American film poster for 1939 film Island of Lost Men: photo by Paramount Pictures, 1939; image by Centpacrr, 27 November 2011
He was a detainee on that island plantation where sleep was not permitted for three long years until one night he learnt to slip out of the identity of the one it was his keepers presumed they were detaining and so knit the ravelled sleeve of care and sipped of the cup of peace perhaps but in any case as if miraculously had vanished by morning from the desolate cloud-murk-enclosed isle of the damned -- or so the story those exhausted and hopeless men gather every evening to tell again among themselves, clutching at its improbable story line as if grasping for a frail straw of hope secreted therein, or maybe a stray shred of something like a meaning, or even, for that matter, a fragmentary scrap of half-remembered, blurred, ancient, half-waking, forever incomprehensible dream-image, there, in the ill-lit stilt huts beneath the sodden dripping foliage of the thick forest canopy of the island of lost men, goes.
Palafito house: photo by Peter & Jackie Main, 30 October 2002
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