off and more
differentiatingly than could any man, than could even a salt-water black
or a bushman smell one. He could tell when a crocodile, hauled up from
the lagoon, lay without sound or movement, and perhaps asleep, a hundred
feet away on the floor mat of jungle.

He knew more of the language of crocodiles than did any man. He had
better means and opportunities of knowing. He knew their many noises
that were as grunts and slubbers. He knew their anger noises, their fear
noises, their food noises, their love noises. And these noises were as
definitely words in his vocabulary as are words in a human's vocabulary.
And these crocodile noises were tools of thought. By them he weighed and
judged and determined his own consequent courses of action, just like any
human; or, just like any human, lazily resolved upon no course of action,
but merely noted and registered a clear comprehension of something that
was going on about him that did not require a correspondence of action on
his part.

And yet, what Jerry did not know was very much. He did not know the size
of the world. He did not know that this Meringe Lagoon, backed by high,
forested mountains and fronted and sheltered by the off-shore coral
islets, was anything else than the entire world. He did not know that it
was a mere fractional part of the great island of Ysabel, that was again
one island of a thousand, many of them greater, that composed the Solomon
Islands that men marked on charts as a group of specks in the vastitude
of the far-western South Pacific.

It was true, there was a somewhere else or a something beyond of which he
was dimly aware. But whatever it was, it was mystery. Out of it, things
that had not been, suddenly were. Chickens and puarkas and cats, that he
had never seen before, had a way of abruptly appearing on Meringe
Plantation. Once, even, had there been an eruption of strange
four-legged, horned and hairy creatures, the images of which, registered
in his brain, would have been identifiable in the brains of humans with
what humans worded "goats."

It was the same way with the blacks. Out of the unknown, from the
somewhere and something else, too unconditional for him to know any of
the conditions, instantly they appeared, full-statured, walking about
Meringe Plantation with loin-cloths about their middles and bone bodkins
through their noses, and being put to work by _Mister_ Haggin, Derby, and
Bob. That their appearance