Eden Burning [antikvár]

^^n a winter afternoon in the year 1673, a fifteen-year-old indentured servant named Eleuthere François, of the family later to be known as Francis, saw the island of St. Felice rise up between clouds and sea. He was a waif from a peasant's cold home in Brittany, and despite all the sailors' yarns he had been hearing, had never imagined anything like this entrancing blue of water and sky, this warmth, this soft, unceasing wind. White sand lay spread like a silk robe, he thought, astonished at himself for having the thought; he was not in the habit of making comparisons, had indeed found little need in his life to do so. And stammered to himself as the island grew larger, It is a flower lying on a pond. Or the jewel in the bishop's ring that Sunday? The dark green shining, the deep, dark shining . . . He knew nothing about the island where he was to remain and found a great family; knew nothing most certainly, of that primordial heaving of the earth's hot crust which had produced an arc of such islands between two continents. He had, very likely, no conception at all of a volcano, or of coral, or of the red-brown man who had preceded him there, the red-brown man with high cheekbones and black hair straight as a horse's mane who had come across the land