THE MAKING OF AN ISLAND 139 



It disappeared rapidly and I was hungry enough to devour an- 

 other but refrained as there were not too many left. In a day 

 or two they, too, would be gone and I would have to depend 

 on the gun. After a short rest I stripped and swam for a few 

 minutes in the surf, then came to shore and donned my clothes 

 again. By this time the sun had set and the moon was coming up. 



I slept on the bare ground that night and dreamed that a vast 

 army of crabs was coming out of the sea to surround me. In 

 my slumber I could hear their armored bodies clicking over 

 the rocks, their large yellow claws were raised menacingly 

 and they crept closer and closer. Soon I could see the facets 

 of their eyes raised grotesquely on bulbous stalks. Their bodies 

 were yellow in color and they waded in deep furrows of sea 

 shells, long spiral turrets shaped like those of ceritheums. They 

 were ceritheums, and strangely they began to multiply, piUng 

 deeply, hundreds, thousands of them, appearing out of no- 

 where. Even the crabs had trouble combating them but they 

 pushed them aside with their yellow claws and steadily moved 

 closer. Suddenly the great pile of ceritheums vanished, dis- 

 solving liquidly into a brown slime. The slime ran between the 

 legs of the crabs and then solidified into a crust exactly an inch 

 thick. Then just as the crabs were about to reach me the ground 

 became warm and the air thick and heavy. 



I awoke, damp with perspiration. My head was buried in the 

 crotch of my arm and a pile of loose sand had worked under 

 my shirt. The moon was out, nearly full, and in its blue glare 

 I could see the shapes of a dozen hermit crabs crawling through 

 the grasses. It was their clacking that I heard in my sleep. For 

 the rest of the night I slept fitfully, alternately dozing and then 

 waking. The sun beaming in my face aroused me in the morn- 

 ing. I felt stifF and dirty and went down to the surf again to 

 wash. The cool clean water made me feel better and I shoul- 

 dered the grass baskets and set out once more up the coast. 



