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.Later, walking on the beach, famous for the whitest sand in all the world, I see the edge of a sunken boat showing through the sand and think of the prisoners who tried to escape.For a while after leaving the prison, I am under the haunting pain of such a place, all the more oppressive when the sky, which shows through the small, barred windows, is tropical, the smell of the lagoon so near, the flour-white sands so soft to walk on, and flowers, ferns, and tropical bushes abundant and replete with sun.We look for sandalwood trees but find none on the island.Sandalwood was highly prized by China for its religious ceremonies.To extract the oil, the early traders tore the hearts out of the trees, ravaged them, and then moved on.Snorkeling reveals a whole other world of fantastic beauty: red, black and blue starfish; mushroom-shaped corals; brain corals covered with sprays of flowerlike purple tips; mother-of-pearl “flowers” shaped like shells but transparent and floating on a stem as if made of silk; a ruby-red fish; the Moorish idol fish with a long, curved dorsal fin larger than its body, more like a sail or a bird’s wing; black fish, each with two white spots; a velvet-black fish with white stripes, named the zebra fish; one with a jet-black tail and brown front edged with brilliant orange; others with turquoise collars.The colors are phosphorescent, transparent, jewellike.The fish hide among the corals and in the many caves made by the action of the sea on volcanic rock.Above the surface ride the beautiful, painted pirogues, carved out of trees, with outriggers and sails.The Melanesian natives have strong bodies and the same strong feet of Gauguin’s Polynesians of Tahiti.The island is dotted with caves and grottoes.They are formed inside the volcanic depths and are filled with the familiar stalactites and stalagmites.At the very end of the Kouaouate Grotto there is an opening through which the sunlight falls like the aura over the heads of saints in Biblical pictures; and with this cascade of light are banyan roots falling like ladders down twenty feet, throwing great white tentacles for fifty feet along the floor of the cave, seeking water.Here on a ledge, exposed to the dim light from above, the natives once placed the skulls of their dead.It was their belief that only the skull should be preserved.Formerly, all the caves were burial grounds.It is difficult to forget the prisoners who built the roads we travel.But those who were pardoned and returned to France, did they remember the lagoons, the dazzling white sand, the tangled acacias, the miles of ferns, the floating islands on the Bay of Gold, the smell of sandalwood, the tranquil pirogues carrying coconuts? And the grottoes like the caves of our dreams?My Turkish GrandmotherFrom the diary of Anaïs Nin.I was travelling on Air France to New York via Paris when the plane ran into a flock of sea gulls and we had to stop at Athens.At first we sat around and waited for information, looking out now and then at the airplane.Vague news filtered out.Some passengers became anxious, fearing they would miss their connections.Air France treated us to dinner and wine.But after that there was a shortage of seats, so I sat on the floor like a gypsy, together with a charming hippie couple with whom I had made friends during the trip.He was a musician and she was a painter.They were hitchhiking through Europe with backpacks.She was slender and frail-looking, and I was not surprised when he complained that her knapsack was full of vitamins.As we sat talking about books, films, music, a very old lady approached us.She looked like my Spanish grandmother.Dressed completely in black, old but not bent, with a face that seemed carved of wood through which the wrinkles appeared more like veins of the wood.She handed me a letter she carried around her neck in a Turkish cloth bag.It was written in exquisite French.It was a request from her daughter to help her Turkish mother in every way possible.The daughter was receiving her doctorate in medicine at the Sorbonne and could not come to fetch her mother for the ceremony, so she had entrusted her to the care of Air France.I read the letter and translated it for my hippie friends
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