He slept little that night, and welcomed the dawn less eagerly than he had the day before. He felt a desire to be idle, a dreamy indifference creeping over him.
“It’s the tropics,” he told himself. “Everyone slows up down here. The heat and the humidity makes you want to drag your feet, to loaf, to sit and dream. But I must not! I must act! Act! Now!”
At that he went at the task of building a raft and before noon it was completed.
A crude affair it was, to be sure. Dry logs of different lengths; there was no axe for hewing them. All these, bound clumsily together with tough tie-tie vine, made up the raft that eventually carried Johnny away from the great rocks and swiftly down the river. As far as he could see ahead, branches formed a perfect arch over the water, and at places hung so low that it was necessary for him to lie flat down to avoid being dragged off into the water.
He bade farewell to his rocky home with no regrets, but with some misgivings after all. He was to drift off into the unknown. What awaited him there? Who could tell?
“It—why, it’s like death,” he thought.
With this mood there drifted into his mind a bit of verse:
“I know not where His islands lift
Their fronded palms in air,
I only know I cannot drift