In a flash, one of them leaped into the sunlight in the open space where runway and water met.

Save for decorations, he was naked as Adam before the Fall.

A solitary white feather uprose from his kinky, glossy, black hair.

A polished bodkin of white petrified shell, with sharp-pointed ends, thrust through a hole in the partition of his nostrils, extended five inches across his face.

About his neck, from a cord of twisted coconut sennit, hung an ivory-white necklace of wild-boar's tusks.