Spontoon Island
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Extracts from a Diary
by Amelia Bourne-Phipps
-edited by Simon Barber-
24 October, 1936 to 30 October, 1936



Monday October 24th, 1936

A bright Autumn day, which our Tutors took advantage of to get us some mixed formation flying. This is the first time Songmark has put up all nine aircraft together, the six Tiger Moths, the Sea Osprey, the Junkers and even my own Sand Flea. Of course, having such radically different aircraft together is rather a challenge - my Sand Flea has a top speed that is uncomfortably close to the stalling speed of the JU86; it is a good thing we did not borrow that Tillamook-built Schneider Trophy racer, whose flight envelope would hardly overlap with me at all!

With two students in the Junkers, that was a large enough formation for my year to fly in two shifts with one ready to act as ground crew. We refuelled, looked over and turned the landed aircraft round at good speed, managing four "sorties" before we broke for lunch and handed the Tiger Moths over to the second-years. They are not getting any flights in the Junkers, and except for our friend Saffina they have to keep their paws off my Sand Flea. I share it freely enough with my year, and quite a few of the second-years have aircraft at home they could bring.

Our Tutors have explained that anyone who brings an aircraft or boat over is welcome to do so in their own time and at their own expense, but if they want to share Songmark hangars and fuel, it must be available for teaching. Which is only fair; certainly I could hardly afford to fly the Sand Flea on my allowance. I recall Father's stories of the first days of the Royal Flying Corps back in 1912, when several of the pilots brought their own aircraft along, in the same way that it was the done thing in the old cavalry regiments to provide one's own mount. Father being a military engineer, he was tasked with building hangars and airship mooring masts while the R.F.C. trained its own support staff.

After lunch - climbing again, though not on the rocks of Eastern Island for a change. We were ferried across to Main Island, where just south of the Oriental village the old Plantation railway crossed a deep stream gorge. In some islands they would have just put a log trestle over it and replaced it every five years (untreated timber does not last well in this climate) but this is a very nicely engineered stone arch bridge some forty foot high, from when British companies were busy on the islands. Thinking about it, although the bridge is the tallest stone structure on Main Island, it is totally invisible in the narrow wooded ravine until one almost bumps ones snout on it. It is certainly the only structure anyone would let us climb on with these techniques.

I was reminded again of the climbing skills of Professor Schiller and G-U-U as we faced the sheer wall of basalt blocks. There is scarcely a paw-hold to be seen, so we were issued with slater's hammers and rock pegs to make the climb in "dangle and whack" style. I noticed it is an awfully noisy way of doing things, especially with the echoes bouncing off the arch above us - certainly we are not going to sneak up on any railway guards like T.E. Loris of Arabia.

As I would have guessed, Li Han and Jasbir Sind did best on this, with most of Prudence's dorm a close second. Missy K and Irma Bundt had to proceed very slowly, having the same pegs as everyone else and a lot more weight to put on them. But we all reached the top and swung round the corner to the natural rocks on the side, looking up at the cast-iron plate on the arch proudly signing it as "Lionel Plantation Line No. 3, Chief Engineer Mr. Hornby Doublo 1890". Poor Mr. Doublo's hard work was not destined to see a lot of use; by the time of the Gunboat Wars the railways had stopped running. It was no trouble for plantations originally funded from England to send out second-hand rolling stock and spare parts, but being by then the Spontoon Islands Independencies they probably found it harder to spare the hard currency. Considering most of the island Plantations failed commercially and there were few other exports and no tourists as yet, the start of the century must have been rather a lean time for the Spontoonies.

Just to limber us up after hours of stretching and straining on the vertical face, Miss Blande had us jog the mile back down to the beach. Actually it was more than a jog; she consulted her watch and announced cheerfully that we had eight minutes before the water-taxi left, and anyone left behind was on their own.

I have to say, Songmark tutors "lead from the front" and though she is surely twice our age Miss Blande has quite a turn of speed when she needs it. We all made it down to the beach on time, though the last hundred yards Adele Beasley was carried by her dorm after a falling six-pound breadfruit bounced off her head. Definitely that girl has no luck with these things. At least in her new dorm she gets some help; Missy K would have ignored her and Beryl started bets on how long she would take to struggle back to Eastern Island, and how severely our Tutors would react to her being late.

By the time we got back for supper we were all ravenous, and happily it was mostly sweet potatoes rather than poi. Prudence has a theory about why the Songmark meals are so uninspiring (apart from the cost of filling us every meal with imported roast beef and potatoes) in that when we finish our courses and (probably) have less hectic lives we will not go on eating sprees of the same sized meals and spoil our figures. It is certainly true that nobody gorges on Poi unless they are really hungry, or native-born Polynesians. At least fish and vegetables are a diet few furs have a problem with their religion or their digestions; on the few occasions we get served a proper "flight breakfast" Ada Cronstein and Hannah Meier pass on the sausage and bacon and just double up on the fried eggs and tomatoes.

Molly and I went out again to Casino Island, where Madame Maxine had some more useful and fascinating lessons for us. Having learned last week how to persuade people, we first practiced on that, then moved on to how to put them at their ease. Once someone is relaxed they are far easier to pump for information and suchlike. There are professional secrets known to waitresses, receptionists and other furs who deal closely with the public, that we practiced all evening. Madame Maxine tells us that in most places Trade Secrets are not up for sale, but our sponsor thinks these are likely to be useful.


Wednesday October 26th, 1936

It is interesting how many people are actually keeping diaries in Songmark! Of my dorm, only Molly is not; Beryl has suggested it would get dull writing "Got up, did something insanely violent, had tea, went to bed" every day. Molly replied Beryl's own would be much the same with the day's labours reading "did something profitably criminal." Both are great exaggerations, and rather wish-fulfilment as far as those two are concerned. From what I have gathered, Beryl keeps a ledger rather than a diary proper, as she measures everything she ever does in terms of profit and loss, not necessarily involving money. She has mentioned something about Piet and her "keep things interesting" by billing each other, but she was probably joking. More than once she has earnestly claimed to greatly value the truth, and as with currency if there is too much of it around inflation devalues it. Eva has mentioned the state of Germany in 1923 when furs were carrying their wages home in wheelbarrows, and going on strike twice a day for wages to keep up with the inflation. Certainly my brother's stamp collection has a fifty milliard (50,000,000,000) mark stamp from then. * And that's just a stamp to put on a letter.

The past two days have been solid, steady work with nothing much to write about. Our logbooks are filling up; third-years get the lion's share of the flying time here (Saffina is not the only second-year who is jealous, and most do not have her good manners about it) and we are flying rain and shine, with increasingly difficult exercises. Today we were taking turns flying the Sea Osprey with one engine or the other out; it can just about hold altitude that way with only two crew and no cargo, but it is a very tricky thing to fly with the rudder hard over to one side or the other.

Some things stay the same. Liberty Morgenstern is in trouble again for fighting; not with any of Red Dorm again (pity) but with Rumiko. We thought Liberty had mellowed after a year at Songmark - in fact she has, to an extent. Maria has an Italian proverb about how you can't polish pig manure. I am pleased to report that Rumiko gave as good as she got, even though both are now under the care of Mrs. Oelabe. In separate rooms of course.

• Editor's note: The Editor's own stamp collection has one of those!


Thursday October 27th, 1936

Maria had a lot to write home about today, with not one but two Vostok "Balalaikas" parked at the end of the runway like giant silver-grey turtles. Watching them land was quite an education; they must have arrived empty and lighter-than-air, so getting them down in a hurry full of hot hydrogen was quite an exercise. Of course, a regular airship would have vented gas but that is wasteful; the Balalaika is meant to take off and land with little ground support and replenishing. Instead, they swooped in over the mooring mast and swivelled the engines and stub wings ninety degrees, actually pushing the craft into the ground! It is a very different experience flying a buoyant craft; one thinks of gravity ("Sir Isaac" as the pilots call it) very differently. We never have to worry about forcing our aircraft into the ground, quite the reverse.

There seems to be quite a lot more Spontoonie official traffic with Vostok these days; I noticed today when we went for our self-defence drills that the instructor had a Vostok issue self-loading rifle I recognised from our trip there last Christmas. Molly looked on it with awe, whispering it was an updated "Fedorov Avtomat" that they built after the Great War when restarting wartime projects after things collapsed in Russia. Only a few hundred were built and made it to the front, given the chaotic state of Russia in 1916. She says one of her Father's business associates, a Mr. "Popgun" Polawski, had one he brought back to Chicago from the Poland/Russian War, and had awful trouble getting any of the ammunition for it. The rifle was Tsarist Russian but the cartridges it took were Japanese, oddly enough. Since the 1905 war the two countries have not exactly been on speaking terms, and the Vostok government seem no keener on Japan than the Reds are.

I must ask Svetlana about this; having a Vostok girl in Songmark is another strange departure. Mind you, as a ballerina she is also the only Songmark girl who wears a tutu (not on our exercises or in the street of course, but she brought it with her. I suppose it might be hard to find one on Spontoon.)

Thinking of cold climates, we have been given our timetable for the rest of the term, and next week we start on the cold-weather side of our course. This will finish in the Aleutian trips - I remember when we were first-years our friend Nootka was from there, and proudly claimed they have the most extreme weather in the world. Not the coldest, but with violent unpredictability that makes the English weather seem as timetabled as a monsoon. I remember well on North Vostok how things could go in two minutes from sunshine to a screaming gale one could hardly stand up in, and the Aleutians are reputedly worse than that.

Some of us are more worried than others about this; Li Han and Jasbir have never even been in snow before. Jasbir says you can see it on the far Himalayan peaks from foothills near her home state of Utterly Pradesh, but it might as well be on the moon for all people think of going there. The sensation of one's tail going numb joint by joint will be a new one to them.

Our alpine skiing star Maria seems perfectly happy with the idea, and Molly is fairly resigned to it. After all, we have heard a lot about Chicago winters from her. The difference is, she says, that nobody tries to camp out in a Chicago winter. She has mentioned quite casually how the Police go around parks and alleyways in the mornings marking out frozen bodies of tramps and derelicts who have put their faith in cardboard "cabins" against twenty degrees of frost.

We might have had a relaxing evening sitting by the radio, but the time is running out for our dance challenge to the S.I.T.H.S. and Molly and Maria needed to get up to speed with the new authentic Orpington Island moves we worked out with Namoeta's help at the weekend. So for an hour and a half we went downstairs to a solid floor and practiced full tilt, drawing an interested crowd of admirers.

Eva was there with the rest of her dorm; she was scratching her head-fur wondering if the gramophone record of swing hula counted as "Degenerate Music" which she is opposed to on principle. It seems back in her homeland there is quite a musical revolution going on; the Government approve of modern electrical instruments such as the Theremin and the Trautonium, and her school has a Trautonium band that plays on national celebrations, political rallies and such. Possibly they want a new sound to emphasise their new outlook, that is as far from the jazz saxophones typical of the Weimaraner Republic as possible.

Beryl was trying to interest some of the first-years in a mining prospectus that smelled suspiciously of very fresh ink. She claims there is a syndicate who have found a lode of very rich Trautonium ore on Cranium Island, and only need funds to develop it. Given European brass bands have instruments made with brass and Caribbean steel bands have theirs of steel, it would make a twisted kind of sense. Furthermore, one could send expedition after expedition into Cranium Island and none of them would return to blow the whistle on Beryl's dubious ore body.

Fortunately Songmark girls are generally chosen for their common sense, and after Beryl's prank at the start of term with the so-called "Spontoonie National Anthem" none of them believed a word of it. Beryl is never discouraged by such things - by all accounts she does very well at the smaller casinos not just by playing but persuading winners at five in the morning to invest some of their winnings in her schemes. * They have more chance on making money throwing it on the most crooked roulette wheel on Krupmark.

* Editor's note: in plain text in the diary margin there is what may be part of some sort of crossword puzzle. It merely says "Clue: ... Fool ...Money...Parted, 4 across."


Friday October 28th, 1936

Quite a nautical day for me! I am the only one of my dorm taking a seafaring option this year - obviously Helen is not, and Molly and Maria are busy elsewhere. In fact only Sophie D'artagnan, Ada Cronstein and Madeleine X are following me towards the Day Skipper qualification, all having enjoyed messing around in boats back home.

We were up early to catch the eight o'clock tide, and soon sweeping out in one of the tourist yachts that their owners are very glad to find customers for this time of year. Mind you, the Captain had pointed out that by September a third of his boats were laid up for repair. Wooden keeled boats are not amusement-park dodgem cars, though many tourist customers have not grasped this idea.

Although late October may not be great weather for lying around on the beaches, it is perfect for sailing with a stiff South-Westerly breeze and with all sails set we set a cracking pace, straight downwind to the North end of Eastern Island, spotting the junior years struggling up the rock faces. Even at high tide we had Sophie taking soundings; less than two fathoms of water under our keel as we slipped over the shifting sandbanks. The whirlpool is invisible at high and low tide but we kept well clear of its position on the R.I.N.S. chart. They update the chart every year for these sandbanks, and still advise all shipping to take soundings. One big storm can change everything overnight.

Getting back into the central waters was a lot trickier; I recall hearing folk tell of that Captain Gary being looked on with amazement as he sailed in from the North-East. We took the usual long way round, tacking and beating East of Eastern Island (seeing a very fine Lufthansa Junkers G38 swooping over on landing approach, passengers in the wing cabins waving down at us). Then some tricky work keeping clear of the reefs around Sacred Island and South Island, hard to starboard and straight down the wind to Casino Island, three hours after we started.

Sailing is decidedly hard work, and by luncheon we were all in. Two years ago we would not have stood a chance at this - certainly we have developed a lot more than our minds studying here. A refreshing luncheon of roast fish and sweet potato with a custard apple apiece put us to rights, and we were back in Songmark just in time to dive on a fight!

We could have seen that one coming. Though Red Dorm have calmed down a lot recently and Tatiana greatly so, having her along with Svetlana from Vostok was always going to be trouble. For a ballerina, Svetlana certainly knows some spectacular moves, and it was anyone's guess who would have actually won this one. They would both have been severely injured, regardless.

Maria held Svetlana in a Triple Nelson while I tried to get to the cause of the trouble. Red Dorm had actually won the year's gramophone fairly on points, and Tatiana had been loudly playing some Russian military songs out of the window, when Svetlana lost her temper entirely.

Having seen the remains of the smashed record, it is hard to know who to believe. It is an album of poetry set to music apparently; some Russian poet called Ilya Ehrenberg. He is Officially Approved by Ioseph Starling it seems - from what Svetlana tells us he exhorts his listeners to "wade tail-deep in the blood of the capitalist monsters", "hang the Aristos in burning nets of barbed wire" and "smash the fascist beast with a spiked fist of socialist steel.". Not exactly a romantic ballad, I would guess. I can see why someone from Vostok would not have it in her hit parade, and move on to "hits" of a more solid kind.

Of course Tatiana interprets things differently, and claims her Embassy sent it to her as some sort of political care package, and we will have take her word for it as the shellac record was broken over her head. She was looking quite smug until Helen appeared from the second-year dorms waving another one in the collection by the same poet; we shall see how Miss Devinski likes it. Or not.

Not a bad day; I get to sail round the islands and put one of Red Dorm into a quadruple hammerlock, and all before supper!


Saturday October 29th, 1936

We were woken by a definitely alarming noise this morning - a sort of thundering roar like a blowtorch. This is not the sort of thing one wants going off unexpectedly in a wooden Songmark hut, so in about twenty seconds all of us were outside (Prudence's dorm heading out of the windows on an unexpected wire ladder. Their room is furthest from the stairs, after all.)

As it happened, there was nothing to worry about. We found a very pleased Jasbir Sind and dorm on the ground floor looking at the boiler for our one real bath. A five gallon fuel tank was rigged up to feed what looked like a vacuum cleaner which was putting out a lot of noise and I think twenty kilowatts of heat.

It is getting chilly enough to make deep baths an inviting idea, and we all have agreed that scavenging old orange crates and other scrap wood is a lot of trouble to keep the old boiler fed. Jasbir has been sniffing around for any fuel going cheap, and found some so troublesome to use that Superior is giving it away. It seems they work on a lot of ships and have to drain fuel tanks of the heavy oil big marine engines use - the sumps are generally contaminated with water, paint chips and rust flakes that nobody really wants to risk getting into their engines.

Of course, getting this to burn cleanly is a major engineering problem; getting it to burn at all is tricky enough. In the marine engines it is heated, reduced to a fine spray and squeezed to about a hundred atmospheres before igniting, a match dropped into a bucket of the stuff would just go out. She has scavenged an electric air compressor and rigged a rather natty fuel pre-heater she starts off with a cup of regular petrol - the overall effect is a sort of marriage between a giant blowtorch and a camping primus stove. Loud, but impressive and useful. I could see Miss Devinski looking on with interest and taking notes. If Jasbir's dorm does not win the gramophone this month I will be surprised.

We are back on Songmark rations, which is an improvement. Two weeks of having the second-years feeding us has been better than expected, with nobody down with food poisoning, accidental or otherwise. Last year we managed to feed our seniors without resorting to poi, though. To be honest, with the budget we could manage without the stuff entirely, so one assumes our Tutors like the stuff.

Saffina is relaxing now, she says, after having been in charge of the budget for our dainty fare (for which read huge bowls of rice or mashed sweet potato with taro leaf and fish stew on top). The second-years know by now just how much we have to eat on this course, and now take pride in not making us eat Maconochie emergency rations having run out of shopping money by the end of the fortnight. We might be more critical of the menu if we had not made the same tricky shopping choices last year.

We needed to clean our plates today, as the showdown with the S.I.T.H.S has arrived. Three dorms of first-years came over with us and Jasbir, who has seen us practicing but not the whole dance routine.

On Main Island there was quite a crowd gathered, with Missy Aha and her trusty notebook ready to record the contest for the Daily Elele. It seems our reputation has spread, that or the papers are stuck for off-season sporting news this weekend. Anyway, she has a rival reporter from the Mirror; a weasel girl who Maria says has been thrown out by three newspapers for giving tabloid journalism a bad name. She seems quite at home at The Mirror, Maria added.

It was quite an epic. The S.I.T.H.S. team went first, a development of their previous Oriental influenced dance. I am still not sure where they are getting it from; Jasbir says it does not look Indian or anywhere nearby, and she knows most styles as far as the Dutch East Indies. It is very graceful to be sure, and they have practiced a lot since we last shook skirts at each other. Trying to chase them down that route would be a bad move; they have too much of a lead and we agreed to go with our Orpington number.

Helen had made arrangements with the band beforehand, as our dance number was rather outside the usual routines. One of the first-years, a shrew girl, looked as if she was trying to dance along to it, started resonating and eventually fell over twitching (nothing unusual for her, her dorm say; they added that this Alpha plays most 78 records at 110 rpm for some reason. It may be a Cranium Island custom.)

Anyway, none of us fell over. It was close, but we stayed upright for the most gruelling dance we have ever done - about as tiring as running up Mount Tomboabo with a pack on. I could hear the judges spotting the Orpington Island style, but we up-engined it like a Tiger Moth with one of Mr. Mitchell's R-5 racing engines! Like a Schneider Trophy racer we were worn out after one race, and almost collapsed by the end of it. The crowd were pleased, and the judges went out for ten minutes before deciding. It was rather like comparing apples and oranges next to the S.I.T.H.S effort but - we won!

A fine celebration at the Missing Coconut had to be cut short by our having to get back in time for our gate guard duty. We left Jasbir and co. to shepherd the first-years back to Songmark after they had quite finished discovering copious quantities of coconut rum punch do not mix well with bumpy water-taxi rides home. Helen's ears went right down as she commented she had the same results on the boat and none of the pleasures first.

Actually, Helen was the only one who had a decent night's sleep. I expect a lot of Songmark graduates spend their final week after exams asleep ten hours a night. And just think, back at Saint Winifreds's we thought of staying up late as a great treat!

Molly and Maria were on the late shift. Molly has found an ancient "sword bayonet" nearly two feet long and made an adaptor to fix it to her T-Gew to make it more menacing. As if it needed it. Maria uses the late shifts to talk through her articles with Molly and the moon as audience. It is encouraging that Molly has quite left off griping about Maria's Uncle stamping hard on organised crime (Liberty Morgenstern has said he just dislikes the competition, which for once may have a grain of truth in it.) It looks like Il Puce willl end up wiping out organised crime from Italy - and that is a legacy few people would take issue with. Nobody would be stupid enough to bring it back in, after all.

Our Tutors seem to have decided I will be good to pair up with Adele Beasley. Miss Devinski hinted that I could use my local knowledge to help her with her problems. I hardly think she means our dance classes. That is Adele's mystery; she is as skilled and knowledgeable as anyone, just things happen to her with a vengeance. Her left ear still has the scar where last year at home she was crossing a field stile that collapsed under her, throwing her onto the barbed wire. I am sure I could have examined that stile all day, jumped up and down on it to test it and given it a clean bill of health for it to snap under Adele just the same.

As we wandered around the perimeter looking out for non-existent burglars, I managed to find out that she has not always been so unlucky. She confessed that her parents are really treasure-hunters, not archaeologists as she has been telling us all this time. I had wondered how traditionally ill-funded academics managed to send their daughter to Songmark. There was a most profitable find in a burial mound of an extinct Alaskan tribe that they "investigated"; not quite in the Laura Shieling mode involving large quantities of dynamite, but close enough. She says her parents have had no particular trouble, but somehow trouble has followed her ever since.

Just to make the point, two of the guard dogs started to follow her around despite her attempts to shoo them off. This usually happens only to canine girls, not to rabbits. Adele sighed, and hinted that there are certain reasons that she would probably get thrown out for if our Tutors knew. Considering our Tutors know just about every move we make and are worried about having to fail Adele anyway, this is definitely not encouraging.

There is certainly something wrong with Adele, that is none of her fault. It reminded me rather of my friend Angelica, whose aircraft is decidedly cursed from what Saimmi has told us. Hmm. Digging up ancient Native burial grounds for profit is about the number one risk in the curse business, and the odd thing is she swears she was never actually involved in doing that. Then, we have heard curses resemble artillery in that it rarely lands exactly where and when it was intended. I resolved to try and help her, and to talk with Saimmi about the problem.

Two in the morning is quite late enough to get to bed, especially after our dance contest! The only real consolation is - we are at least in our beds, which are not luxurious but better than we will be managing for the next few weeks' cold-weather exercises as clean fur and warm paws become a cherished and fading memory. Getting Maria up is never easy at eight in the morning, let alone two.


Sunday October 30th, 1936

Dear Diary - if there is one thing Songmark teaches you (mainly by making you go without them) it is the value of the simple pleasures in life. Waking up in a warm, dry room while rain hammers on the windows outside rather than dripping through an improvised bivouac in the forest, was the first one I woke up to today. Again, although the breakfast of mashed breadfruit was the same as we have every Sunday, it was hot and filling and rather better than the chewy cold shellfish I recall living on when Maria escaped with me across Vostok last year.

Still, even on a Sunday there is no lounging around here. Helen and Saffina were ready the minute after breakfast, and as promised we took Eva Schiller with us. This proved to be an interesting experience. We almost expected her to change her mind when she saw the weather, but she is a Songmark girl after all and as much an ambassador for her nation as Maria is.

As we had Eva along, we varied our usual South Island route and headed on a longer water-taxi trip towards Main Island. There is a small isle just off the delta leading from Sacred Lake river, that we know little about. We met Saimmi there, and introduced her to Eva.

 It was a strange meeting. Eva is of course a Euro, but deeply steeped in a tradition both ultra-modern and ancient in places. She has been telling us of her Uncle's department having successfully "borrowed" from the vaults of a ruined Sicilian castle the actual Last Book of Klingsor, some ancient scientist who had some rather strange ideas. It seems the Vatican had the book on its proscribed list for a thousand years, and is not the sort of paperback one could pick up in Woolworth's. Unlike most modern scientists, the Ahnenerbe not only believe such things work, but are actively researching how.

Maria has quoted an Italian proverb many times, "keep your friends close to you and your enemies closer still" - not that Eva seems to be anything but neutral, but I can well believe Saimmi wants to keep her in view. After all, her Uncle did head out with the Fragment I retrieved from Cranium Island, and the main one was not two miles away at the bottom of Sacred Lake. If anyone is to reassemble those pieces it should be Saimmi, though she has admitted she has no idea of how she could safely render them harmless yet. Unfortunately Saimmi does not have the option of simply forgetting about the problem; people such as Kansas Smith know about the power to be gained from the fragments, and there is the Krupmark one presumably there for the taking if anyone finds out where it is.

Not surprisingly, Saimmi said nothing about those artefacts. The unnamed island has enough to tell about; in the ancient times it was a place of punishment and possibly sacrifice. She invited us to feel for any vestige of that influence, while we sat in the rain grateful for our banana leaf parasols (Spontoon Main Island does grow bananas in the sunniest parts, though yields are not wonderful most years and harvest is the latest in the Pacific.) Oddly enough, none of us could find any stain on the spirit of the place; rather strange even after centuries if it has been put to the uses Saimmi described.

It seems that this island is serving as a test for cleansing rituals. She tells us it was the first one Priestesses landed on a century ago, where they could work undisturbed by the plantation companies and missionaries. Too small for a plantation of its own and with no decent harbour, the islet was of no commercial interest and has never even had a native village. She described how the last traces of taint have been removed - sufficient to say it is used by courting couples, and girls who have a "hunting license" that nominally only covers Casino Island, are encouraged to make use of the island if anyone wants Native scenery.

I must take Jirry here next time I see him. It is in a good cause, after all.

Back to Songmark, with Eva asking very shrewd questions all the way and scribbling in her waterproof notebook. As Maria says, you can learn a lot about people from the questions they ask. Maria has been developing a lot of local contacts, mostly on Casino Island, and tells me about them "for distribution." Although she has not spelled it out I think she means if Mr. Sapohatan asks I am to tell him right away. Maria has gained a shrewd idea of the sort of things Helen and I get tasked with, and while she is here she is being a fairly good Spontoonie Citizen.

An early night tonight after a deep, long bath apiece (paying Jasbir in IOUs for Song Sodas, to use her new heater) and an extra supper from our private larder. Tomorrow we say goodbye to that.


(And they did. As described in "Thrills and Chills.")



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