# The Isle of Seven Moons/Chapter 10

CHAPTER X
THE ISLE OF GREEN STAIRWAYS
After a refreshing but cautious draught, the shipwrecked sailor tumbled on a clump of fern under a colonnade of royal palms, and fell asleep. The sun had been within two hours of the Zenith when he drifted away into that deep unconsciousness. It was but two hours from its own resting-place when he awoke, to the rapid alarum of a voluble parrot, whose plumage, as seen through the palm-leaves above him, was a splashing design in cubist planes of scarlet, indigo, and green.
It isn't the first days of isolation, any more than the period immediately following a bereavement, in which the full weight of loneliness is felt, and the boy, on arising, felt strangely refreshed, and yet incomprehensively light of head.
Nor was it so much the hunger and exposure—he was inured to these—as the atmosphere of the place itself. It had a singular clarity—the pristine purity of spring-waters or dews of Eden transmuted into ozone, while still retaining the soft-hued, dream-commingled drowsiness of some potent drug. It was as though this opiate quality which tinctured every breath he drew, every space the eye dwelt on, had been compounded of the myriad hues of the vernal wilder​ness that fronted him,—a wavering, softly-shimmering kaleidoscope of tree and vine and flower, set in tremulous motion by the most wooing of breezes. Line or curve he could not distinguish, only blurred masses of form and colour. In all that green paradise the parrot's shriek was the only concrete thing.
He turned his back upon it, to meet the more clearly-cut curve of a white, coral-flushed shore, and suddenly the vague spell of the place assumed the sharper proportions of hunger.
A green, checker-backed turtle basked on the beach. A swift somersault, and it lay flapping ludicrously on its back. Innumerable crayfish, too, wriggled their prankish tentacles in the water. The flesh might have been eaten raw in extremity, and a three days fast could fairly be considered that, but first he took stock of his equipment.
A search in his pockets revealed a clasp-knife, almost soldered fast by rust, and the lens of a broken glass, which fortunately he had stowed away for safe-keeping, the day before the wreck.
With the latter he stole a little of the sun's flame, concentrating it on a heap of leaves and dried twigs. Soon a fire flagged its rosy invitation to the solitary banquet.
On the following day he added to this meagre menu with the aid of a crude but efficient bow, made of resilient vines and boughs, a sharp stone serving for the arrow-head. The island abounded in "agouti," little animals resembling prairie-dogs in size and shape, and their flesh he found to be not entirely unpalatable. The leaves of the wild plantain, too, were edible. A foray farther into the heart of the mysterious ​wilderness produced tropical fruits; and on the rougher west coast of the island was a rendezvous of sea-birds which added new delicacies to the lost sailor's larder.
Other tools he contrived,—a spade from a flat stone, roughly sharpened by chipping it with another, then set in a cleft bamboo reed, and bound with tough vines; a hammer similarly fabricated; and an axe of disappointing dulness.
Fortunately, long handling of ropes rendered his hands proof against blisters, and on the thirtieth day, so busily did he work, the house-warming of a little hut was celebrated. Save for the jabber of the parrot and the scream of some harsh macaw, it was a very silent occasion. There was only one guest, and she never spoke. Yet the boy was sure the place echoed to her silent laughter. The day was to come, perhaps, when it would only mock him, but now he could hear its lilt pleasantly everywhere,—in the breeze ruffling the palm-fronds, the very silver break of the waves on the beach, and its overtones always in the bubbling of the spring.
The hut had one room, quite sufficient for his needs. His cooking was done on hollowed stones in the open. Sweet-fern and palm-leaves furnished his bedding. Yet he ate plentifully and slept soundly, though all too drowsily, for some time at least. On his square shoulders was set a very level head, and on one thing he was stoutly determined,—he would not let the loneliness, the overcompelling mystery, "get his nerve," as hour by hour they threatened. Some day he would see Sally again. Either he would get to her, or she would come to him. Over and over he said it to himself.
​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—he almost feared it but now that the building of the hut, the manufacture of his weapons, and the stocking of his larder, had secured shelter and sustenance, he was resolved to conquer that dread. So, immediately after the house-warming, he started a tour of exploration, noting his discoveries on a rough chart made of bark from the widest girthed tree he could strip. Some human habitation he might find, although he doubted that, and perhaps the charting of the place in actual visual lines would give tangible form to its haunting vagueness, dispel the mystery, which for all its loveliness he felt to be unholy and ominous.
"The Two Horns," as he called the capes encircling the bay, he first traced on the map. Then because of the many hues shimmering in the waters between them, he carved the letters "Rainbow Bay," although he was tempted to change the name to one more fanciful when he gazed down through the pellucid depths at the odd sea forms and quaint sea fauna, lying still at the bottom or crawling lumberingly away.
Little sea-horses like animated chessmen floated through the waters, their heads held high, and seemingly propelled by no motive power but the buoyancy of their own mettle; and grotesque toad-fish; and warted creatures; and ludicrously misshapen things with toothed claws of vermilion; and angel-fish with mouths whose hideousness was swathed in scarflike fins of an infinitely delicate hue and texture. Each tint a poem; each fin a flame that water could not quench; each claw a most prodigious joke! The little jokes of God, as he had once told Sally—so long ago it seemed. ​The aquarium, fathoms deep yet crystal-clear, was a vast depository of them, the beauty, the humour, the fancies, the wondrous figments of the imagination of the Almighty. One had but to look down into the waters to realize an infinite variety which far outranged the vengefulness or mercy, the two lone attributes with which past ages have credited Him.
The island itself he christened "The Island of Green Stairways," a happy title, suggested by the view from the bay, looking upward and to the South. From the pink and white shore, it rose in a beautiful succession of table-lands covered with rich foliage of varying shades, that looked for all the world like green terraces or stairways designed for some giant's ascent to "Cone Mountain," a height of some two thousand feet, sometimes blue as smoke from a woodfire in the forest, at others tinted the darker hue of a swallow's wings. Yet even here, on the unencumbered shore, outside of the bewildering green wildwood inland, as his eye followed palm coronal, and plumed terrace after plumed terrace, to the mountain, the same sense of unreality held. The perspectives were bewildering, like those in the vistas of Versailles, now limned as on a vertical canvas suspended near one's eyes, again as though lengthened by a camera lens to poetic distances.
However, in infinite attention to practical detail lay salvation, and he returned to the shoreline again, curving around it until he reached the more jagged volcanic shore to the East, indented by little unnavigable bays, and one of deeper water, though not so favourable as that between the Twin ​Horns. This, the haunt of innumerable, skirling seafowl, went down on the chart as "Plover Bay."
Now, with the spring again as the starting point, his knife swung to the West, past the limestone cliffs of Coral Cove (just west of the capes) to the great "Cave of Night," two miles and three-quarters, as the crow flies, from his home. Its roof, at least sixty feet high, was plastered all over with nests like those of martins, but larger and only dimly descried. Through the eternal darkness sounded the strange cries of nightbirds, whose wheeling bodies melted into the inky blackness of the vault until they became mere flitting pairs of eyes.
Fleeing this ghoulish aviary, he hurried home, and on the following morning took his most extensive tour, through the heart of the island, due south from the hut.
Leaving the coral-tinted beach and its border of feather-topped pines, he passed through acres of sworded thicket, then the rich foliage of several successive terraces, prolific with mangoes, oranges, limes, nutmegs, and other once cultivated fruits, all mingling with the wild and giving evidence that long ago beings of his own kind had dwelt in this beautiful, forgotten fragment of the earth.
As he ascended, over him towered gigantic trees,—mahogany, dye, and fine cabinet woods, and everywhere, criss crossing between their mighty boles, stretched like a maze of ship s ropes the stout liana vines. Their roots were covered by an even more impenetrable labyrinth of weed, and bush, and hidden trailer, all as riotous in colour as in their bewildering disorder. The sombreness of the trees was richly tinted ​by the warm hues of silver and golden tree-ferns, the delicate hues of myriad lichens and parasites, and here and there picked out by the crimson beauty of the Mountain Rose. And ever hither and thither among the trees and vine- mazes darted wild blue pigeons, while above the thickly netted vines hummingbirds hung suspended like little thrumming ruby gyroscopes.
The bewildering intricacies of blade, and frond, and trunk, and vine, of colour, light, and shadow, were so overpowering that he felt enmeshed and longed for some thing clear-cut, like the simple outlines of old New England roofs, or the familiar spars and cordage of a ship. It seemed as if some form must shortly disentangle itself from the green labyrinth, some half-human thing with body of faun or satyr, perhaps, but with at least the semblance of human lineament. The absence was uncanny.
Sometimes he thought he heard hallooing, faint and afar-off, and he ran after the fancies until he stumbled over some natural abattis. Then, recovering his footing and fortitude, he dismissed the wild imaginings from his mind.
Now, as the terraces ranged on and up, the tangle thinned out, and the trees loomed higher and higher, like columns supporting the rent blue roof of the sky. So deep was the twilight and so majestic the upward sweep of the Gothic shafts that in the silence, broken only by the cataract's thunder, the castaway christened this highest terrace "Cathedral Woods." But the organ-music of the waterfall was sharply pierced by the shriek of the birds above, whose harshness belied their gorgeous colouring. Harsh, harsh, ​always harsh they were, though garbed in the raiment of Paradise, always striking the discordant, unholy note, and profaning this shrine of Nature as gargoyles the pure façade of some old-world cathedral. To the wanderer it seemed not only impious but a foreshadowing of impending evil.
He followed the cataract's thunder and came upon a gorge as regularly cleft as though cut by some Olympian battle-axe, and separating Cathedral Woods, on the West, from the last short climb to the summit of the mountain.
Over its edge leapt a white streak of waterfall with a sheer drop of four hundred feet. The almost supernatural beauty of the place, the lack of human companionship, and his lonely lover's dreams, had set the boy to the making of poetic figures, which would have surprised even Captain Fairwinds, and further increased the distrust of Captain Bluster, who with a pachydermic matter-of-factness would have despised such "loony" tendencies. At any other time, in any other place, the boy would have been equally ashamed of himself as a sentimental fool, but he had been transported back a thousand years, his fancy quickened and equipped with all the rich imagery of races in the dawn of the world. So when he gazed down the sheer side of the cliff, with a sudden catch in his throat he saw her face, on the wedding day that was to be, misted in the white wonder of the ever-falling water, and with the vision was born the sobriquet. Not for worlds would he have told it to a soul, had there been any to receive his confidences, nevertheless as "Sally's Bridal Veil" it went down on the chart.
Over the gorge stretched another trace of human occupa​tion,—a half-rotting suspension bridge, built of liana vines. He essayed the passage fearfully. The frail structure swayed above the cataract's thunder, but he reached the other side in safety, and climbed to the summit of the mountain. From a distance it had seemed a perfect blue cone, but here the explorer saw that a few thousand feet had been decapitated or blown away by some volcanic eruption, leaving a little seething, sulphurous lake, shaped like a saucer with brown and yellow, cliff-like sides, and properly recorded on the map as "Davy Jones' Saucer."
The boy turned his face away from the mountain, and gazed over the beauty of The Isle of Green Stairways and far away over the surrounding blue radiance of the ocean, but there was no cheering touch of white to tell a sail, or any smudge of steamer smoke to mar its purity.
A little later, in the twilight, he descended, vastly depressed, to the hut, and fell asleep.
On the following week he again made the journey through Cathedral Woods to Cone Mountain, and this time saw, leagues to the Northeast, the longed-for smoke on the horizon rim. Frantically he built huge fires, but in an hour the smoke had melted into thin air.
If he had had a powerful glass instead of the one broken lens, he might have seen a trim schooner yacht with a Bohemian party aboard, bound on a cruise of the West Indies. From the deck of the yacht, the owner and skipper saw the smoke of Ben's signal fires, but fancied it the vapour of some inactive volcano. Though they sailed away, one of the party all unconsciously performed a service for the ​castaway. In an exuberance of spirits, a woman guest hurled a half-emptied champagne bottle into the waves. Favouring winds carried it to the shore of Rainbow Bay, and a week later, Ben, while walking along the sands, discovered it, cast up by the receding tide, and now clutched in the embrace of a landcrab which crawled awkwardly away at his approach. The champagne in the bottle was stale—anyway Ben had no stomach for it. But an old, old idea occurred to him, and he decided to try the thousand-in-one, forlorn, last chance it offered.
"If that bottle has taken a trip all the way from civilization—if you call it that—why, maybe it can find its way back."
So on a piece of bark, he cut the message:
"Shipwrecked on island—about Lat. 18 N.
Long. 62 W. Alive. Well. Notify
Capt. H. Brent & Miss Sally Fell
at Salthaven, Mass., U. S. A.
Benj. Boltwood,
form, mate Bark Provincetown."
"Landlubber's calculation," he grumbled to himself, "but maybe it won't miss it by more 'n a hundred miles."
The old cork was too swollen to be replaced, so he fashioned a new one from a bit he found in the flotsam on the beach, then very carefully fitted it in the mouth, walked to the end of the southern Horn and swam out to sea. To the westward-moving current he gave the bottle with a wish ​or prayer—or whatever it is that an unsentimental but despairing sailor would utter—then swam back swiftly, for fear of the finny picaroons, the only ones that seemed now to roam these waters. But even of that he was not so sure.