Explore "The Island of Desire" by Robert Dean Frisbie on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The Augustuses had notified us that on the fifteenth of February there would be a birthday feast at Matauea to celebrate Susanna's unhappy appearance on the mundane scene. This meant nauseous heaps of half-cooked pork, scraggly fowls, tari, and coconuts, with perhaps one of those poisonous things that Susanna calls "cakes." But luckily, at 9 p.m. the night before, a vessel's lights were sighted to southward.
Desire and I saw the lights while we were walking on the outer beach, and, because we were close to Matauea, we hurried there to tell the Augustuses the news--then we leaped back into the shadows, appalled by the scene that followed. Have you ever seen a stampeding herd of cattle "milled"--that is, driven so they move like a whirlpool? That is what our casually stated, "There's a big steamer in the offing," did to the Augustuses. They started milling, noisily, like a panic-stricken herd of cattle. They lost contact with the familiar realities of the Danger Island world.