PULAU MATI by John L. Evans

small shovel were missing.  He strolled north up the beach and urinated in the surf.  He also wanted to take another look at the possible cave and the peak itself.  Just as he had remembered, the upper most part of the peak at this end of the island was exposed rock while the one at the south end was covered with jungle.  He walked back to the shelter pleased.
    When the water was hot they had a breakfast of cheese, fruit, crackers, nuts, chunks of coconut and hot sugared tea; quite a good breakfast considering their situation.  The gift baskets would not last indefinitely though, and eventually the rice from the hut and the easily caught seafood would run out, but food was not their most pressing problem.  They needed rescue in order to get medical help for Lleyton and Malik.  Keegan seemed much better today so Gray unofficially promoted him to ambulatory rank
    Gray had a semblance of a plan but first there was an unpleasant task they had to perform.  Anna, Lex and Melanie had asked him about it but were apparently leaving it up to him to decide when.
    “Does everybody agree we should bury the bodies this morning?” he asked.
    Everyone agreed, gloomily.  Without much discussion, Lex got the shovels, a small camp shovel and a full size one and asked, “Where?”
    Gray turned to Shinobu and asked, “Do you have any preference?”
    His shoulders slumped and with head bowed he seemed to consider the question in earnest.  “Where it is easy to dig,” he said dead pan.
    That brought some giggles and chuckles.  “Thank you, Shinobu,” Gray said.  “ I’m sure they will be exhumed anyway when we are rescued so I think up north in the sand as far up the beach as possible.”
    Gray did not know whether Paolo still thought they would be rescued soo n or not but the man joined them for the solemn task.
    On the way to the proposed grave site, they unceremoniously dragged Sani and one of the fight attendants behind them.  About a hundred yards up the beach they came to a place where the sand went farther inland.
    “As far as I am concerned a common grave is fine,” Shinobu volunteered.
    They all participated in digging although Lex, Keegan, Paolo and Gray did most of it.  At first the sand kept falling back into the hole but eventually they reached a sandy soil that dug easily and sped up the process.
    Taking a break, Gray gazed across the water to the west.  There was no sign of the debris from the wreck nor was there a visible oil slick.   The thought came to him that they had missed an opportunity to give searchers a sign of their presence.
    Consensus was reached that the hole was adequate without anyone verbalizing it.  They dropped the bodies in two deep, side by side.  Gray asked if anyone wanted to say anything but nobody spoke up.  Keegan made the Catholic sign of the cross and began shoveling in the sand and soil.  Lex gathered rocks and was about to lay out the pattern of a cross until Gray told him there were likely two Muslims, a Hindi and a Buddhist in the grave.  Lex rearranged the rocks into an X.
     
    When everyone was back at the shelter, Gray said, “I think we missed an opportunity to give searchers a clue to our location.  I’m sorry I did not think of it.”
    Some raised their eyes to him and Lex asked, “How?”
    “Yesterday morning, after we were sure no one else was left alive out there, we should have tried to set the oil slick on fire.  The timing would have been right for searchers looking for a sign of a crash.”
    “I thought you said they would be looking two or three hundred miles from here,” Melanie said.
    “You remember correctly.  The search probably began in some radius of maybe fifty or a hundred miles around where the plane was last seen on radar.  But with all the eyes that were out there scanning the horizon, someone might have spotted a big column of smoke.”
    Lex laughed.  “Gray, you are beating yourself up for nothing.  We did not have any way to