CHAPTER XXVII
THE ISLAND
A few miles in length, fewer in breadth, the island lay in a sub-tropic clime. During its winter all the air was neither cold nor hot, but of a happy in-between and suave perfection. Its summer brought strong heat and at times wild tempests of rain and wind, thunder and lightning. For the most part the land rose but a little way above the sea, a shallow soil with a coral base. Out of this mould sprang a forest of eternal greenness. Once there had been a number of villages, each in its small clearing, but one by one they had been destroyed and the clearings had gone back to the forest.
This one larger village had outlasted. Dwindling year by year, before it, at no great term, death and absorption, when all the island would be desert, it yet showed a number of irregularly placed, circular huts woven of branch and reed and thatched with palm. To this village Joan and Aderhold were swept together with the escaped slaves, the returned exiles. Besides the tenanted huts there were others from which the last of the occupants had died, but which were not yet fallen to the earth and become a part of the forest floor. Joan and Aderhold were given one of these abodes standing under tamarind and palm, and here food was brought them. All the village was in commotion, restless and excited, for seldom and most seldom in all the years did any one come back.... When night fell there ensued feasting and revelry, a strange picture-dance, performed by men and women, long recitatives wherein some sonorous voice told of this people’s woes, of their palmy days, and how the white men came in the time of their fathers, and they took them for gods and they proved themselves not so—not gods but devils! The torrent expression of wrongs flowed on. Sharp cries and wailings came from the dusky figures seated in an ellipse about the narrator. Eyes looked angrily across to where the white man and woman sat and watched.
Among the Indians of the sailboat had been an old man with a finer, more intelligent face than was to be found among his fellows. It was he, principally, who had talked with the castaways. Now, on land, he constituted himself their advocate and protector. He had been, it seemed, the chief man of a vanished village, and this present village, being without a strong man, looked to him with deference. Now he rose and spoke and the threatening looks faded. These Indians were not of a fierce and cruel temper—and the two strangers were not Spanish, but came from a tribe whom the Spanish fought.... Danger to the two from their hosts or captors passed away.
The night went by in noise and feasting. With the dawn the village sank into sleep. The home-coming ones needed, after long adventure and strain, rest and repose, while the friends and kindred at home were used to swift and calm descendings to immobility and profound sleep. Within and without the tent-like huts lay the dusky, well-shaped forms, almost bare, still as death, lying as though they had been shot down by invisible arrows. The projecting palm thatch, the overhanging, thick foliage, kept out the fierce sun, made a green and brown gloom.
Joan and Aderhold slept, too. For them the immediate need was health again, strength again, energy in which to base the wonderful flower of life. They lay like children near each other, and slept the livelong day. When, in the last bright light, they waked, there was cassava bread, and tropic fruit and water from a neighbouring spring. They ate and drank and talked a little, about indifferent things—only nothing now was indifferent, but rich and significant. But it was as though they would hold away from them for a little while their deeper bliss; would not speak of that until they could speak in health, with glow and vigour and beauty and power! About them the village half waked, half slept. They heard women’s and children’s voices, but dreamily. The woods, that had been very still during the heat of the day, were now as murmurous as rapids of a stream. All manner of winged life made a continuous sound. Joan and Aderhold rested their heads again upon the woven palm mat and slept the deep night through.
With the second morning the Indian village resumed its normal process of existing. The women practised a kind of embryonic agriculture. The men hunted not at all, though they trapped birds; but they fished, pushing out into the turquoise sea in canoes hollowed from tree-trunks. The women plaited baskets, and cut and dried gourds large and small. They had cotton, and they knew how to weave it into the scant clothing needed in such a clime. They scraped the cassava root into meal and made bread, and gathered and brought in the staple fruits. In the village were to be found in some slight number and variety matters not of savage make. During the more than a hundred years since the great Genoese and his Spanish sailors had come upon this group, such things had drifted here, as it were, upon the tide and the winds. Thus there were to be seen several cutlasses and daggers, together with a rusted Andrea Ferrara, a great iron pot, and smaller utensils, a sea-chest, a broken compass, a Spanish short mantle and hat and feather, some piece of furnishing from a church, a drinking-cup, a length of iron chain. But nothing had been left, or had been traded for with Indians of other villages, for a long, long time. The islands were desert and forgotten ... except that now of late sea-robbers and pirates were, for that very reason, taking as anchorage, refuges, and bases of operation, the intricate channels and well-concealed harbours. But no pirate ship had found as yet this inward-lying island. It rested upon the sea as if forgotten or lost or inaccessible, and its fading people knew at least a still and not ungentle autumn.
The old Indian came this morning to visit Aderhold and Joan. Others had been before him; they had held, perforce, a kind of levee. The children were not more curious, nor simpler in their expression of curiosity, than were the men and women. They had no language in common with the castaways but that of gesture, but they made this answer. The torn, sun-faded clothing of the two, the fineness and tint of their hair, the colour of their skin, Joan’s grey eyes, the absurd sound of their speech at which the Indians laughed heartily—every physical trait was of interest. But as with children attention went little further than that and was quick to flag. The levee dispersed.