CHAPTER 14 . Colin, having slept most of the night, awakened around midafternoon. Careful not to disturb Draper, who had gotten no sleep at all, she quietly arose, dressed and left the bedchamber. Her first order of business was to tell the other girls of Draper's transformation. All were amazed - and disappointed, particularly Martin and Justin, who had not yet been serviced. Then the other girls informed Colin that the big Greeks were missing, along with the power launch, effectively cutting them off from the rest of the world, with barely two weeks' supply of food on hand. The island had several springs, so water would not be a problem There were plentiful wild guinea fowl, goats and rabbits as well and the sea was teeming with fish. The transmutes, however, being flighty females more interested in their hair and their nails than in practical matters, were unable to appreciate the difficulty of their situation. Even had they been cognizant of it, they had no idea how to hunt or fish, and besides, they lacked the necessary tools and equipment and were constitutionally incapable of making any from materials on hand. Their main concern was the loss of the island's only man; their conversations centered on what they would do to Stavros and Dimitrios should they be foolish enough to return, and on where they could find more men. Neal thought that there might be a storm any moment - a ship could be wrecked on the rocks, stranding a whole crew of sailors on the island. Steven thought that the Greek air force would hold war games in the Cyclades any time now, and drop a few dozen paratroopers on the island, whom they would convince to live there for ever and ever. Justin was certain that if they could only send smoke signals to passing ships, one would drop anchor and send a "rescue" party to service them. Colin was no exception. She foresaw no disaster and hoped for a rescue. She helped herself to the comestibles on hand without regard to the lack of any reserves. After she had eaten, she prepared a tray of fruit, cheese, sliced sausages, canned chicken, sardines and samples of everything good and tasty still left in the camp's larder. She carried the tray to her bedchamber in the late afternoon, for she knew that Draper would be ravenously hungry when she awoke. But when she returned, the bed was empty! Draper was not there. Nor was she anywhere in the temple or on its immediate grounds. Distraught, Colin returned to the other girls and formed a search party to scour the island. It was not until evening, just after sunset, that they spied Draper from the height of a cliff on the western side of the island. She was standing tip-toe on a rock in shallow water at the base of the cliff, half-clad in a bolt of diaphanous black silk which the evening breeze was ballooning over her shoulders. The almost-new moon, a tenuous crescent, was about to follow the sun into the sea. Draper was virtually nude, her statuesque body oddly relaxed, like a medieval saint in holy ecstacy about to receive the stigmata. From afar, where the girls stood on the cliff, it seemed Draper was entranced. As indeed she was. Draper had awakened in the still of late afternoon. It was so quiet that she could hear the distant crash of the waves beating against the island's rocky coast. Irresistibly drawn to the sea, she wrapped herself in the bolt of black silk and descended the steep path to the water's edge, where she was brought under the sway of the setting moon the moment her feet touched the water. There, on a rock, at the edge of the livegiving sea, Peter Draper became the moon's captive, her body forever enslaved by its cycles and phases. As Draper stood transfixed on the rock, she felt the moon's infinitesimally faint gravitational tug - on her breasts, on her womb, on her ovaries. She felt her fertility well up in her soft womanbody, like the tide wells up in a bay, utterly obliterating her masculine past.