When Rantan awoke from sleep it was morning. He had slept the clock round. He awoke hungry and full of vigour¹, and coming out from amongst the trees he stood for a moment by the edge of the little lagoon² above whose sapphire³ waters the white gulls⁴ were flighting against a sky newborn and lovely and filled with distance and light.  
The canoe lay where he had left it, high-beached now, for the tide was out. The bodies that had been tied to the gratings were gone, the gulls had done their work, and nothing showed but the coconut⁶ sennit bindings hanging brown like rags and moving to the breeze.
 
Close to the northernmost of the trees lay a little pond from which he had drunk before lying down; the trees stretching from the pool ran in a dense⁷ line for a quarter of a mile, pandanus, coconut palm, bread fruit, and a dense growth of mammee apple, shading beach and reef to a spot where the naked reef took charge. The rest of the ring of the atoll showed few trees, just a small clump⁸ or two of fifty-foot palms, wand-like and feathery against the blazing blue.
 
There was food here, enough of a sort, but he had neither knife nor fire nor fishing line. He was naked.
 
When they had bound him and kept him and flung him in the canoe to take him to the southern beach of Karolin, he had not bothered about the fact that he was naked—it had not troubled him at all till now. Now that sleep had restored him to himself, the fact of his nakedness came to him as a sudden trouble making him forget for the moment everything else, even food.
 
The trouble was entirely⁹ psychical¹⁰. The climate of the beach was so warm that he did not require clothing as a protection, and there was shade enough to shelter him from the sun if he were too warm. All the same, his nakedness lay on him like a curse. He felt helpless, part of his environment that had clung to him for forty years was gone from him and without it he was all astray; naked as a worm he felt useless as a worm, ready to flinch¹¹ at anything, without initiative, without power.
 
Dick had never known the need of clothes, he had never worn them. It was different with Rantan.
 
The absence of shoes he felt less, though without them he was condemned¹² to keep off the rough coral and keep to the beach sands.
 
He came along the sands towards the canoe. Had you been watching him and had he been clothed in purple and fine linen¹³ you still would have said to yourself “There is something wrong about that man, why does he walk like that?”
 
When he reached the canoe he looked in at the remains¹⁴ of the fruit all squashed and gone bad from the sun; then, turning to the gratings he began to unfasten the strips of coconut sennit that had tied the bodies of the children.
 
The birds had pulled the bodies to pieces, not even the little bones were left and the bindings hung lax; his fingers were not trembling now as they had trembled on Karolin when trying to untie¹⁵ the knots; he had plenty of time to work in and bit by bit the fastenings came undone¹⁶.
 
Then the gulls, if they had bothered to look, might have seen a strange sight: Rantan trying to make himself a loin cloth.
 
Why?
 
He had neither real decency¹⁷ nor shame in his composition, there was no one to see him in his nakedness but the gulls. Why then did he trouble?
 
Trouble he did and the result was scarcely worth his trouble. Then, and still without eating, he turned to and cleared the rotting pandanus and other fruit out of the canoe—he could not swill¹⁸ her out as he had nothing with which to hold water, but she had brought in a long piece of weed tangled¹⁹ on the outrigger; the sun had dried it, but he wet it again in the lagoon water and used it as a sort of mop.
 
Having cleaned her and seen that the mast, sail and paddles were all right, he came back to the trees, plucked some pandanus drupes and began to eat.
 
As he sat down to the food, he made to hitch²⁰ up his left trousers leg, a habit he had. Before leaving the canoe to come back to the trees he had tried to put his h............