"Good idea, Ishmael," said someone from the back of the tent.
"Call me Ish," said Ishmael, stroking his beard. "Now then, who's first?"
"I suppose I am," said a pleasant-looking man who was holding what looked like a large, metal flower. "It's nice to meet you three. My name is Alonso, and I've found the propeller of an airplane. The poor pilot must have flown straight into the storm."
"What a shame," Ishmael said. "Well, there's no airplane to be found on the island, so I don't think a propeller will be of much use."
"Excuse me," Violet said hesitantly, "but I know something about mechanical devices. If we rigged the propeller up to a simple hand-powered motor, we'd have a perfect fan for keeping cool on particularly hot days."
There was a murmur of appreciation from the crowd, and Alonso smiled at Violet. "It does get mighty hot around here," he said. "That's a good idea."
Ishmael took a sip of cordial from his seashell, and then frowned at the propeller. "It depends on how you look at it," he said. "If we only made one fan, then we'd all be arguing over who got to stand in front of it."
"We could take turns," Alonso said.
"Whose turn will it be on the hottest day of the year?" Ishmael countered, a word which here means "said in a firm and sensible tone of voice, even though it was not necessarily a sensible thing to say." "I'm not going to force you, Alonso, but I don't think building a fan is worth all the fuss it might cause."
"I suppose you're right," Alonso said, with a shrug, and put the propeller on the wooden sleigh. "The sheep can take it to the arboretum."
"An excellent decision," Ishmael said, as a girl perhaps one or two years older than Violet stepped forward.
"I'm Ariel," she said, "and I found this in a particularly shallow part of the shelf. I think it's a dagger."
"A dagger?" Ishmael said. "You know we don't welcome weapons on the island."
Klaus was peering at the item Ariel was holding, which was made of carved wood rather than metal. "I don't think that's a dagger," Klaus said. "I believe it's an old tool used for cutting the pages of books. Nowadays most books are sold with their pages already separated, but some years ago each page was attached to the next, so you needed an implement to slice open the folds of paper and read the book."
"That's interesting," Ariel remarked.
"It depends on how you look at it," Ishmael said. "I fail to see how it could be of use here. We've never had a single book wash ashore— the storms simply tear the pages apart."
Klaus reached into his pocket and touched his hidden commonplace book. "You never know when a book might turn up," he pointed out. "In my opinion, that tool might be useful to keep around."
Ishmael sighed, looking first at Klaus and then at the girl who had found the item. "Well, I'm not going to force you, Ariel," he said, "but if I were you I would toss that silly thing onto the sleigh."
"I'm sure you're right," Ariel said, shrugging at Klaus, and she put the page cutter next to the propeller as a plump man with a sunburned face stepped forward.
"Sherman's the name," said Sherman, with a little bow to all three siblings. "And I found a cheese grater. I nearly lost a finger prying it away from a nest of crabs!"
"You shouldn't have gone to all that trouble," Ishmael said. "We're not going to have much use for a cheese grater without any cheese."
"Grate coconut," Sunny said."Delicious cake."
"Cake?" Sherman said. "Egad, that would be delicious. We haven't had dessert since I've arrived here."
"Coconut cordial is sweeter than dessert," Ishmael said, raising his seashell to his lips. "I certainly wouldn't force you, Sherman, but I do think it would be best if that grater were thrown away."
Sherman took a sip from his own seashell, and then nodded, looking down at the sand. "Very well," he said, and the rest of the morning proceeded in a similar manner. Islander after islander introduced themselves and presented the items they had found, and nearly every time the colony's facilitator discouraged them from keeping anything. A bearded man named Robinson found a pair of overalls, but Ishmael reminded him that the colony only wore the customary white robes, even though Violet could imagine herself wearing them while inventing some sort of mechanical device, so as not to get her robe dirty. An old woman named Erewhon held up a pair of skis that Ishmael dismissed as impractical, although Klaus had read of people who had used skis to cross mud and sand, and a red-haired woman named Weyden offered a salad spinner, but Ishmael reminded her that the island's only salads were to be made from the seaweed that was rinsed in the pool and dried out in the sun, rather than spun, even though Sunny could almost taste a dried coconut snack that such an appliance could have made. Ferdinand island to dump the items in the arboretum, and the islanders excused themselves, at Ishmael's suggestion, to wash their hands for lunch. Within moments the only occupants of the tent were Ishmael, the Baudelaire orphans, and the girl who had first brought them to the tent, as if the siblings were merely another piece of wreckage to be picked over for approval.
"Quite a storm, wasn't it?" asked Ishmael, after a short silence. "We scavenged even more junk than usual."
"Were any other castaways found?" Violet asked.
"Do you mean Count Olaf?" Ishmael asked. "After Friday abandoned him, he'd never dare approach the island. He's either wandering around the coastal shelf, or he's trying to swim his way back to wherever he came from."
The Baudelaires looked at one another, knowing full well that Count Olaf was likely hatching some scheme, particularly as none of the islanders had found the boat's figurehead, where the deadly spores of the Medusoid Mycelium were hidden. "We weren't just thinking of Olaf," Klaus said. "We had some friends who may have been caught in the same storm— a pregnant woman named Kit Snicket who was in a submarine with some associates, and a group of people who were traveling by air."
Ishmael frowned, and drank some cordial from his seashell. "Those people haven't turned up," he said, "but don't despair, Baudelaires. It seems that everything eventually washes up on our shores. Perhaps their crafts were unharmed by the storm."
"Perhaps," Sunny agreed, trying not to think that they might not have been as lucky as that.
"They might turn up in the next day or so," Ishmael continued. "Another storm is heading this way."
"How do you know?" Violet asked. "Is there a barometer on the island?"
"There's no barometer," Ishmael said, referring to a device that measures the pressure in the atmosphere, which is one way of predicting the weather. "I just know there's one coming."
"How would you know such a thing?" Klaus asked, stopping himself from retrieving his commonplace book so he could take notes. "I've always heard that the weather is difficult to predict without advanced instruments."
"We don't need any advanced instruments on this colony," Ishmael said. "I predict the weather by using magic."
" Meledrub," Sunny said, which meant something along the lines of, "I find that very difficult to believe," and her siblings silently agreed. The Baudelaires, as a rule, did not believe in magic, although their mother had had a nifty card trick she could occasionally be persuaded to perform. Like all people who have seen something of the world, the children had come across plenty of things they had been unable to explain, from the diabolical hypnotism techniques of Dr. Orwell to the way a girl named Fiona had broken Klaus's heart, but they had never been tempted to solve these mysteries with a supernatural explanation like magic. Late at night, of course, when one is sitting upright in bed, having been woken up by a sudden loud noise, one believes in all sorts of supernatural things, but it was early afternoon, and the Baudelaires simply could not imagine that Ishmael was some sort of magical weatherman. Their doubt must have shown on their faces, for the facilitator immediately did what many people do when they are not believed, and hurriedly changed the subject.