The candle flickered a little; and she shuddered. She'd actually succeeded in spooking herself. She picked the candle up and carried it through to the kitchen, setting it down beside the stove while she refilled the kettle. There was a scuttling in the shadowy roof above her head, and she looked up to see a large gecko-the largest she'd seen either in or around the house-scuttling across the wooden slats of the ceiling. It seemed to sense her gaze, because it froze in its tracks and remained frozen until she looked away. Only then did she hear its scrabblings resume. When she looked up again it had gone.

She went back to refilling the kettle, but in the time it had taken her to look up and see the gecko her desire for tea had disappeared. She put the kettle back on the stove, unfilled, and picking up the candle, she went to bed. She started to undress, but only got as far as taking off her sandals and jeans. Then she slipped under the covers, and fell asleep to the accompaniment of the rain.

She was woken by an impatient rapping on the bedroom door. Then a voice, calling to her: "Rachel? Are you in there?"

She sat up, the dream she'd woken from-something about Boston, and diamonds buried in the snow on New-bury Street-lingering for a moment. "Who is it?"

"It's Niolopua. Nobody answered the front door so I came in."

"Is there a problem?" She looked out of the window. It was day; the sky was a brilliant blue.

"You have to get up," Niolopua said, his voice urgent. "There's been a wreck. And I think maybe it's his boat."

She got up out of bed, and wandered across the room, still not fully comprehending what she was being told. There was Niolopua, spattered with red-brown mud. "The Samarkand," he said to her. "Galilee's boat. It's been washed up on the beach." She looked back toward the window. "Not here," Niolopua went on. "Down at the other end of the island. On the Napali coast."

"Are you sure it's his?"

Niolopua nodded. "As sure as I can be," he said.

Her heart was suddenly racing.

"And him? What about him?"

"There's no sign of him," Niolopua said. "At least there wasn't an hour ago, when I was down there."

"Let me just get some clothes on," she said. "And I'll be with you."

"Have you got any boots?" he said.

"No. Why?"

"Because it's hard to get to where we're going. You have to climb."

"I'll climb," she said, "boots or no boots."

The effects of the storm were to be seen everywhere. The highway south was still awash with bright orange runoff water, the heavier streams of which carried a freight of debris: branches, boards, drowned poultry, even a few small trees. Thankfully, there were very few other vehicles on the road at this early hour-it was still only seven-and Niolopua negotiated both streams and debris with confidence.

While he drove he offered Rachel a short explanation of where they were going. The Napali coast was the most dangerous and beautiful portion of the island, he explained. Here the cliffs rose out of the sea, the beaches and caves at their feet hard to reach except from the sea. Rachel was familiar with images of the coast from a brochure she'd glanced at on the short flight from Honolulu: one of the most popular tourist trips was a helicopter flight over the cliffs, and the narrow, lush valleys between the cliffs, which could only be reached by those foolhardy enough to trek down from the summits. There were rewards for those who dared such journeys-waterfalls of spectacular scale, and dense, virgin jungle-but the trip wasn't to be taken lightly. According to local legend some of the valleys were so hard to reach that until recent times small communities had existed there, completely isolated from the rest of the island.

"The beach we're going to can be reached along the foot of the cliffs," Niolopua told her. "It's maybe a mile from where the road stops."

"How did you find out about the wreck?"

"I was there during the storm. I don't know why I went. I just knew I had to be there." He glanced over at her. "I guess maybe he was calling for me."

Rachel put her hand up to her face; tears suddenly threatened. The thought of Galilee out in the dark water-

"Do you still hear him?" she said softly.

Niolopua shook his head, and his own tears ran freely. "But that doesn't mean anything," he said without much real conviction. "He knows the sea. Nobody knows it better. After all these years…"

"But if the boat sank-"

"Then we have to hope the tide brought him in."

Rachel remembered suddenly the tales of the shark lord, who sometimes guided shipwrecked sailors back to land, and sometimes, for his own unfathomable reasons, devoured them, and how Galilee had thrown their dinner into the water that night, as an offering, which she'd thought sweetly absurd at the time. Now she was grateful he'd done so. The world she'd been raised in had no room for shark gods, nor the efficacy of food thrown on water; but of late she'd come to understand how narrow that vision was. There were forces out there, beyond the limits of her wits or education, which could not be contained by simple commandments. Things that lived their own, wild life, unwitnessed, unbounded. Galilee knew them because he was in some measure of them.

That was both her present fear and her present hope. If he felt he belonged to that other life too much, might he not have decided to give himself over to it? To lose himself in that boundless place? If so, she would never find him again. He was gone where she could never go. If, on the other hand, his professions of love had been real-if he'd meant what he said when he talked of all that wasted time, when he should have been looking for her-perhaps the very powers that would claim him if he chose were presently her allies, and the offering he'd made, and the shark god for whom it was intended, had been part of the story that would return him to her.

The signs of storm damage got worse once they were the other side of Poi'pu; the road was nearly impassable in several places, where the force of the rainwater had washed down large rocks. And once they got onto the beach road, which hugged the base of the cliffs, matters became worse still. The road was little more than a winding, rutted track, which was now largely reduced to red mud. Even driving cautiously, Niolopua several times lost momentary control of the vehicle, as its slickened wheels lost their grip.

Out to the left of the track, on the other side of a ragged band of black rocks, was the shore: and here, more than any other place along their route, was the most eloquent evidence of the storm's power. The sand was strewn with debris from the margin of the rocks to the water's edge, and the waves themselves dyed with the run-off mud. It was like a scene from a dream-the sky cerulean, the sea scarlet, the bright sand littered with dark, sodden timbers. In other circumstances she might have thought it beautiful. But all she saw now was debris and blood-red water: it enchanted her not at all.

"Here's where the climbing starts," Niolopua announced.

She took her eyes from the shore and looked ahead. The muddy track ended a few yards from them, where the cliff face jutted out into the sea; a spit of rock against which the ruddied waves rushed and broke.

"The beach we're headed for is on the other side."

"I'm ready," Rachel said, and got out of the car.

The air, for all the din and motion of the sea, was curiously still close to the cliff. Almost clammy, in fact. After just a minute or so she was sweating, and once they began to clamber over the rocks her head started to throb. Niolopua had left his sandals at the car, and was climbing barefoot, making little concession to the fact that Rachel was a neophyte at this. Only when the route became particularly dangerous did he glance back at her, and once or twice offered a hand up when the rock became steep or slick. In order to avoid having to climb over boulders that were virtually unscalable he led them out onto the spit of rock.