His corpse lay at cliff-foot now, heaped with funerary leaves and branches, stirring not when, crash! crash! crash!, the boxes landed in ruin beside him. The logic had been slow, by man’s standards, and slower still its communication by cleverer to dimmer, but in the end sufficient of the troop understood and coöperated to drag the boxes to the cliff-top and tip them over. Their contents? A sore, a sorry disappointment to the apes, who found amid the splintered wood, each wrapped in cord-tied silk, naught save grenade-sized bulbs of some inedible flower. Enraged again, they flung the bulbs, trampled them, pelted the cliff-face therewith, till rage was spent and they crowded to the beach again in hope of further flotsam. A white and soaking sailor, some hoped for, or two or three, with dead faces and skulls to mash and crush with paw and rock, but the wreck withheld such materia of vengeance, sprawled on the rocks that had broken it, and the tide had swallowed it ere nightfall.
Did any ape, next autumn, recall the boxes and the bulbs when that hive was raided and honeycombs, sweeter for the stings all had endured, were shared among eager paws? Nay, nay, why should one? They had seen the bulbs sprouting, some on the cliff, most on the ground, two within the very ribs of the skeletal yearling, and they had noted the eagerness with which the island’s bees swarmed to the flowers thereof, but none knew the mechanism of mellifacture, none connected this honey’s richer flavor with the flowers’ new nectar, none surrendered to honey-thick sleep unwillingly. And soon no voice raised but a suckling’s, twice-stung, which bawled without response from its scarce-breathing, clog-breasted mother. And she ere sun-set had ceased to breathe and the suckling to bawl, fearing the gold-eyed cats wherefrom it knew no adult could now defend it. Ere sunrise the chrysopses, natheless, had found and devoured it, eschewing the adults’ carrion as deadly. And in coming years, multiplying vegetatively, the sea-borne flowers spread to cover the island, scarlet-bloomed, glaive-leaved, while the apes’ white bones greened and crumbled, fading daily into loamy oblivion.