Amadel hurried down to the shoreline, delirious with excitement. It was as if the entire, hidden world had been thrown upon her island all at once. Barrels and crates bobbed in the shallows, containing she knew not what. Each one she would open in time.
First she came to some spars, a tangle of rigging, shattered planking, a broken cask filled with seawater, and then a man lying face down in the shallows, the water lapping around his shoulders. She paused uneasily at the sight of the corpse, not quite afraid, but unhappy now. The rush of excitement was gone. She did not entirely understand what the corpse was. Aside from her father, this was the only human being she had ever seen. It was all confusing, an abstraction.
She came upon more debris, whole sections of deck or hull cast at odd
