The fainting girl swallowed it automatically.
Then Felix, stooping down, tried the matches against the box.

They were unfortunately wet, but half an hour's exposure, he knew, on sun-warmed stones, in that hot, tropical air, would soon restore them again.

So he opened the box and laid them carefully out on a flat white slab of coral.
After that, he had time to consider exactly where they were, and what their chances in life, if any, might now amount to.
Pitch dark as it was, he had no difficulty in deciding at once by the general look of things that they had reached a fringing reef, such as he was already familiar with in the Marquesas and elsewhere.

The reef was no doubt circular, and it enclosed within itself a second or central island, divided from it by a shallow lagoon of calm, still water.

He walked some yards inland.