Page:Anderson--Isle of seven moons.djvu/99

87 To record the slow passage of time until that blessed reunion, he named the twelve royal palms that guarded the spring from which he had first drunk when cast on the island, according to the months, cutting on the proper trunk a broad nick each time the sun rose.

"I'm sure a magician," he said to himself, for, with a courage more admirable than his humour, he often fashioned naïve conceits as well as more ponderable weapons for his fight against despair—"with my little knife I've changed a cocoa into a sure-enough date-palm."

Occasionally he even chaffed or cracked boyish jokes with himself and his strange audience, constituting himself a whole minstrel show,—"Mistah Interlocutah," "Endman," "Bones," and "chorus," to the amazement of the agouti, the "gab-birds," as he dubbed the brilliant parrots and macaws, and those beautiful winged creatures of such bright azure he called them "Heaven-birds." Some of them even came to know him, the more trusting responding to his whistle, and he never violated the confidence once given by these furred and feathered waifs, only the wilder serving as game for his primitive weapons.

So his life was made up of two contrasting existences, and his eternal struggle between them—between the oppressive, almost supernatural, spell of the place, the loneliness, and the daily routine and fight for very survival. As the months passed by, he doubled his efforts to keep his sanity by absorption in practical tasks, those absolutely necessary, and others which he was constantly contriving.

The inland mystery of the island he had never penetrated