peculiar purple-gray mist. You could not see very far, even if there was anything to see. The only thing my eye could cling to was the wide channel of rushing gray water between me and the shore, and I did not see myself getting across that.
All the same, I stumped down toward the channel. I had some notion that the water would not be salty there. And as I went, I thought I heard Duck screaming from the rushing channel. It was the way he screams when he is really frightened. “Help!” he screamed.
I remember I dropped the jar and came down to the water like a plow in a furrow of dry sand. It was not Duck. It was a much smaller child. He was in the channel, thrashing about in the racing muddy water and traveling past in it as fast as I could walk, screaming all the while. There was a horrid while when I seemed to stand there staring. But I think I took my shoes off and got out of my rugcoat while I stared.
“Keep swimming!” I screamed at the child. “Swim for your life!” He heard me. A fountain of water went up from his arms and legs, but I could see he had no idea how to swim. I plowed down into the water. I remember squawking. It was far colder than the River is by Shelling, and the bottom was no bottom at all. It was just sinking stuff. You had to swim or sink in the mud. I swam madly. I had never swum in a flood before. My father forbade it. But I think, even that first night of the flood, the current was not as strong as the one in that race. My legs were towed sideways before I was afloat. No wonder the child screamed so. I swam with my whole strength, and yet I could not seem to cross that narrow channel.
I think I caught up with that drowning child simply from being heavier. Since I was trying to go forward, I was carried to him on a slant. That is, I was carried to where I had last seen him. He had gone down a second time by then. I thought he was drowned, and I was thinking of saving myself when a heavy sand-colored head bobbed up just by my fingers. I wound my hand in the hair and pulled.
Then it was all panic. The child’s terror got into me, too. We both thrashed and screamed and sank. I roared at him to be quiet, and he shrilled at me to let go, and to get him out, and called me names. I called him a crab-faced idiot and fought him until the water was in spouts round us. While we struggled, the current dragged us along against the land, and I saw we were traveling out toward the sea. I put my hand against the bank to stop us. And my hand stuck in the land, up to my elbow. I dream of that still. The bank was as soft as curd cheese. Somehow, I got us out onto it, out of the sucking waters, and the cheeselike land sucked us down instead. I floundered through it, dragging that poor child by his hair. I came to hard sand under my elbows, coarse as sugar, and I cried with relief.
The child cried, too, on hands and knees, with water pouring out of his mouth and hair. His face was red and blue in patches, and his bare feet and legs were raw purple. He was wearing a silly kind of tunic and drawers which must have been cold even when he was dry. He shivered, and I shook.
“Shut up,” I said. “You’re all right now.” He looked at me as if it was all my fault. “You’re saved,” I said. “By me. You’re looking at the person who pulled you out. How did you fall in, anyway?” He seemed vague about that. He muttered something. “I see,” I said. “You were fooling about and you slipped. Where do you live?”
He gave me a shifty look. I think he said, “I didn’t say that,” but he still didn’t speak properly.
“Then what did you say?” I said.
“I said some natives pushed me in.” He said it very loudly and clearly, so there was no mistake, and he gave me the defiant look people do when they are lying.
“Liar,” I said, but I said it without thinking. The wretched child was a Heathen. My wet hair was the same sand color as his, and I knew his would dry fair, too. I thought that if I had let him drown, it would have been revenge for my father at least, but what had my father to do with him? I could not have stood on the island and let him drown. “You’d better go home and get into dry clothes,” I said. “Where can I find s
ome water?”
He gave me another sideways look and pointed to the racing channel behind us.
“Very funny!” I said. “Do you think I’m a fool?” He shook his head swiftly. “Water to drink,” I said. “I was looking for some when I heard you yelling.”
He looked at me from the corners of his eyes, very carefully. Maybe he knew I was not a Heathen. Something made him afraid and respectful of me. “There’s water up here,” he said, and jerked his shivering chin to the sandy hill above us.
“Show me,” I said.
Both shivering hugely, we marched up and inland, over one sandy hump and round another. The wind was cruel. And there, running between two more sandhumps, was a peculiar little stream, very flat and shallow. It came out of the sand about a foot above my head and, instead of flowing down into the River, simply buried itself in the sand and vanished, just beside my mauve feet. I tasted it, and it was good. “Thanks,” I said. “Now you’ve shown me, you can go home, but mind you tell them the truth about what happened. If you spin them that story about the natives pushing you in, I shall know at once, and I shall come and get you.” I did not see why he should blame our people for his own silliness.