never be seen by anyone, after the last of us has gone. I have here, however, a bottle which formerly contained gin; and it corks stoutly. I will do the usual honors; keep our record as long as I can, put it into the gin bottle, cork it, and throw it into the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps sometime . . .
The yacht reposes on the floor of the Pacific, and got there not long after she struck, but we took a few things off. Gibbs is responsible for the gin bottle—and for several other bottles of various brands. What we saved of food is gone, and we are living on dew and limpets.
We even have water. I salvaged a couple of large pieces of canvas, and in these we nightly collect dew. I have read of this expedient, and it is amazing how much is really available—enough to make up the loss by broiling endured during the days, I think. I say this guardedly and after much thought. We are dying, and in part dying of thirst; but if our thirst for water alone were killing us, we would be by this time far worse off than we are. We are dying of rebellion against the constant longing for more water; the constant fear of a night when no dew will gather in sufficient quantities—but our tongues do not swell and protrude.
And then, there are in each of us those individual seeds of destruction of which I spoke in the beginning.
We are gaunt, enfeebled living skeletons. We are worse off in physical condition than Terence McSwiney of Ireland and Mahatma Gandhi of India after longer periods of total food and water starvation. But we are devoted to no cause, and our weakness does not grow progressively worse; if our sufferings were as serious as they are intense, as I said, we would be past writing—past quarreling. . . .
We all bate each other.
Gibbs drinks. . . . Lisa, his beautiful wife, who reminds me of Poe's exquisitely lovely Ligeia, she who could not be conquered by death, more or less keeps him company. Ah, but the thing they did yesterday was horrible, considering they really love each other. And yet—sometimes they seem to hate each other too. Yet without each other, life would be for each of them the desert in which no rose blooms. Put all that together, and you have tragedy.
So yesterday, at high noon here on our desert rock island, they went off together to a little cavern we have found on the north side of the rock, low down toward the water. They took a bottle of wine with them; they said they wanted to drink a toast to the voyage that ended on a rock, and to each other.
I went after them, a little later. I thought they had acted strangely when they went away together. I thought. What if they have gone off together to commit double suicide? But it was not that.
They were in the little cavern. They lay unconscious there, lit by dancing rays of cold light reflected from the moving waters.
I looked around a little, and saw a white powder scattered on the rock floor of the cavern. I tasted it—bitter. Chloral hydrate, I thought. I remembered Gibbs showing me some after we got our things together on the rock. The wine bottle was barely touched. Lisa's mouth showed an encrustation of white—chloral hydrate. Her wrist was cut, and blood was oozing. I heard about that later, but the bleeding didn't amount to much; to so little, and the action of her heart was so faint, at first I thought she was dead.
I went to work. Not nice work. I carry a ball of twine around with me, and I caught limpets by diving, and hurried back and tied the string to a limpet, and stroked and forced the limpet down Lisa's throat, and after a little pulled the string.
She had some automatic reflexes left, and the chloral was swimming in consid-
