The White Island

VOLUME 166

NUMBER 3

SEPTEMBER 1940

BY JUANA ALLRAUM VOGT

BIBULOUS-LOOKING pelicans row by on slow, powerful wings,careening slightly to one side or the other, against the backdrop of the Andes. Their long, strong beaks tipped with red, they look a little drunk with spring, all of them.

But what a strange animal-and-mineral kind of spring!

The air and the sun are fresh and hot, and there are a million sea birds courting around us, but there is not one blade of grass, one green leaf, one cactus even, in all the island. The common indispensable signs of spring that we watched for at home — the budding boughs, and changing grasses, and first butterflies and songbirds — are all absent. This is a desert island, a true desert island that makes Robinson Crusoe’s seem a cultivated summer resort.

But this is spring at the flood. We know it because each morning the sun is hotter on the long veranda in front of the house. Because the lizards that come out to share our breakfast muffins have developed an oblique awareness of each other, rather like girls and boys at a first dance. And because the slim guanayes (the Peruvian cormorants) and the great pelicans have nested on the island, and laid their eggs, and hatched their first extraordinary young.

The bone-deep feel of strangeness is intensified because I have already had one spring this year — an orthodox New York spring in the proper months, with the correct accessories. This second spring in the months of September, October, and November is like a fairy gift — to be enjoyed, but never to be taken for granted. If I forget its strangeness and its wonder, if I treat it familiarly like a tame cat at the back door, as to my shame I have sometimes treated spring at home, something will be forfeit!

As we sit at breakfast on the veranda at six o’clock of a clear hot morning, I am convinced, even in my half-awake state, of the pure good luck of this experience — because I am not physically adventurous, or even physically brave. There is nothing at all in me that has brought it about.

Roca, the mayordomo, pours our café con leche — the coffee freshly roasted, rich and aromatic and nearly strong enough to wake even me. We drink a tall glass of orange juice from Peru’s coastal haciendas, and spread canned American butter on browned muffins that are the joint product of Fannie Farmer’s Cook Book, my laborious Spanish, and a Peruvian cook who is aficionado (that superlative of praise that means loving the thing you do, and is quite distinct from merely being a cook or a carpenter or a doctor).

Copyright 1940, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

Straight down the white rock from the railing of the veranda, the blue Pacific is alive with silver sparks like quartz crystals. Through its silk and spangles two sleek dark bodies roll and dive and play, and lift smooth heads and great doglike eyes, curiously. Lobos are our permanent neighbors on the island — sea lions, which are friendlier to us when they are in the water than when we try to approach them by land (for the excellent reason that they are rarely approached except with a club and the uncomplicated motive of sending them to the nearest oil refinery). Across the water, faintly veiled, is a wavering pencil line incredibly high in the sky, which only experience can make us believe is the great cordillera of the Andes.

The morning is loud with the ecstatic shrieks of gulls. At least they sound ecstatic, and since they have to do with the fact that the sea is alive this morning with cameroncitas — little red prawns that look ridiculously like strawberries swimming — even a scrupulous scientist could say there is some emotion connected with these cries.

And I am not a scrupulous scientist. In fact — I am again awed and humbled by the pure good luck of my presence in latitude S 13° 39′, longitude 76° 25′, on a guano island off the coast of Peru.

Then a natural human uneasiness, in the face of sheer chance over which one has no control, asserts itself. I look across the breakfast table and think complacently that I must really have been a very intelligent young woman to marry an ornithologist!

II

We came to our island in the beginning of the South American spring, after I had had almost three months of traveling in Peru. Now traveling in Peru, as Blair Niles proved so vividly, is traveling in Time as well as Space. The life of Viceregal days, the events of the Conquest, the régime of the Incas, and the dust of a great and little-known primitive past, make a counterpoint to the simple, sometimes jazzy tune that contemporary Peru lives to. (The inevitability of that musical metaphor will be obvious to anyone who has passed through the plaza of any little Peruvian town and, under the shadow of huge trees, Ficus, which dwarf the town, heard the government radio dispensing tangos and American swing, and Incaic music between news broadcasts.) There are strange incongruities, touching and maddening and funny, but there is an exciting richness about everything, as if it were a world lit by strange lights, and every peddler woman, and each clay jar and adobe hut, cast a double or a triple shadow.

So when we left the sawdust-smelling shipyard at La Puntilla, and rocked out across the little waves of Pisco Bay to the remolcador awaiting us and our suitcases, I had qualms. Would our island, despite its novelty, seem too simple, too desert, too barren of human history and associations? Because there are places that are beautiful and strange, but very unsatisfying to creatures with hungry imaginations.

But those are misgivings that are only twinges in the first hours in a new place. Once the boat started out of the bay, I forgot them. With a practical instinct we left the seats, with their all too obvious benefits of gasoline from the engine and garlic from the galley, and sat less comfortably but much more happily in the bow.

The sun was hot and the wind was cool and salty. We toasted our faces and our backs alternately, and I borrowed the binoculars every fifteen minutes to see if our island were in sight. The degree of our absorbed expectancy and excitement can be measured by the fact that I borrowed the glasses with abandon, and they were given up with undiluted amiability. For, to any ornithologist, binoculars are a kind of antenna almost as sensitive as parts of his anatomy. And repeatedly to borrow his binoculars is to set up a state of acute and, I must admit, justifiable irritation.

We pulled away from the palm trees and the marvelously sculptured sand hills, where pinks and reds and purples and tawny oranges are spilled in grains over the crests and the wind-clean edges. We passed the mysterious sign on the hill, made by deep trenches dug in the sand perhaps more than a thousand years ago. No one is sure. People call the sign the ‘three crosses,’ or the ‘candelabra’ because of its appearance from the sea. We left the shelter of Paracas Point and came out into rougher water and harder wind. At the left the broken mass of the island of San Gallan was haloed with a cloud. At our right the little high Ovillos were a sample of what our island would be, and I examined them greedily.

Then for an hour and a half we throbbed and rolled and rocked through the great swells of the Pacific. Around us flew birds that I tried to learn excitedly and rapidly — petrels, in what seemed infinite variety, but finally resolved into four kinds: the little skipping butterfly things that are named for Tierra del Fuego; the black powerful soaring and dipping birds with bodies like small zeppelins; the domino ones, ‘Cape pigeons’; and the great black machines, with the long sheeplike muzzles, that in both Spanish and English are called so aptly ‘mutton birds.’

A long ribbon of guanaves moved across our bow, elegant in flight, their white under parts gleaming, their black wings and backs and necks glossy in the sunlight. The ribbon rippled in long waves played by some unseen hand. Pelicans passed us majestically in pairs and trios, and little social groups. I felt a swell of proprietary pride. Perhaps the wife of a college president might feel this way when she enters the campus! These were the true guano birds. These were ‘the most valuable birds in the world.’ These were the reason we were bound for North Chincha Island off the coast of Peru.

All the time, a white spot on the horizon was evolving in a fascinating fashion, first into two white spots that grew in size and definition, and at last into three — not spots, but islands: definitely formed white islands with minute sticks upon the farthest one that meant a building. By then I was permanently attached to the glasses and they were glued to Chincha — until my husband suddenly said a word that shattered my absorption.

I had been excited and expectant, and delighted with novelty and new sights, and then all at once something reached down and connected with a well of sentiment and romance, and there was a new, deeper kind of excitement. What he had said was ‘Penguin!’

There wasn’t much to see — a long flat swimming bird, with a short neck and a head like a driving iron. And it dived immediately. But I had seen my first wild penguin.

Chincha Sur is high and rounded, with outposts of strangely eroded rocks and its sides scooped out in great green caves that echo with the roar of sea lions. Chincha Centro undulates a bit in hills and valleys and has a lighthouse. Chincha Norte — our Chincha — has a greater variety of contour, with beaches and little bays, and a deep fjord they call ‘the amphitheatre,’ where lobo families sleep and breed and carry on riotous family feuds. On the edge of the cliff, like a long birdhouse, perches the frame structure that shelters us and our domestic staff.

But, despite such differences, the three closely grouped Chincha Islands lift typically clean bare white faces. They look like spoonfuls of floating island dropped in an immense dark pudding. (There is certainly some perverse spirit that moves everyone who describes guano islands to figures of speech connected with food! Their literature abounds with references to ‘white cake icing,’ ‘loaf sugar,’ ‘meringue,’ ‘dumplings,’ and so forth.)

As we passed along within thirty or forty feet of the shores we could see the boobies, piqueros, perched on jagged rocks, and watch them fly out with their sharp beaks aimed at the water, and drop like spearheads where the fish lay. Our unknown household hung over the railing of a high mole and waved to us. One of them ran monkey-like down a cat ladder at the end, swinging wildly from side to side, pulled in a long rowboat, and, being joined by another acrobat, rowed out toward us, the remolcador having let down its anchor. My momentary alarm at the cat ladder was quieted when I saw a respectable staircase being lowered at the side, but I also felt a regretful pang of stodginess.

It was a home-coming — a warm, friendly, happy home-coming. ‘Doctor Pajaro’ was already old resident and Señor here, and the Señora was accepted implicitly. (‘Doctor Pajaro,’ meaning ‘the bird doctor,’ defines my husband acceptably and definitely for all the inhabitants of all the islands of the Peruvian coast. In everyday intercourse it becomes el Doctor, and in moments of simple trust and affection, mi Doctor.) We stood on the dock, shaking hands all around, laughing and answering in our awkward Spanish the soft, tuneful questions. The blue-green water surged up the rocks below us and poured down again in white cascades, uncovering brilliant coral starfish and shiny black anemones. Flocks of Inca terns, disturbed by our arrival, swept out chattering and trilling from the shallow caves. Followed by the staff carrying bundles and suitcases, we climbed the steep white path and stairs to the long veranda. I had begun to live on a guano island.

III

Coastal Peru has no weather. During the gradual, almost imperceptible unfolding of this Peruvian spring, I have never quite got over my astonishment at this phenomenon. Of course there are cloudy days, there are nights that are cooler and middays that are hotter. But ‘weather,’ in the definite, tangible sense that the rest of the world experiences it, is unknown. During three months of the year Lima can talk about cold and damp and fogs, but for the other months its inhabitants, like the rest of the coastal people, are deprived of one of the most valuable crutches of conversation.

On the island we talk about the sea instead. The sea to us is what the weather is to the farmer — really the weather plus the ploughed field. What to us are spring sowing, the germinating seeds, and the first green shoots! The great salt sea, the cold Humboldt. Current flowing along the coast, the shoals of anchovetas, the microscopic life, and the sea birds whose existence depends on all the rest — these are important. It’s true that in the end there will be a very practical connection between the sea harvest and the land harvest, when the guano goes out in sacks to the haciendas. But for the present our concern is with the Pacific Ocean.

We take its temperature several times daily, and shake our heads when the thermometer rises. We sample its plankton with concern. And even our casual small talk is about the sea. The Spanish words for its goings-on are particularly fitting, I think. When it lies in a satin calm they say it is mansa, as you would say of an animal that is tame. When the unpredictable and unknown urges send it in wild swells and crashing waves against the coast, and the little ports are closed all down the line, they say it is brava and bravisima! It is always alive and personal to them — even to the littlest of them.

The cook’s daughter sat on the sand with me. She is six, and a warm brown color like the sun-baked pottery jars. She has a shy, thin smile that is touching, like her thin shoulder blades, and when she smiles her cheeks dimple high up under her cheekbones and her black eyes peep merrily through narrowed Oriental slits. Bits of red string are tied through the holes in her ears. She has not yet graduated to earrings.

That morning she was quiet, watching the waves. There had been a dying gull on the beach when we came down, and Inocenta had picked it up by its broken wing and demanded the Soñora’s attention with great enthusiasm. The Señora, not being made of such stern stuff, had suggested throwing the gull out to sea (a procedure having no more merit, I recognized, than letting it die on land, but being a little less harrowing to the Señora). So, with polite surprise, Inocenta had returned the bird to the waves.

Now she sat forward alertly and pointed. ‘Señora, the gull!’ Yes, now quite dead, it lay washed up on the beach. And death in a bird seems so much deader than in any other creature! There is not even the semblance of living sleep. It is utterly different.

Inocenta said solemnly, with a little nod of her head, ‘The sea does not like dead things.’

I turned my head to her still brooding face. Was she six or sixty? Had some great-great-grandmother, who watched her sons push out from shore in their tiny reed caballitos, the ‘little horses’ of the coast, resurrected suddenly in her descendant? Undoubtedly. This was old folk wisdom, rounded and polished by generations like an old grinding stone. ‘A la mar no gust an los muertos’ (‘The sea does not like dead things’).

But is it only the lady sea who doesn’t like dead things? For the sea is both masculine and feminine here. I suppose if I went about it in a scholarly fashion I could find rules and reasons why it is sometimes la mar, and sometimes el mar. But I have a reluctance to find out. I prefer to think that Blanca, who is the captain of our fleet of two rowboats and two detachable sails, — Blanca, who has the pure fine Indian features that you can see on the Mochica portrait jars a thousand years old, — chooses his definite article with an impromptu and subtle appreciation of the temperament of the Pacific Ocean at the very moment. I like to feel that old Peña — our venerable guardián, sun-blackened and grizzlewhiskered, and slow and compact with laborious years, like an old lobo himself — looks at the sweet siren waters on a calm morning, and the cold green slapping swells under an afternoon wind blowing from Paracas Point, and, remembering obscurely the men and women of his sixty-four years, distributes his genders accordingly.

IV

This morning at breakfast, the Pacific is certainly la. She is even a trifle ‘Oo, la, la!’ All this exuberance of spangles and shimmer! All these shrieking and ecstatic devotees, like chorus men in a musical comedy! All this siren warmth — a deceptive warmth. Roca has just told me that the temperature is ‘normal,’ around 17° Centigrade. I could not, offhand, turn it into Fahrenheit, but I know by experience that 17° Centigrade will be cold for swimming.

Roca is a mild young man, slow and amiable and idealistic. Our relations are highly amicable. But two things about the Señora disturb him. She writes so much — she is writing all the time! (I should like to think this estimate correct!) And she bathes so much —often two swims a day and a fresh-water shower. As I waited one afternoon for him to lower the staircase from the dock, he warned me gravely that too much bathing was very weakening. He put his head shyly on one side and regarded me out of large brown eyes. ‘I myself,’ he said, ‘even in the hottest weather, take only one shower a day.’

I reassured him somewhat by saying that I took very short baths. And I went down the staircase to my undignified entrance into the Pacific (resulting one fifth from sensitive sinuses, and four fifths from shameless cowardice) pondering the species mayordomo peruano.

Out of a series of eight or ten brief or long acquaintances, we have never had an unpleasant one. A few were dirty and some were slow and dull, but every one was friendly, kindly, and with an intimate concern for our well-being. When our appetites faltered, we were urged to take milk of magnesia immediately. When el Doctor spends the day on another island and I lunch alone, I am condoled with and told it is muy triste! When friends arrive from Lima to visit us, the mayordomo is all smiles — for us, because now we must be muy alegre!

But his report this morning of the water temperature leaves me less concerned than usual. For a week now, swimming has been a matter of annoyance, — one of those deep, restless, impulse-to-kick-the-furniture annoyances, — because just about a week ago my husband remarked casually in passing, ‘By the way, Ampuero says you ought not to swim from the dock. He says there are sharks.’

I felt an immediate and unreasonable anger. ‘I know there are sharks,’ I argued with myself, ‘but most of the men say they never come close to shore. Surely when there’s a difference of opinion — ‘ And then I was uncomfortably aware that a division of opinion about the presence of sharks is not the same as a division of opinion over sunspots.

‘But,’ I returned to the problem, walking round and round it, ‘these people love the dramatic. Remember the dogs you were warned of! The ferocious watchdogs, that came up and practically sat in your lap! They’re probably overdramatizing the situation.’ And again the cold voice of reality inquired what I should consider the overdramatization of a shark.

I held a consultation with Ampuero. He is a fine figure of a man. His height stands out among his small-statured countrymen. He is also a casador — the official sharpshooter who defends the nesting birds and their eggs against vultures and occasional condors, and protects the young, first-swimming birds from hungry sea lions. As a consequence he has a certain gallant swagger about him.

‘What about these sharks?’ I demanded defiantly. ‘Has anyone ever seen one near the dock?’

‘Si, Señora!’

‘This year?’

‘Not yet, Señora.’ The inference was unmistakable. Apparently we could expect them like swallows.

‘Has anyone ever been attacked by a shark?’

‘No,’ he said tolerantly, as to a child, ‘but a lobo was found last week on the other side of the island. It was ripped — ‘

’Gracias!’ I said hastily, to stem the pathological details.

‘The playita is a very pretty place to swim,’ he assured me soothingly.

I pointed out the defects of the little beach to him accusingly. ‘It is very far! ‘ — the whole island being not quite a mile long. ‘And the waves are full of sand!’

There was a deadlock. Ampuero broke it with dignity.

‘Of course,’ he said serenely, ‘the Senora is very valiant. Con permiso, Señora,’ and bowed himself out.

I put on my bathing suit and walked down the escalera from the dock. I was fully aware that the cook, the cook’s wife and daughter, Ampuero, Roca, and perhaps the rest of the island’s inhabitants were watching me. Are there sharks? Como no! But the North American Señora is very valiant — she doesn’t mind swimming where there are sharks. But how ridiculous! There aren’t any sharks!

Sea water, even at six feet, can be extraordinarily opaque. I gazed down and down and never could see the bottom. Do sharks always swim about obligingly with a fin up like a submarine periscope, or do they sometimes lurk? But what nonsense! The ocean was the same ocean I had swum in yesterday and all the yesterdays. There was no more danger than there was yesterday.

I realized two things simultaneously: that I was terrified, and that I would sooner be bitten by a shark than walk back up the staircase, and past the gallery, in a dry bathing suit. By such noble emotions is courage inspired. I made my entrance with rather less dignity than usual, and I endured the shortest, most uncomfortable swim of my life. I, who without good style or form or endurance can simply rest and roll about in water as most people prefer to do on a solid beach, was in imminent danger of drowning from paralysis. With grim conscientiousness I swam my little bit and popped out. But the next day I went swimming from the beach.

V

The morning has its quiet schedule. Roca brings the hot water for bathing, and I dress for the day in slacks and shirt. Fortunately for the efficiency of the island, the cataclysmic effect of the slacks has worn off, and workmen no longer drop bundles and peer around buildings when the slacks pass. El Doctor leaves his laboratory to join me in the salita for the fifteen minutes of radio news from Lima, and our staff gathers at doors and windows to listen too. The state of the world being what it is, they arrive promptly and have all trailed away before the end. I am left alone with the martial music that closes the broadcast, and three pelicans sail by the window most fittingly, looking like a new kind of centaur — both battle plane and pilot. Pelicans should always perform to military bands.

Now for the lista! In our first week on Chincha I was very wary of interfering with our excellent cook and, on the whole, excellent meals. But since, in the matter of vegetables, Peruvian cooking ignores them when possible, or else disguises them effectively, I sent out a few suggestions. The results were not too good. We had the same kind of vegetable soup four meals in succession. At our loud protest there came a hurt and dignified request that the Señora make a lista each day of the menus. So, now the lista.

I have wondered recently just what purpose the lista serves. It is very good for my Spanish. It provides a social diversion in Teodoro’s morning. It gives me a remote control of the vitamin situation. Outside of that —

I take the list to the back regions. Olivant is ironing this morning. ‘Buenos días, Señora!’ she calls happily. She is the same warm brown color as her daughter. Her small plump figure is bent over the ironing board, and her gold earrings flash as she moves her head about energetically. Her iron looks like a perilous contraption to me, being a large hollow affair filled with red-hot coals.

Teodoro sits on a box outside the porch, with his knees around a large flat stone, and in his hands another stone, worn and oblong. With this primitive mortar and pestle he is grinding green culantro leaves. He is quite black, showing the frequent coastal mixture of Negro blood. He is a rugged, lusty individual, with a hearty sense of humor and a turbulent temperament befitting a master cook who is aficionado of his trade.

He says ‘Buenos días, Señora,’ and rises rather sadly from his labors.

‘For almuerzo,’ I say decisively, ‘first a cream soup.’

‘But, Señora, there is peje sapo.’ Now no one in his right senses refuses chupin de peje sapo. For one thing, there is only one boatman who can find the ugly toadlike rockfish, and he cannot always be spared. And when the fish is cooked in its own juices and wine it becomes a delicacy of a lifetime.

‘Bien!’ I say. ‘Muy bien!’ and make my first alteration. ‘Then, steak—’

‘No hay!’ The mention of the meat course is always the cue for a furious diatribe against the powers on the mainland who buy our meat. Never, never, never do they send the quality of meat worthy of el Doctor and the cook! (I am a mere woman, I have found long since. I have also discovered that one of the speediest ways of getting what I want is to say that el Doctor likes it, or doesn’t like it, or wants it immediately. It’s a rather scurvy trick, because el Doctor usually doesn’t feel half so passionately about these things as his wife does, but this is a war of diplomacy in which all is fair.)

Teodoro points to the last chunk of meat hanging from the ceiling, and I try to look wise. ‘Mire, Señora!’ he says bitterly. ‘Ca-ramba!’ The correct production of this word had been a revelation to me. It starts with a low growl, works up with a roll of thunder on the r to a cannon boom on the am, and bites off the last syllable menacingly. I never used to think much of it in print. I can understand its potency now.

‘Ca-ramba!’ says Teodoro again. But I am not much impressed this time. Having seen the culantro a-grinding, I know what’s coming. ‘Better,’ says he smoothly, ‘is a meat stew with culantro’

‘Bien,’ I agree helplessly. ‘But with vegetables! Boiled, hot vegetables!’

He acquiesces indulgently, and we continue the business of changing the rest of the list.

I return, having left a lista intact in only one item — vegetables, which are always regarded as a harmless North American idiosyncrasy which may be indulged. After all, it is good for my Spanish.

VI

In the morning I write — stories, articles, anything. It seems to me the most interesting craft in the world, because it uses everything that you do and are. And if there is no set piece to work on at the moment, there are always notes about the island and the sea and the sky — an infinity of notes! I look back at random ones of three months: —

A wild Paracas blowing late today — on the south side, the water opaque green beaten into waves that were frosted like the bloom on a plum. To the north the wind had raised a fine dark nap on the blue sea.

A radiant morning, a dazzling silver sea — the mirrors to catch larks must be like this. But to catch our petrels in a picture we had to lay a slick, drop by drop of lobo oil, behind our rowboat. Little danzarines came down to it, and mutton birds and cape pigeons. In spite of claps and shouts, the mutton bird refused to perform until I dashed water at him; then he rose laboriously, taking all of fifteen or twenty feet to get under way, and treading water with his great splayfeet as well as pumping with his wings.

The black and white cape pigeons are plump and demure and never afraid. They stay close enough to touch a sea lion feeding, and peck up the crumbs. The sleek, whiskered head comes up and tosses the fish from side to side, making waves that bob the birds violently back and forth, and never seem to ruffle them.

An official visit to the pelican blind. Dressed in white so the ticks would have no protective coloration, wearing socks and pants lapped like shingles so there would be positively no entry, and a bandana over my head against the acrobatic ones.

Pelicans are handsome! They have a bright look in the courting and breeding season; their pouches are finely striped black and white, looking accordion-pleated, and rippling constantly like gay banners fluttering through the colony. The shiny black pate and nape of the neck look like a Chinaman’s queue.

The antediluvian young, infinitely ancient and weary! They look like artificial birds of dirty white stuffed flannel. Six in a row stagger past my window seeking the shade of the blind. A constant noise — they groan and whinny and snarl and snore and growl like a hungry stomach (which they are, largely). One big bully bites a thin-looking one who lays his long neck helplessly on the ground and squeals. ‘Don’t do that!’ I say sharply. The big one teeters back slowly and blinks in a numbed fashion, like Abraham hearing the voice of God.

The daily procession of guanayes coming back to their nests in the afternoon after feeding was

a marvelous pouring flight of birds across the end of the porch and the island. To look up and into them flying over you is like watching motion itself. There is more than the myriad flicker of wings — the very air shivers around them.

But then, such a fall from glory: —

On the sick list today. Where did I pick up this germ? At least it isn’t bad enough to be the dreaded amœbic dysentery. One cheering note! Bill brought in the information that it is called ‘the bicycle’ — bicicleta — and when it’s very bad, motorcicleta! And one reward of suffering. When I got up at 2 A.M., the Southern Cross and the Big Dipper shone brilliantly across the black night at each other. It was like seeing two good friends meet — my old friend and my new friend. (And no need to feel uneasy over them, either!)

What could I have been thinking of! This is less worldly: —

The phosphorescence after dark — struck like match light from the water where a wave breaks. Running up among the rocks like blue fire.

And of an eventful morning: —

Leviathan was playing in our front yard today! A rather small leviathan and his two brothers. There would be the delicate high spray, the waves, and then the great shining black roll of bodies.

Height, especially in a woman, being something of a curiosity in this country, I told Inocenta in one of our serious conversations on the beach that the North American Señora who was coming to visit was even taller than I. Later I wrote: —

This morning, when Mabel left us for a minute, Inocenta turned to me and said with great loyalty: ‘The Señora is not taller than you — or only a chiquitito! ‘

This was a serio-comic day: —

Our Thanksgiving turkey was beautiful and brown and luscious — with just the needed touch to remind us that we are in strange parts. It wore its head and feet tucked around it intact. Teodoro was so proud! He leaned in the window of the dining room and beamed on us as we ate. They are such gentle people. They congratulate us on our holidays.

And always returning to the birds: —

The penguins walk shyly down the rocks looking at their toes. They hop into the waves with their heads up, as we were told never to do! But they seem not to mind the most boiling surf. The people here call them pájaros niños — ‘the bird children.’

No, I need never have had qualms that the desert island would be too hard and barren. It has an inexhaustible richness. But its most enduring quality, for me, is its very desertness.

You seem to get close to the secret places of the universe in such a spot. And if you never get any closer than this white rock it’s enough — and perhaps better. The plain ocean, the limitless horizon and the unobstructed stars, the white island stripped and bare, the million sea birds — it’s good to live in this starkness for a while! It’s good to realize that even where the earth grows no trees, puts on no softness, no brilliant colors, no murmurous songs, there can still be spring — a spring of clear hard simple beauty, and teeming creation.