He could discover the spot only by the five myrtles, which, disembarrassed of their roof of reeds and their plaster walls, had resumed their natural decorations, green and glossy, as if the hatchet had never touched them.

At their feet tufts of briers and other underbrush had grown up, as formerly.

The two streams, the _Linnet_ and the _Stammerer_, alone had suffered no change.

The one with its gentle murmur, the other with its silvery cascades, after having embraced the lawn, still continued to flow towards the sea, where they seemed to have buried, with their waves, the memory of all that had passed on their borders.
At sight of his shore, which seemed to have retained no vestige of himself, Selkirk remained a few moments, mournful and lost in his incoherent thoughts, in the midst of which this was most prominent:--Yet alive, already forgotten by the world, I have seen my traces disappear, even from this island which I have so long inhabited! A rustling was heard in the foliage; he raised his eyes, expecting to see Marimonda swinging on the branch of a tree.

Perceiving nothing, he remembered that Marimonda reposed at the Oasis; he took the road from the mountain which led thither, but when he arrived there, when he was before her tomb, covered with tall grass, he had forgotten why he came.
One of those unaccountable fits of terror, which were now more frequent than formerly, seized him, and he precipitately descended the mountain, springing from peak to peak along the rocks.
The religious sentiment, which formerly sustained Selkirk in his trials, was not entirely extinct; but it was obscured beneath his darkened reason.