Joan and Aderhold slept, too. For them the immediate need was health again, strength again, energy in which to base the wonderful flower of life. They lay like children near each other, and slept the livelong day. When, in the last bright light, they waked, there was cassava bread, and tropic fruit and water from a neighbouring spring. They ate and drank and talked a little, about indifferent things—only nothing now was indifferent, but rich and significant. But it was as though they would hold away from them for a little while their deeper bliss; would not speak of that until they could speak in health, with glow and vigour and beauty and power! About them the village half waked, half slept. They heard women’s and children’s voices, but dreamily. The woods, that had been very still during the heat of the day, were now as murmurous as rapids of a stream. All manner of winged life made a continuous sound. Joan and Aderhold rested their heads again upon the woven palm mat and slept the deep night through. With the second morning the Indian village resumed its normal process of existing. The women practised a kind of embryonic agriculture. The men hunted not at all, though they trapped birds; but they fished, pushing out into the turquoise sea in canoes hollowed from tree-trunks. The women plaited baskets, and cut and dried gourds large and small. They had cotton, and they knew how to weave it into the scant clothing needed in such a clime. They scraped the cassava root into meal and made bread, and gathered and brought in the staple fruits. In the village were to be found in some slight number and variety matters not of savage make. During the more than a hundred years since the great Genoese and his Spanish sailors had come upon this group, such things had drifted here, as it were, upon the tide and the winds. Thus there were to be seen several cutlasses and daggers, together with a rusted Andrea Ferrara, a great iron pot, and smaller utensils, a sea-chest, a broken compass, a Spanish short mantle and hat and feather, some piece of furnishing from a church, a drinking-cup, a length of iron chain. But nothing had been left, or had been traded for with Indians of other villages, for a long, long time. The islands were desert and forgotten ... except that now of late sea-robbers and pirates were, for that very reason, taking as anchorage, refuges, and bases of operation, the intricate channels and well-concealed harbours. But no pirate ship had found as yet this inward-lying island. It rested upon the sea as if forgotten or lost or inaccessible, and its fading people knew at least a still and not ungentle autumn.