Limanora: the island of progress

I T was long before our strange guest could be induced to continue his narrative. He had seemed to hesitate as he approached the close of his sojourn in the outer islets of the archipelago. He several times postponed the story of his exit from it in the projectile. And for months he left his history hanging in air, and the strange coffin in which he had been confined executing its parabola from his yacht. There was some excuse for his delay, for the winter had fled, and the birds and the flowering trees around us gloried again in song and colour. He grew restless as the days lengthened, and could not bear to settle in our shelter by the fiord. All that we saw of him for months was his occasional flight from precipice to precipice above the sombre green of the bush. It was as easy for him to flit from knoll to knoll as it was for us to leap a ditch. He had regained his old bird-like gait, that to us was noiseless. What he fed on came to be a puzzle, for he seldom joined us now in our meals; and the old semi-transparency came into his face. Weeks and weeks together none of us would see him. Where he went we knew not, nor had we the heart to follow him and trace his whereabouts. Now and again he would join one or another of us at our work, and indicate the direction in which we should tunnel or dig for the richer layers of wash-dirt. His instinctive sense of the presence of gold beneath the surface of the earth seemed to us in our blind groping miraculous. We never found him mistaken in his indications. But we felt it a kind of desecration to ask him to condescend to such base and trivial pursuits as the research for wealth. At times his absence was so prolonged that we thought he had vanished back to the ring of mist, whence he had come. But a great storm always brought him to our huts again. The summer waned into autumn, and the days began to narrow down. Blasts from the south grew keener; and his flight from us was more circumscribed. We saw him almost daily. When the winter nights began, he gave himself up again to memory. He drew towards us in sympathy, and…