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land? As if to say look! two violet-blue jacaranda blossoms appeared on the lavender water, trailed by a palm frond and two green-leaved bamboo shoots.
    And he spied four dead rainbow fish; had assumed they were alive until he shook out the bottom of a paper bag of bread crumbs on the glazed water. The fish did not flicker. The air was heavily humid. Cohn focused his binoculars into the hazy distance and saw moving fog. No birds present, not an albatross or pelican, or anything smaller.
    He inspected their yellow rubber raft and gathered supplies and objects of craft and art to take ashore, granting they arrived at a shore. He collected several precious books, and the water in ten-gallon jugs. Cohn had hand-picked, from cabin to cabin, piles of clothing for all seasons; all the provisions he could carry; also a portable wind-up
phonograph with a dozen uncracked records, seventy-eights, long ago the property of his father the rabbi who had once been a cantor; plus yards of lumber and a full tool chest, with gimlets and awls. And he took with him a small off-white urn containing his pregnant wife’s ashes. She had been cremated before the universal cremation, her will, not Cohn’s; she had seemed always to know what was coming next.
    That night, while Buz and Cohn were asleep in their upper and lower beds, the vessel shuddered, splintered, and cracked stupendously as it went grindingly aground. The chimp was pitched out of his berth and began to hoot in the dark; but Cohn got a candle lit and calmed him, saying they would no longer be at the mercy of a foundering ship.
    At dawn Buz slid down a rope as Cohn climbed down the tilted ship’s ladder, stepping on the blackened surface of a coral reef on whose algae-covered mass the Rebekah Q , jaggedly broken in two, was pulled up tight. Across a narrow channel lay a strip of coastal land, possibly an island.
    Buz stepped into the water, and to Cohn’s great surprise, began swimming across the channel to the verdant thick-treed shore. A chimp paddling on his back? A genius chimp, Cohn reflected.
    They’d be like brothers, if not father and son.
    Arriving on shore, the dripping ape thumbed his comic nose at Cohn, and sauntering forward, plunged into the steaming rain forest without so much as a glance backward.
    Hours later, having brought in the yellow raft laden with supplies to the green shore, then hidden them in the saw-toothed tall grass, an exhausted Cohn followed Buz into the
forest. He figured God had, at long length, permitted him to go on living, otherwise He wouldn’t have let Cohn leave the wrecked vessel and make for shore.
    The Lord, baruch Ha-shem, had moved from His Judgment to His Mercy seat. Cohn would fast. Today must be Yom Kippur.

Cohn’s Island

    His first night on the island—the massive silence was unreal—Cohn spent in a scarlet-blossomed candelabrum tree, although there were no wild beasts to hide from. In the rain forest no birds sang or insects buzzed; no snakes slithered on their bellies; no moths, bats, or lizards had survived. No friend Buz, for that matter; Cohn had seen no sign of the young ape. How desolate the world was; how bleak experience, when only one experienced.
    Where were the dead? He had come across yards of scattered bones. None were fossils. All were skeletons of animals that had perished in the Devastation, among them an undersize leopard and a lady chimpanzee. He found no bones of men, felt a renewal of abandonment, but kept himself busy exploring the island.
    In the morning he discovered—there where the rain forest curved behind a rocky, hilly area, and flowed north—several caves in a striated yellow sandstone escarpment, and Cohn chose the largest, a double-caverned chamber, to shelter himself. The escarpment, as high as a five-story tenement backed against a parapet of green and lilac hills, was a many-ledged bluff topped by masses of wild ferns, mossy
epiphytic saplings, and cord-thick vines dripping down its