"To the honour of God Almighty and in despite of the enemy of mankind, Simon Meron, of Lisbon in Portugal, with counsel and help of his faithful friend Simplicius Simplicissimus, a High German, did fashion and here set up this token of our Saviour's sufferings, for Jesus Christ His sake."
Thenceforward we began to live somewhat more religiously than before; and in order to our reverencing and keeping of the Sabbath, I every day, in place of an almanack, cut a notch in a post and on Sundays a cross; and then would we sit together and talk of holy and godly things; and this fashion must I use because I had not yet invented anything to serve me in the stead of ink and paper, by means of which I might set down somewhat in writing to keep count of our life.
And now to end this chapter I must make mention of a strange adventure that did greatly terrify and distress us on the evening after our cook her vanishing; for the first night we perceived it not, because sleep overpowered us at once by reason of fatigue and great weariness. And this was it. We having still before our eyes the thousand snares by which the accursed devil would have wrought our ruin in the form of the Abyssinian, could not sleep, but passed the time in watching, and indeed for the most part in prayer; and so soon as it became a little dark we saw floating around us in the air an innumerable quantity of lights, which gave forth such a bright glow that we could discern the fruit on the trees from the leaves: this we deemed to be another invention of the enemy to torment us, and therefore kept still and quiet, but in the end found 'twas but a kind of firefly or glow-worm, as we call them in Germany, which are generated by a particular kind of rotten wood that is found in this island, and shine so bright that one can well use them in place of a lighted candle; for I have written this book for the most part thus: and if they were as common in Europe, Asia, and Africa as they be here, the candle-sellers would do a poor trade.
Chap. xxii.: FURTHER SEQUEL OF THE ABOVE STORY, AND HOW SIMON MERON LEFT THE ISLAND AND THIS LIFE, AND HOW SIMPLICISSIMUS REMAINED THE SOLE LORD OF THE ISLAND
And now seeing we must perforce remain where we were, we began to order our housekeeping accordingly. So my comrade made out of a black wood that is almost like to iron mattocks and shovels for us both, with the help of which we first dug holes for the three crosses before mentioned, and secondly drew the sea-water into trenches, where, as I had seen at Alexandria in Egypt, it turned into salt; and thirdly we began to make us a cheerful garden; for we deemed that idleness would be for us the beginning of destruction; fourthly, we dug another channel for the brook, into which we could at pleasure turn it off, and so leave the old river-bed dry, and take out as many fish and crayfish as we would with hands and feet dry: fifthly, we found near the said brook a most beautiful potter's clay; and though we had neither lathe nor wheel and, most of all, no borer or other instruments so as to make anything of the kind and so mould for ourselves vessels, and though we had never learned the craft, yet we devised a plan by which we got what we wanted; for having kneaded and prepared the clay as it should be, we made rolls of it of the thickness and length of English tobacco-pipes, and these we stuck one upon another like a snail's shell and formed out of such whatever vessels we would, both great and small, pots and dishes, for cooking and drinking: and when our first baking of these prospered, we had no longer reason to complain of lack of anything; 'tis true we had no bread; but yet plenty of dried fish which we used in its stead. And in time our scheme for getting salt turned out well, so that now we had nothing to complain of but lived like the folk in the golden age of the world: and little by little we learned how with eggs, dried fish, and lemon peel, which two last we ground to a soft meal between two stones, and birds' fat, which we got from the birds called boobies and noddies, to bake savoury cakes in place of bread: likewise did my comrade devise how to draw off the palm-wine very cleverly into great pots and let it stand for a few days till it fermented; and then would he drink of it till he reeled, and this at last he came to do every day, and God knoweth how I dissuaded him therefrom. For he said if 'twas allowed to stand longer 'twould turn to vinegar; in which there was some truth; yet I answered him, he should not at one time draw so much but only enough for our needs; to which he replied that 'twas a sin to despise the gifts of God, and that the palm-trees must have a vein opened at proper times lest they should be choked with their own blood: and so must I give a loose rein to his appetites unless I would be told that I grudged him that of which we had plenty.
And so, as I have said, we lived like the first men in the golden age, when a bountiful heaven produced for them all good things from the earth without labour on their part; but even as in this world there is no life so sweet and happy that is not at times made bitter by the gall of suffering, so happened it with us: for the richer we grew daily in larder and cellar, the more threadbare did our clothes from day to day become, till at last they rotted on our bodies. And 'twas well for us indeed that we thus far had had no winter; no, not the slightest cold; although by this time, when we began to go naked, we had by my notch-calendar spent more than a year and a half on the island, but all the year round 'twas such weather as is wont to be in Europe in May and June, save that about August and a little before it used to rain mighty hard and there were great thunderstorms: moreover from one solstice to another the days did not vary in length more than an hour and a quarter. But although we were alone upon the island, yet would we not go naked like brute beasts, but clothed as became honest Christians of Europe: and had we but had four-footed beasts it had been easy to help ourselves by using their hides for clothing; for lack of which we skinned the birds we took, such as boobies and penguins, and made clothes of this; yet because for want of the needful tools and other material for the purpose we could not dress them so as to last, they became stiff and uneasy and fell away in pieces from our bodies before we were ware of it. 'Tis true the cocoanut-trees bore cotton enough for us, yet could we neither weave nor spin: but my comrade, that had been some years in India, shewed me on the leaves at the very tip a thing like a sharp thorn; which if it be broken off and drawn along the stem of the leaf, as we do with the bean-pods called Faseoli to strip them of their rind, there will remain hanging on the said pointed thorn a string as long as the stem or the leaf is, so that one can use the same for needle and thread too; and this provided me with opportunity to make for us breeches of those leaves and sew them together with the threads of their own growing.
But while we thus lived together, and had so improved our condition that we had no longer any cause to trouble for overwork, waste, want, or calamity, my comrade went on daily tippling at his palm-wine as he had begun, and now had made a habit of it, till at last he so inflamed his lungs and liver that, before I was rightly ware of it, he by his untimely death left me and the island and palm-wine and all. Him did I bury as well as I was able; and as I pondered upon the uncertainty of human life and other the like matters, I wrote for him this epitaph that followeth:
"That I am buried here and not in ocean deep.
Nor in the flames of hell (from which may God us keep!)
The cause was this: three things did for my soul contend:
The first the raging sea: the next the infernal fiend.