178 I N A G U A 



one strand is brightly illumined with the glow of day, in con- 

 trast to and unlike its neighbor which is dark with the shadows 

 of night. It is an enjoined tissue in which one coil is life and the 

 next is death; and, there is a great intermingling of patterns, as 

 of design shuttling between one portion of the mesh and an- 

 other. 



All individual creation has its beginning and its ending. 

 Stars wing their way into existence in a burst of flame and then 

 die as cold, blackened spheroids; birds begin as eggs and com- 

 plete their course as smudges of brown earth or heaps of be- 

 draggled feathers; the winged seeds that drift over the spring 

 meadows become in the fall clumps of charred and frayed tis- 

 sue; continents rise and disappear as geologic time overwhelms 

 them; even epochs start with hope and promise; the new year 

 pushes out the old and in its turn makes room for another. 



On Inagua nearly the whole of existence began and ended 

 with the wind. To be able to compute with exactness the po- 

 tency of the wind in the lives of the creatures of the island 

 would require the services of a super-statistician and the com- 

 bined efforts of a complete university of technicians, miles of 

 graphs and years of patient research. Even then the picture 

 would be clouded with uncertainties. Yet the factor of the 

 wind is everywhere present and everywhere obvious. Even the 

 most undiscerning soon discover that the birds pay allegiance 

 to its force when they sleep at night; their bodies are all oriented 

 to the east, facing the breeze. Herons, flamingos, sandpipers, 

 doves, warblers, hawks, perching in branches or crouching on 

 the ground, singly or in flocks of hundreds, all turn and face the 

 direction of the sunrise. I adopted this habit myself, except 

 when in the shelter of a boulder, snuggling low to avoid the cur- 

 rent. Even the lizards which burrowed underground delayed 

 the hour of their morning appearances when the wind was 

 strong. I kept a careful record of the times of their emergence 



