Zebra Island - The Yellow Lizard Island

The Island of the Yellow Lizard is an island of… almost no significance and it is at any rate located far from the main maritim roads, indeed quite at the edge of the Known World since it emerges about two hundred nautical miles East of Santa Cruse in the Lesser Curry-Bean… It is in length barely ten miles for an average width of about three. It is essentially composed of two blocks: an almost one thousand nine hundred meter high active volcano (Which makes it – at least one remarkable point! – the highest island in the Archipelago of the Lesser Curry-Bean.) and a collapsed caldeira which slided partly into the sea and of which the bow tops a little below eight hundred meters (See the map below).

A quiet place to retire

Its unremarkable dimensions and its isolated geographical situation hide the character of the Yellow Lizard's island, all at once welcoming and wild, and, as a consequence, neither Piracy nor Tourism developped on its shores. Welcoming the (rare) visitor through its beaches and its plantations of coconuts, sugar cane, pineapples and mangoes but, above all, wild because of its inextricable forests, its very active volcano, its steep cliffs and its summits, though being of moderate height, jagged in terrific rock towers…

It is probably thanks to its isolation that the Island of the Yellow Lizard is still an island independant of the influence of larger ones such as Santa Cruise; its Governor at any rate, Juan-Ernesto Barbisurte, is an ex-Pirate who managed to organise a quiet retirement, in the Year 80 of the Universal Calender in that forsaken part of the Known World (see the situation Map of the island) and built for himself a nice opulent house in pure style of white column rows and gravel path lined with flamboyants leading to the main entrance; also his golf course is mentioned somewhere in the funny cracks to tell of that page…

The inhabitants

Chedham Harbour is a town of barely a thousand and eight hundred souls; the village of Nice Borrough counts about five hundred inhabitants in the middle of the old caldeira, among the fields of the valley of the Jolly and not far from the pastures located around the Cows' Pass; both combined represent the greatest part of the population of the island. Upon that add up some three hundred inhabitants of the hamlets or isolated bungalows spread over the island.

Also a population of Curry-Bean origin lives on the island, somewhat isolated, in or around a Curry-Bean village, named Sakkavana in local language, that is to say in Curly-Bee. The village is located near a sea turtle beach, therefore its name, at the foot of Goats' Pass.

Taking those Curry-Bean Indians - one hundred - into account, the island bears a population of about two thousand seven hundred inhabitants, including about one thousand slaves and as many « Humble Whites ».

The Mould

As if life would only look pink on the Island of the Yellow Lizard, well now talking of anyone not being the Governor or his – so nice – daughter! (Besides, life rather looks green and blue on such islands, that's a mind's posture.) And even if the days generally pass by quietly, a strange evil plagues the island since several years: in fact, a sort of mould infests all plants and, without killing them, give them a crumpled and unfinished aspect which, over time, repelled most of the merchants who still came to make their business once or twice a year at Chedham, the only port of the island, in particular to provision a pork meat which had been excellent in the past.

The inhabitants of the island, for their part having no choice, eat the sick plants of their island and do not seem to suffer much of that – The only little think is that they remain very thin because the nutrients in their diet have a largely reduced quality… Meat, milk and egg production is thus also diminished, even if pigs (and rats!) seem to better resist.