They stood upright and perfectly
still, but for the slight movement of their heads from right to left and
back again as they swept their gaze through the grey emptiness of the
waters where, about two miles distant, the hull of the yacht loomed up
to seaward, black and shapeless, against the wan sky.
The two figures looked beyond without exchanging as much as a murmur.
The taller of the two grounded, at arm's length, the stock of a gun with
a long barrel; the hair of the other fell down to its waist; and, near
by, the leaves of creepers drooping from the summit of the steep rock
stirred no more than the festooned stone. The faint light, disclosing
here and there a gleam of white sandbanks and the blurred hummocks of
islets scattered within the gloom of the coast, the profound silence,
the vast stillness all round, accentuated the loneliness of the two
human beings who, urged by a sleepless hope, had risen thus, at break of
day, to look afar upon the veiled face of the sea.
"Nothing!" said the man with a sigh, and as if awakening from a long
period of musing.
He was clad in a jacket of coarse blue cotton, of the kind a poor
fisherman might own, and he wore it wide open on a muscular chest the
colour and smoothness of bronze. From the twist of threadbare sarong
wound tightly on the hips protruded outward to the left the ivory hilt,
ringed with six bands of gold, of a weapon that would not have disgraced
a ruler.
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