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however, climb into the crown of a tall tree and fling himself forward, grasping arm-thick liana vines to hold himself aloft before dropping into the next tree. Cohn admired his skill in plunging from one to another without stopping to think about it.
    In the rain forest Buz left Cohn behind, a compass in his hand, trying to hack his way out of the dense undergrowth that made hash of his clothes. Cohn wielded a fine, exquisitely sharp, French saber from the Franco-Prussian War that the chimp had discovered, and borrowed from Dr. Bünder’s trunk.
    The massive equatorial rain forest was canopied with interwoven branches of leaves festooned with mossy looping vines, through which sunlight barely filtered. The effect was of lit green gloom over a shadowy forest floor. Saplings smothered each other in their struggle to arrive at light.
    Parts of the forest floor were covered with flowers. Cohn caught glimpses of vermilion, white, and yellow blossoms. Man and beast had expired but not flowers; the Lord loved their fragrance and color. But who were the pollinators?
unless there was a little bee around—God’s grace—fructifying the little flowers? How vegetation existed without insects or other small creatures to pollinate plants, Cohn didn’t know but could guess: the Lord Himself had creatively taken over. Even the distorted fruits Cohn had found on many trees on his arrival had reassumed their natural forms. ““Grow,”” He said, because that was His nature. And trees and flowers blossomed and bloomed.
    The Lord enjoyed beginnings and He usually began by phasing some things out—to make room. Creation soon created crowds. What was He maybe into now? A touch of life without death? Bacteria, for instance, also continued to exist. Maybe this island was Paradise, although where was everybody who had been rumored to be rentless in eternity? No visible living creature moved through the outsize vegetation, only a lone Jewish gentleman and a defenseless, orphaned chimp he had, by chance, befriended on a doomed oceanography vessel.
    It took them about two weeks to encircle the island in their yellow raft, camping on land at night, eating from wild fruit trees and root patches, sucking sugar cane; and where there were no streams or waterholes, drinking fresh water Buz found in tree holes. They had begun this journey on the beach below Cohn’s cave and had paddled east, then north at the highlands. The island was shaped like a broken stubby flask, it seemed to Cohn. Its bottom had split off in the recent Devastation and sunk into the sea.
    On the northern coast as they paddled west, the shoreline was indented by a series of coves and short bays with coarse,
sandy beaches; and where the mouth of the flask appeared, a half-dozen atolls shielded the shore.
    Every so often they had drawn the raft up on the beach and commenced a fossil dig nearby for a day or so. Cohn kept extensive notes on the bones they unearthed. He was interested in bone movement. And he searched for hominids and found varieties of small ancient animals. He had discovered some surprising samples and felt he ought to knock out an article or two, if for no other reason than to keep up the habit. He wished he had saved his typewriter from the sea, the loss a result of momentary confusion. Buz enjoyed making small holes bigger and breaking rocks with Cohn’s hammer. When his eye lit on an interesting bone he beckoned Cohn over to make the identification. To date they had found six teeth of Eohippus—an extraordinary find, two chimp leg bones and a gorilla jaw, possibly from Pliocene times. Also a Jurassic mouse, and an ancient giant raccoon from the Miocene epoch. It was a pretty old island.
    Cohn guessed from the vegetation that it lay somewhere in what had once been the Indian Ocean, perhaps off the southern coast of old Africa, possibly over a more or less dead volcano that had bubbled up in the ocean bed. Too bad he had left behind all his diving