THE MAKING OF AN ISLAND 135 



The wind whistled across this plain with a violence that was 

 amazing after the quiet of the hot forest. But it was cool. 

 Bending against its pressure I followed the trail which wound 

 sinuously toward the northeast. At noon I found myself well 

 out in the middle, and seeking a dry spot I sat down to rest and 

 eat a little lunch. The corned beef did not help my thirst so 

 I washed it down with another swig^ from the canteen. While 

 I rested I examined the soil. It was derived almost entirely from 

 living matter; there was no sand mixed in it. Only an inch or 

 two beneath the surface was a layer of solid rock; thousands 

 upon thousands of fragments of tiny ceritheum shells made up 

 its substance, diminutive spiral mollusks hardly more than a 

 quarter inch in length. This soil had its origin largely in the 

 decayed material of these animals, and in the accumulated 

 residue of millions of their droppings which were derived from 

 countless billions of feedings upon equally diminutive algaes. 

 How many hundreds of years and trillions of lives had been 

 necessary to produce this skim of earth I could not guess. Some 

 of the skim had been lost, no doubt, whirled into the sky as 

 dust on the wings of the trades. Equal amounts had probably 

 been dissolved by the rains to drain back into the sea again. 

 A few other creatures had added their quota to the sum total 

 of this inch of earth, but not many; a few stray feathers and 

 the crushed carapaces of land crabs were the only other evi- 

 dences except the sparse straws of the struggling grass. The 

 grasses appeared to be newcomers, for they were not numerous 

 and were scattered in distant clumps. Around the grass clumps 

 were some mounds of whitened sand brought up from cre- 

 vasses in the base rock by great yellow land crabs with unbe- 

 lievably monstrous claws. But these crabs were hidden in their 

 holes; their existence was only indicated by a number of the 

 shells of their dead bodies scattered over the plain where they 

 were bleaching in the sun. 



