Often he had heard his father and mother, on the safety of the sand, bark and rage their hatred of those terrible sea-dwellers, when, close to the beach, they appeared on the surface like logs awash.  “Crocodile” was no word in Jerry’s vocabulary.  It was an image, an image of a log awash that was different from any log in that it was alive.  Jerry, who heard, registered, and recognized many words that were as truly tools of thought to him as they were to humans, but who, by inarticulateness of birth and breed, could not utter these many words, nevertheless in his mental processes, used images just as articulate men use words in their own mental processes.  And after all, articulate men, in the act of thinking, willy nilly use images that correspond to words and that amplify words.

Perhaps, in Jerry’s brain, the rising into the foreground of consciousness of an image of a log awash connoted more intimate and fuller comprehension of the thing being thought about, than did the word “crocodile,” and its accompanying image, in the foreground of a human’s consciousness.  For Jerry really did know more about crocodiles than the average human.  He could smell a crocodile farther off and more differentiatingly than could any man, than could even a salt-water black or a bushman smell one.  He could tell when a crocodile, hauled up from the lagoon, lay without sound or movement, and perhaps asleep, a hundred feet away on the floor mat of jungle.

He knew more of the language of crocodiles than did any man.  He had better means and opportunities of knowing.  He knew their many noises that were as grunts and slubbers.  He knew their anger noises, their fear noises, their food noises, their love noises.  And these noises were as definitely words in his vocabulary as are words in a human’s vocabulary.  And these crocodile noises were tools of thought.  By them he weighed and judged and determined his own consequent courses of action, just like any human; or, just like any human, lazily resolved upon no course of action, but merely noted and registered a clear comprehension of something that was going on about him that did not require a correspondence of action on his part.

And yet, what Jerry did not know was very much.  He did not know the size of the world.  He did not know that this Meringe Lagoon, backed by high, forested mountains and fronted and sheltered by the off-shore coral islets, was anything else than the entire world.  He did not know that it was a mere fractional part of the great island of Ysabel, that was again one island of a thousand, many of them greater, that composed the Solomon Islands that men marked on charts as a group of specks in the vastitude of the far-western South Pacific.

It was true, there was a somewhere else or a something beyond of which he was dimly aware.  But whatever it was, it was mystery.  Out of it, things that had not been, suddenly were.  Chickens and puarkas and cats, that he had never seen before, had a way of abruptly appearing on Meringe Plantation.  Once, even, had there been an eruption of strange four-legged, horned and hairy creatures, the images of which, registered in his brain, would have been identifiable in the brains of humans with what humans worded “goats.”