His skin was dry like cracked mud, and his back was arched like an earthen mound. It is like rain, like the heart of a woman.” The Earth Sage showed the children how to arrange the rocks. For the land is the most precious thing on this island. “You must love the land, my children, and ring it in with your love. The island was small and the people lacked farming tools, so pebbles were piled around the plots, to keep the soil moist and to serve as a windbreak. One of the only starchy plants on the island, the luxuriant akaba, a word that meant “shaped like the palm of a hand,” seemed to raise innumerable hands in supplication to the sky. “Oh my child, people can’t grow scales, just like a sea turtle can’t sleep with its belly to the sky.”Īnother day, the Earth Sage took the children to the field in the hollow, to the place where the akaba grew. The children here all had enormous eyes, like the eyes of a nocturnal animal. “So what if we grow scales?” one boy asked. His speech carried the smell of the sea, and there was salt on his every breath.

He talked until the boys became youths, and until the youths endured the rite of passage and became men. He talked until the sun dipped below the waves. “If you are so careless as to eat an asamu, you will grow a ring of scales around your navel, a ring of scales that you could never finish peeling off your whole life long.” Leaning on a whalerib staff, the Sea Sage hobbled over and sat under a tree every day at dusk to tell the little ones all the stories of the sea. For this reason, it was counted among the creatures that could not be eaten. The asamu, for instance, was a black-and-white fish sent to spy on people, and to test them. But some of the ocean’s spawn were the avatars of Kabang. The island followed the tides, floating around in the ocean, which was a source of sustenance for the people. In the beginning, people believed, there was nothing but a shoreless sea, until Kabang (the word for “God” in the Wayo Wayoan language) created the island for them to live on, as if placing a small, hollow clamshell in a tub of water. As far as island memory reached, the white man had once visited the island, but nobody had ever left and brought back news of another land. The island was situated in the midst of an immense ocean, far from any continent.

The people of Wayo Wayo thought the whole world was but a single island.

The man with the compound eyes