The Isle That Was Incomplete

By Frank Exon

LENNOX awoke from his afternoon siesta and wandered drowsily to the door of the hut. With pleasurable an ticipation, his gaze idled along the dazzling ribbon of beach. Then he stiffened, and all signs of drowsiness left him.

From the cool darkness within. Dale watched with some uneasiness. Affecting a nonchalance he was far from feeling, he awaited the outburst he knew must come.

“So you’ve been playing the fool again”, said Lennox, quietly, though his effort at restraint was very obvious.

Dale shrugged a careless agreement.

“You say so. But is that evidence?” he queried, pertly.

“Perhaps not. But you’ll stop your funny business nevertheless—while you're safe.”

“Threats? Again?”

“Yes”, said Lennox, simply, “and for your own good. You don’t seem to realise”, he went on, “how serious I am—how ser ious the position is, though you’ve been warned often enough Here are two of us —once bosom friends—marooned on this two-by-two island. Conditions are abnor mal and yet, such is your folly, you choose to make no allowance for temperamental abnormalities.”

Temperamental?” Dale broke in, con temptuously. “Half the word will do Either half.”

Lennox ignored the interruption “We’ve ueen here a long time now—too long” he on. “Two of us—alone on a few acres of sandbank—under conditions trying be yond belief. We’ve kept physically fit but our mental outlook is obviously strained our perspective is awry; our auras are clashing hopelessly. You won’t help; you prefer, it seems, to throw us still further out of step, to upset what little harmony remains, by deliberately thwarting a whim of mme—your description—which you re gard as ridiculous. It’s no whim; you’re monkeying with something vou don’t understand. Stop it! Leave me to my queerness ... I repeat . . . while you’re safe.

The last was said with a certain wist fulness that Dale missed. He noted only the threat and again became frankly con temptuous.

“Stop what?” he asked. “Stop moving a log—a mere piece of driftwood—because to do so excites your complexes or warps your perspective or some such jargon?

Don’t be so dam’ silly! You’ve been child ishly unreasonable ever since the con founded thing came ashore. You’ve mooned about it for hours like a half-wit. You spend half the day aligning it and view ing it from different angles. I’ve watched you. . . And you expect me to humour you in such madness—for madness it is. I should be doing you a kindness if I set the blasted log adrift again. Some night I will.”

“You’ll not do that!” Dale recognised a new and dangerous quality in the order, and said no more. “It might seem a small thing to do, but the effect. I warn you would be disproportionate. And despite your stupidity it would be lonely here with out you.” Lennox broke off and abruptly left the hut.

DOWN on the beach, where the gannet colonies nested and squawked their protests against his intrusion. Len nox sat and reviewed for the hundredth time the events of the past months. They had come to this tiny outpost, he and Dale, almost a year ago. engaged in mete orological research—forecasting and plot ting the vagaries of the cyclones which neriodically wrought such havoc in those waters. An island steamer dropped them, with their tinned stores and water, and would return when their work was finished.

Miles out there in the Pacific, the nature of their work and the unusualness of the situation had at first appealed to

them, and the days had passed smoothly, if slowly. Lennox tended his instruments and read therefrom the weather auguries, plotted the upper air currents, studied the tides and found a wealth of interest in the coral formations and the marine life of those prolific tropic seas; Dale worked the wireless transmitter that formed their sole link with the outside world; each took his share of the domestic duties, and for a while all had been harmony.

How, then, had the present situation — this perpetual clashing of wills leading to incessant and ever more dangerous quar rels arisen? Lennox knew well enough, but he couldn’t reduce his knowledge to concrete terms that Dale would under stand —or even try to understand. He knew—the reasoning side of him knew— that all the lads accusations were true; that he was being unreasonable, that judged by the standards of the world they had left his queernesses verged closely on madness, and that unless some form of mental discipline were possible a tragedy was imminent. But no exercise of will, he knew now, could throw off the insidious disorder that possessed him—that had striped him of his civilised inheritance oi stability and reduced him to an elemental crudity, capable of any extravagance even of murder. For he realised it might come to that.

He wondered what an alienist would make of his case, what allowances a jury could possibly make for one who, back in his normal world was undoubtedly sane, yet who had slain a companion on the most trivial pretext imaginable? He saw his defence and the absurdity of it; that he had been forced to kill Dale because he persisted in moving a log—a plebeian piece of driftwood —out of a certain posi tion.

A marauding frigate bird, harassing a home-flying gannet, dropped like a plum met across his vision. Lennox eyed the skilled tumbler delightedly, then, as it flattened into a graceful curve, left it with a shudder of distaste. Could even an alienist, witnessing this incident, have gained a clue as to his disorder. He thought not.

The sun dropped low, making a crimson wake that cut across the island’s encircl ing reef in most pleasing fashion. The tide was unduly low and but patchily covered the out-cropping rocks between the beach and the reef. Leaving exposed raw gaps of ooze and sand tangled, smelling sea growth. Long stretches of stagnant water lay dark and forbidding; sinister pools, oily-surfaced and inky black, mirrored the glow of the setting sun. Unlovely slug-like bodies of beche-de-mer lay contorted amongst grey slime; sea snakes writhed, half-covered, in shallow pools; bleached

things—half-glimpsed, half-guessed—dis

turbed the stinking weed or stalked blindly across drying patches until the tide, mak ing slowly, gave kindly covering to their nakedness.

The stale breath of dying things, the stench of rotting weed, the half-sensed exhalations of innumerable slimy crea tions, the almost tangible silence that hung pall-like over all (his ears had long since ceased to register the din of the seabirds) all added to the effect of utter desolation. He might have been the last man in a dying world. Could anyone with any imagination, he asked himself, be ex pected to maintain a normal mental bal ance in this environment?

LENNOX shivered. It was not a setting favourable to his present perilous state.

And yet it was not the solitude alone that had brought him to this border line of sanity; it was scarcely more than a contributing factor. Solitude, he argued,

was an abstract state, and one to which a nature in any way flexible could adapt itself. The real trouble was of a very different order. It was structural; it was a concrete omission; something vital to man’s very being had been left out of the island’s make-up. He knew what that something was—now. The place had no Third Dimension! A few-acre turtlebacked hummock of sand and coral, bare of all vegetation, it modestly broke, and no more than broke, a plane surface of infinite extent.

Lennox saw himself as a three-dimensioned being squeezed into a two-dimensioned world—a queer restricted world of flat parallels made by the ribbon of beach. the water’s edge, the reef, the horizon and

the wispy strata of cloud usually lying thereon. There was no perspective; he had been ruthlessly thrust into a flat pro jection—like those unfortunate figures he had seen in Japanese woodcuts. Save for the sun’s wake at morning and evening and the moon’s in her last quarter—noth ing ever cut across the eternal horizontals; not even the wireless masts or the ele vation of the hut satisfied the eye’s crav ing for something to break an infinite series of re-echoing lines, He hac j whimsically recognised this in the early days of his exile—had even then realised in an intuitive sort of way that playing with the notion was dangerous, Yet, forewarned as he had been, what had at first been a mere irritating dis

taste had flourished in that will-sapping atmosphere into a terrible obsession—de fiant of any attempt at restraint.

But he was still fighting; he was still