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a murmur akin to the swishing of old silk and taffeta, and, 

 briefly, I thought of Victorian ladies clad in multi-hued petti- 

 coats moving in old-fashioned parlors. But this memory van- 

 ished swiftly and once again the green pines dominated the 

 scene. Except this time the air was not warm but was frosty 

 and cold. Down through the interstices of the somber needles 

 were drifting swirling clouds of tiny white motes, the falling of 

 new snow. The gyrating horde of six-shaped crystals danced 

 across the clearings and fell on the carpet of dead leaves. Their 

 falling and bumping against the dried vegetation combined in a 

 mysterious murmuring that ran up and down between the 

 aisles of the trees. 



I opened my eyes once more. The same trade wind that was 

 bringing the rollers in was drifting the beach sand, rolling the 

 countless grains up and down the beach, tumbling them into one 

 another, piling them into drifts and sweeping them on again. 

 The sound was not snow but the movement of tropical beach 

 sand that was causing this whispering, billions of infinitesimal 

 sounds accumulating one upon the other, the noise of grain 

 against grain, of lime rasping against lime. The wind was blow- 

 ing the sand, tearing the island apart, building it up, scouring the 

 slopes of the dunes, etching graven lines in the soft rock. 



Gaunt and stark in the moonlight the ghostly silhouettes 

 of a thousand thorn trees crouched blackly against the luminous 

 sky. From these came the tones that I had mistaken for the 

 whisperings of the pines. These trees had all grown to an equal 

 height, stretching supplicating fingers to the heavens and then 

 like old men had all become bowed— curtsying evenly in one 

 direction— pointing to the west. They seemed to suggest that 

 in that direction moved the stream of life. Vainly their branches 

 had sought to resist the current, growing in normal tree fashion 

 until the uppermost twigs emerged from the still zone close to 

 the earth and felt for the first time the ceaseless pressure of the 



