He cast his mind back to his early musings on escaping the island and saw little to change his opinion as to the difficulty of the endeavour. He tried to recall if there was anything useful he might gather from a childhood reading of Robinson Crusoe. As far as he could remember, the trick was to avoid being eaten by cannibals, patronise anybody one might save from said cannibals (‘Since today is Friday, I shall call you . . . Man Friday!’; ‘I do have a name, you know. Just because you can’t pronounce it . . .’; ‘Be quiet! I haven’t taught you English yet’), and then cunningly do nothing very useful for years until ftrangely deliver’d by PYRATES. No, that would never do. The local PYRATES were likely to be as bad as cannibals, and that was on the assumption that they weren’t actually cannibals themselves. It was hard to believe, but Cabal had the distinct impression that Daniel Defoe had let him down.
He sat and watched the sun settle slowly towards the western horizon off to his left. Before him was a vast expanse of ocean without a hint of distant land. Once he thought he saw an island, but it grew closer and, before it finally submerged, he realised that it was actually a sea monster, approximately the size of Rutland. It was a memorable sight, but not one he felt improved him or his situation.
As the sun started to dip below the water, crabs began to populate the beach. In common with so much in the Dremlands, they couldn’t simply be just like earthly crabs. These specimens had bodies roughly the size of dinner plates, their chitinous armour coloured a dismal brown-orange, puckered like warmed celluloid. They had four eyes, two mounted on stalks in a decent crably way, but the others were large and human-like, peering out of round openings in the front seam of the carapace between the upper and lower parts. These eyes, occasionally moistened with a meniscus that slid back and forth, looked permanently startled and cautious, but Cabal knew that was just an effect of their setting and nothing to do with their owners’ actual dispositions. As he had no desire to be pincered to pieces by an army of startled-looking crabs in the early hours, he retired to the cave entrance, and blocked off the path with rocks. He hoped the crabs weren’t substantially more intelligent than they looked, and settled down for a miserable night’s sleep in the sandy cave mouth.
Next morning he discovered some useful information about the crabs (that they had probably intended to eat him if they could, but that their rapacious appetites fortunately far outstripped their intelligence), and breakfast (there was a small pile of crabs lying on their backs beneath the cave mouth that had fallen there while trying to negotiate Cabal’s rock blockade. They were still alive and, if anything, looking more startled than usual). He cracked them open with a sharp stone, which startled them still further, and cooked them on a fire lit with one of his precious remaining matches.
He decided that he would keep the fire going as long as he could, and start supplementary fires elsewhere. He had no idea how long it might take to get off the island, or if he ever would, and permanent fires seemed like useful things to have. He might get lucky and find a supply of flint, but he probably wouldn’t, and the whole idea of rubbing sticks together seemed very hit and miss. The smoke from the fire might also attract the attention of passing ships, should there be any, bearing in mind Mormo’s reputation for obscurity. Admittedly, given the Dreamland’s tendency towards the dramatic, should any ship come to the island it would probably be full of cannibalistic pirates, piratical cannibals, Jehovah’s Witnesses or similar. That was acceptable, however. He was sure they could come to some arrangement that didn’t involve any unpleasantness. Any unpleasantness to himself, at any rate.
Somewhere around midday, Cabal re-entered the caves and made his way with no great enthusiasm to the throne room. There was no self-proclaimed Phobic Animus in residence, and Cabal presumed that he was no longer of interest and Nyarlothotep was off elsewhere, doing incoherent alien things, incomprehensible to anybody who couldn’t think in more than eleven or twelve dimensions. Somewhere between the realities floated a god’s ‘To do’ list with the name Johannes Cabal firmly ticked off. He did not know whether to feel insulted or relieved that he was no longer a person of interest, and settled on relieved, although he would have been still more relieved to have been put somewhere more convenient than Mormo at the end of Nyarlothotep’s pitiless little game.
Cabal sat upon the throne to think, and presently sprawled upon it for comfort, incidentally and unselfconsciously mimicking Bose’s attitudes of the previous day. In the first instance, he decided, it would be necessary thoroughly to explore Mormo to discover what it contained and then to make plans based on whatever resources were revealed. His options seemed to coalesce into a simple choice between making his home there and hoping for rescue, or building a vessel and taking his chances with the sea. The latter course was by far the more dangerous, but also the least maddening. The very thought of sitting around and feeling his life frittering away was abominable. No, unless his survey of the island turned up something unexpectedly useful, such as a marina on the north shore or even an isthmus to a mainland, then he would put together some sort of boat and bet his life on it neither falling apart nor being swallowed by Moby-Rutland. His mind made up, he went out to see what wonders the beaches and wooded slopes of Mormo might conceal.
The woods contained trees and the beaches contained sand and, occasionally, large crabs that seemed astonished by their own vicious aggression. It was a disappointing exploration, but Cabal did not begrudge the three days it took to circumnavigate the coast and to examine much of the forest and look up the open upper slopes of the rocky island heart. Food, at least, was not too uncommon. Aside from the vicious but splendidly stupid crabs, there were coconut palms, something like papayas and breadfruit groves, and even a couple of families of wild pigs that avoided him as carefully as he avoided them. It was good to know that they were there, though, should he ever decide the meat part of his diet was becoming tediously crab-orientated. His survey completed, he arrived back at the cave and considered the practicalities of his next move. He had searched the outer part of the island, true, but that still left the inner. The great crack in the throne room’s antechamber might lead somewhere, and required exploration. A stone tossed experimentally into the void went a long while before a distant clatter of impact arrived back at Cabal’s ears. Assuming the laws of physics were more or less the same as in the mundane world, and making an educated guess as to the effect of air resistance, he gauged a drop of somewhere between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and fifty feet. That was a long way to climb in near darkness and there were few handholds, from what he could see close by the upper reaches. He needed a rope and, he realised, he had the necessary elements to make one.
Coconut rope requires two things above all others: a lot of coconuts and a lot of time. He distantly remembered reading once how such rope was made, and knew that simply making the white coir fibre he needed would take the best part of a year, assuming that he was lucky with the current stage of the coconut’s growth cycle. Cabal considered this, and decided that it would be a last resort if he could not find a more immediate alternative. The obvious one was to use jungle creepers, of which he had noted several varieties on his sortie.