It was a night of tempest; Hurakan, the god of the Antilles, reigned with unwitnessed fury. The priests spoke of a new deluge and of the legendary gourd in which were the ocean and the sea-monsters, which, one day, broke and inundated the earth, and, terrified, they ascended to the summit of their temple-pyramid and took refuge in the shadow of their gods of stone, which trembled on their pedestals. The people of the island, overwhelmed with terror, forgot Starei. All the night was passed in prayer and sacrifice; but at daybreak, they ran, infatuated, to where the song of the maiden called them.
Starei was on the shore, seated on the trunk of one of the thousands of palm trees, which the wind had uprooted and thrown upon the sand; upon her knees rested the head of a white man, who appeared to be a corpse. The beauty of that face was sweet and manly at once and the just appearing beard indicated the youthfulness of the man, whom Starei devoured with eyes bathed in tears.
“Whoever saves him,” she exclaimed, “shall be my husband, my life companion.”
“He is dead,” solemnly replied an aged priest.
“He lives,” cried a man, opening his way through the crowd.
The astonished Indians fell away from him; never had they seen so strange a being among them. He was tall and strong; his hair, the color of corn-silk, rose rigidly above his broad and bronzed forehead and dividing into two masses fell thick and straight upon his shoulders; his eyebrows were two delicate red lines, which joined at the root of his aquiline nose; his mouth, of the purple hue of Campeche wood, bent upward at the tips, in a sensual and cruel arch. The oval of his face, unbroken by even a