CAHOWS AND LONGTAILS 



my blind, auditory compass. They came consist- 

 ently from a narrow sector in the southeast and 

 after a few nights of confirmatory repetition I 

 shifted my observations one morning to a visible 

 horizon and found that the source of the nocturnal 

 voices included Green Island — the last continua- 

 tion of Nonsuch beyond South Point. 



During the first year of my stay I had wandered 

 over this small, isolated, wave-worn patch which was 

 about one hundred yards across, and had found 

 nothing of especial interest. On the sixteenth of 

 May of the year 1931 we visited it again. I leaped 

 from the stern of a small boat as it balanced upon the 

 summit of a rising swell, and swarmed up a cliff 

 composed of effectively arranged, serried ranks of 

 pins, daggers, needles, half-opened scissors, knives, 

 nails, fish-hooks, arrows and bits of broken glass. It 

 proved, after all, to be only a cliff of geolian sand, 

 dissolved and refused and tempered to marble hard- 

 ness, and sculptured and whetted to razor sharp- 

 ness by the waves : but to hands and feet it was all 

 the rest. The islet rose to a low, central table-rock 

 by way of two diminutive and irregular terraces and 

 its title was saved from absolute misnomer solely 

 by a thin, emerald enamel of flattened and sprawl- 

 ing sea purslane with its tiuy, purplish-pink faces 

 staring up at the sky. Single and double pads of 

 island cactus hid low among the scattered sea ox-eye 

 and marine mulberry. No cedar today had been able 

 to face the blasting salt and live, although stony 

 molds here and there showed where great for- 



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