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416 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
Daybreak.
At windward passage, four hundred miles due east, the sun is rising. Wind east-northeast, thirty-eight knots, with gusts to forty-five: a gale.
Black waves, wind-feathered. White birds, dark birds.
The trade winds freshen at first light, and the sea rises in long ridges, rolling west.
Sunrise at longitude 76, 19 degrees north latitude.
Sunrise at longitude 77.
Sunrise at the lesser Caymans. Horizon rises from horizon. To the westward, Grand Cayman is gray; its high cumulus, visible to migrant birds a hundred miles away, is a gray-pink.
The sun, coming hard around the world: the island rises from the sea, sinks, rises, holds.
[...]
Sunrise at Newlands and Careening Place and Booby Cay.
Sunrise at Savanna. A lone dog in the road, stiff-legged. Poinsettia and jasmine, low white walls.
Green parrots cross the sunburst to the mango trees. Light polishes gray-silver cabin sides, glows in the bolls of the wild cotton, shines the dun flanks of a silken cow in pastures of rough guinea grass; a gumbo limbo tree, catching up sun in red translucent peals of shedding bark, glows on black burned-over ground between gray jutting bones of ocean limestone.
New sun on a vermilion fence. Breadfruit and tamarind.
Cock crow.
Sunrise at Spotts Bay and Matilda Pond. In a woman's tongue tree, the dawn wind passes and racketing pods fall still.
Sunrise at Prospect, on South Sound, abandoned since the hurricane of '32. The Prospect Church decays in an old orchard, grown over now be seaside wood; the roof of the church is wind-slotted, battered by gales. Lizards scatter in the leaves and sun-spots that stray in the church door, and a hermit crab, snapped shut, rocks minutely in the silence.
In the graveyard behind the falling church grows oleander and white frangipani. On the ironshore below, incoming seas burst through black fissures in the rock, and black crabs scatter.
Dass it. All kinds of birds and rats and wildcats, jaguars, y'know, and dogs, and what dey calls ringtails--all dem vermin comes out de swamps and jungles dat lays just behind dat beach, and wild hogs, too, dey say--all of dat is swarmin de beaches, and de few dat slips past de vermin got to scromble through dat big surf dere, which is one of de worst in all de world, and dem dat gets past de breakers, dey got to deal with all de sharks and fish in de deep water, and de mon- o'-war birds pickin at'm from de top when dey surfaces to get dere breath. In de monin' time when dose young ones dat come out from de night is restin in de water, dat mornin de sky is littered with birds. Mon-o'-war birds. De boobies don't grob dem so much, but de mon-o'-war do. Dey millions of birds dere. Dat mornin de sea is covered with baby turtle and de sky is black with birds, just black with mon-o'-war birds, swoopin down. Dey is very few dat gets away. Oh, very few!