The island was lost-dropped from sight and memory-for not less than four centuries. Once a cenobite shared his hermitage with the island's crawling things, but that was all briefly. A year, more, who knows? He died unrecorded. Lost like the island, he was rediscovered by fishermen, a skeleton with cross and scapular, miraculously intact but moldy with moss. The island was otherwise uninhabited for these several centuries, except for the dead.