AN ISLAND EXISTENCE 8i 



as it stared unblinking from the safety of a crevice. One of its 

 webs brushed stickily against my cheek. I untangled it and it 

 clung to my fingers. Drawing them aside the web fell away 

 from the door jamb and exposed some dim pencil marks spread 

 in half inch spans amid some scribbled dates. There were simi- 

 lar marks on the door jamb of my own home eighteen hundred 

 miles to the north. These lines marked the tops of the heads 

 of growing children as they sprouted year by year. The high- 

 est line was dated August 19 14, the month of the year when 

 the Great War began. 



I pushed a shutter and it fell among the weeds with a crash. 

 Sunlight streamed through the newly opened window reveal- 

 ing the dusty spaces of two diminutive rooms. This had been 

 a very poor house, a roof and four walls, little more. But it 

 did boast of a wooden floor that was still solid though it creaked 

 mournfully in spots. The roof was almost all intact. A few 

 palmetto leaves would make it tight. The walls were of coral, 

 still faintly white with lime beneath the dust of a decade. 



With a broom fashioned from a stick and a bunch of leaves 

 tied with a vine we cleaned the place of webs and chased the 

 spiders back beneath the rock walls from whence they had 

 originally come. Only one was allowed to remain, the big black 

 and yellow fellow over the lintel. We tried to coax it out but 

 it only drew deeper into its crevice, glaring balefully at these 

 trespassers on its rightful domain. Down to the sea we went 

 with a square of canvas, dipped it in a surf-carved pool and 

 returned staggering under a load of warm sea water. We 

 splashed it mightily over the walls and along the floors until 

 they ran with the flood. From one corner we kicked out the 

 faded body of an orange and yellow land crab that had come 

 there long ago to die. Its shell clattered across the floor and fell 

 into a dozen pieces. 



When we had it all clean, though still damp from the salt 



