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Page 21.

He felt fire in his eyes and awoke with a start, throwing blankets aside. He remembered the dead faces he’d seen, and the losses they meant to him, and let out a muffled yell as if coming up from a drowning well.

Sunlight stabbed through the reed doorway in dozens of thin shafts, and had found him on the bed and caressed his eyelids.

He sat up rubbing his eyes and slowly remembered where he was. The fire had gone out, and the fireplace overflowed once again with white and black ashes.

He rose and stumbled to the bench, where he found half a clay cup of water and drank it to relieve his thirst. He found a few bits of dried fish and chewed on those while pulling the door open.

Outside, the rain and fog were gone. The normal semitropical warmth filled the air, hot and moist. The air smelled bracingly of the sea, and the wind itself was fresh and cooling. Alex walked down the beach to the edge of the sea, which was at low tide. There was no sign of the old woman. He walked around the long bend in the direction he’d come, and found the young woman’s body still on the beach. A half dozen pelicans were working around it, scooping up the crabs that had come to feast, while swarms of insects filled the air and covered the sand around her.

He sat on the beach cross-legged for a long time, chewing on his fish and holding his cup. At times, tears welled up in his eyes when he thought of what could have been. If only he’d been here a few weeks earlier. He wiped the tears away. If nothing else, he knew now there were other humans, and maybe he’d find more. Just realizing he had not been alone—even if perhaps these had been the only other two humans in the world, and he was perhaps again alone—changed everything somehow. It did not make the world any less tragic or awful. It did not make it any more or less beautiful and mysterious either.

It was extra scary now, in a way it had never been before. He’d been resigned to his loneliness. Now he was starting to let hope torture him. If he never met another living person, that would be a crushing disappointment he could not bear. He thought about this, and decided it would be worse not to try. It would be worse not to hope.

He knelt down in the soft, creamy sand near the water and dug with both hands. By trial and error, he found just the right consistency of sand so that it was wet enough to stick together and easy enough to dig without collapsing constantly inward. In a short while, he had dug a longish depression in the sand. He tested it by rolling into it, and found it was just deep enough. He walked over and carefully, assailed by the smell and the angry buzz of disturbed insects, dragged her to the hole. He tried to avoid touching her, and pulled her by two bunched handfuls of her wool cloak. She was empty, and light, like the older woman, and moved across the sand with a soft sighing sound of grains moving under material. When he dragged her away from the indented and stained place she’d lain, he saw a fine stone knife in the sand. It was of smooth blue stone, with no markings. Even the chippings had been polished smooth over many hours of fond rubbing.

He slid her into the slot and used his feet to push sand over her, while pinching his nose shut. When he had her fully covered by six inches or more of sand, he brought some rocks down from the upper beach, until he’d covered her with a loaf-shape of stones. Done. He picked up the knife and walked down to the tidal strip. He rinsed the knife and put it in his belt. He washed himself in the sea, though he was sure it was more symbolic than hygienic. He paused for a minute over the grave to think about who she might have been, and how he might have spoken or laughed with her.

He hoped she had had a good life. When there was nothing more to think, he walked away.

Alex walked around the circumference of the island, and it did not take overly long.

He followed a sandy beach most of the way, except on the landward side where it was broken up by surf and boulders, and there was that rocky landing with the boat still parked on it. He walked uphill to the sheep meadow and looked out toward the land.

He got his best view of the world yet. At this distance, he could make out distant mountains with white tops. Closer, he saw the valley in which the rippers lived. At the narrow end toward the forests and jungles, he saw a high waterfall tumble down. Even from here, three or four miles away, he could see the plume of mist drifting away from the tumbling water, and he could make out a faint rainbow as sunlight mingled with the water.

The water formed a fast-flowing river that cut though the valley, and it was clear that at flood-times the entire valley was the mouth of a huge, raging river that blasted out to sea. Most of the time, it was a flat marshy plain cut by one main channel and several smaller channels of fast-flowing water like the one he’d dived into to swim across to shore and look at the blood and keel cuts on the sand. On either side of the valley were long, medium rows of hills with rocky faces and vegetation on top.

Somewhere in those hills on the right, he knew, was the cave in which he’d been born. It was part of the enigma of this whole place—and who he was, who the old woman had been, who the young girl he’d just buried had been.

He knew he could not stay on this island. Maybe one day he’d be strong enough, but not yet. He wanted so desperately to be around living people, and being around the dead would bother him all the more. At the same time, he knew he would be back here, maybe often. It was the closest thing to civilization that he’d ever know.

Even if he stayed here alone, he could be the keeper, passing this dead world on to anyone who might come after, if anyone did.

He made one more foray down into the central part of the island, the sunken village.

Clambering over the undergrowth, he saw signs of fresh water below. Was there perhaps a spring somewhere in this depression, though it was no more than a few hundred feet across and contained half a dozen stone houses packed tightly together? Nobody could answer his question now. They were all gone, buried in a moss-choked columbarium at the end of the village street.

Tucked away into dozens of wall niches, under a large rock overhang, were the funerary urns of the inhabitants. Alex had to stoop to climb in over the mossy rocks. He counted several dozen niches, all of similar size. At one time all the niches had been covered over with stone slabs, but most of the slabs had fallen down. Almost all the slabs had illustrations and inscriptions, carved in a primitive manner most likely using harder stone to chip at softer stone. The slabs had been held in place by narrow ledges cut by human hand, but winds and earth tremors had rocked them loose. Tongues of moss ran down the recessed Cliffside, oozing from open wall niches like a kind of water of time. The middle niches were the oldest, and the urns inside were the most pitted. Pushing carefully in until his head and shoulders were in one of the niches, Alex found that the number of urns continued inward for at least ten feet, each urn being about a foot high and half as much around. The word amphora came to mind, from Alex Kirk’s meme trove, except these urns had rounded instead of conical bottoms. They must have burned their dead, Alex thought, for only ashes could fit in a vessel that small. When he saw into the back of the niche, he was shocked, because the style was different—more ornate, smoother, finer made, and so delicate they crumbled to the touch. That was when he realized he was looking at a culture that had existed her for centuries, maybe a thousand years or more, before vanishing. He saw a number of interesting things, and then one shocking find.

He left the village, feeling more overwhelmed at what he knew than puzzled by the enormous amount he didn’t know. The passage of time, the coming and going of lives, the drizzle of countless lifetimes like sand through an hourglass, weighed on him with a depressing heaviness. There was something else that he reflected on, which had not occurred to him, but which he realized afterward. There was no sense of family about the urns. Each bore at most a name, written in language he could readily understand from Alex Kirk’s memories: Robert, Martha, Sandra, Keith, Leigh, Vasco, Lars, Kim, Shinko, and so on. Furthermore, some of the names repeated. He counted several Keith’s, several Brains, several Johns, several James, innumerable Mary’s, two or three Workups. But no family names. It was as though they all belonged to one great family—even the Alexes, who might have taken the name Kirk. The shocking find was that the most common names were Robinson and Friday. And variations like Robin or Robinette and other days of the week. Did it mean there had been many brought into the world as he himself had?

He had a feeling the answers to some of his questions lay near, but he wasn’t sure he’d feel any better once he learned more about the truth.