They came in on a dying wind, the outlying reefs creaming to the swell¹ and the great high island opening its cañons and mountain glades² as they drew towards it pursued by the chanting gulls⁴.  
Le Moan, who had never seen a high island or only the vision of Palm Tree uplifted by mirage⁵, stood with her eyes fixed⁶ on the multitude of the trees. Palms, breadfruit, tree ferns, aoas, sandalwood groves⁷, trees mounting towards the skies, reaching ever upwards⁸, changing in form and misted by the smoke of torrents¹⁰.
 
Here there was no freedom, the great spaces of the sea had vanished, Levua like an ogre had seized her mind and made it a prisoner.
 
For the first time in her life something came to her heart, terrible as her grief for the loss of Taori, yet even more far searching and taking its bitterness from the remote past as well as the present. It was the homesickness of the atoll-bred islander encompassed¹² by the new world of the high island; of the caged gull³ taken from the freedom of the wind and the sea.
 
At Karolin you could see the sun from his rising to his setting, and the stars from sea line to sea line; the reef rose nowhere to more than twice the height of a man, the sea was a glittering plain of freedom and a sound and a scent¹³.
 
Worse even than the monstrous¹⁴ height of Levua, its strange cañons and gloomy woods, was the scent of the foliage¹⁵, cossi and vanilla¹⁶ and sandalwood, unknown flowers, unknown plants, all mixed with the smell of earth and breathing from the glasshouse atmosphere of the groves.
 
An extraordinary thing was the way in which the forms and perfumes of Levua permeated¹⁷ the Kermadec itself, so that, turning her eyes away from the land, the deck of the schooner¹⁸, the rails, masts and spars, all seemed hostile to her as the land itself. Sru alone gave her comfort as she watched him superintending the fellows busy with the anchor—Sru, who had promised that she would return.
 
The anchor fell in twelve-fathom water and as the rumble-tumble of the anchor chain came back in echoes from the moist-throated woods, a boat put out from the beach. It was Sanders the white trader, the man who lived here alone year in, year out, taking toll¹¹ of the sandalwood trees, paying the natives for their labour in trade goods; cut off from the world, without books, without friends, and with no interest beyond the zone of sea encircling the island, except the interest of his steadily¹⁹ accumulating money in the hands of his agents&............