192 I N A G U A 



This heron had walked through them with its sticky feet and 

 collected them as it brushed against the pod. 



The web of island life had been spun a little way. Also, like 

 the nets of certain spiders, some of it had been retracted. A 

 death for a life; the corals and anemones had to live and breed 

 and grow that there should follow ceritheums and flamingos; 

 whole hosts of fishes and crustaceans had disappeared with the 

 corals; gallinules and clapper rails splashed and waded where 

 the surf had thundered; mangroves and beach grass existed be- 

 cause gorgonians and sea fans had perished; the wind was the 

 binding thread, the warp and woof of island existence. De- 

 pendence upon dependence, a thread on a thread; coral polyps 

 fed upon microscopic sea-animals which were brought by the 

 wind; these polyps manufactured forests of rigid stone, im- 

 movable calcium trees which strangely bore no leaves and 

 which, even more amazingly, reached their barren branches 

 towards the wind which, paradoxically, did not exist for them. 

 This has the sound of an old fashioned riddle but is nothing more 

 than the plain statement of truth; the trees of coral thrust their 

 fingers towards the direction of greatest current, towards the 

 path of the incoming waves, which is the direction of the rush- 

 ing trades. Here the polyps find the most abundant food; an- 

 chored to their stony homes they cannot pursue their prey; 

 it must be brought to them; that is why coral reefs are always 

 most abundant and spectacular on the windward side of an 

 island. The stone trees in their turn shelter the lagoons; the 

 lagoons capture the drifting sand; the sand provides footing for 

 beach grass; these plants supply shelter and sustenance for in- 

 sects; birds feed upon these; except for my breakfast of doves 

 I would have gone hungry and would not have been sufficiently 

 interested to note these happenings; the editor and the proof- 

 reader would not have been bothered and this chapter of this 

 volume would not have been written. 



