Chapter 107

Hey Lily,

You have trees outside the dome? I thought your homes were underwater. Or are you saying that there are additional domes, away from your "home" dome.

Just trying to get a picture of your setup. I know Willow wrote a bit about ours to her brother back when we first landed over a year ago. Wow, it's been a long time since we came. The island we are on is large considering that several people estimate that it was once the top of a volcano crater. One of the college prof corporals we have. Oh, Willow didn't write much about that, but we somehow ended up with seven college professors in our original team. Two died when tank five was destroyed, but we still have the others. They love to sit around and debate things, and the formation of our island was a popular topic when we first landed.

Heck, we turned their debates into a spectator sport, complete with cheerleaders. I wasn't a cheerleader, the rule was that the professors concubines had to do it. I did coach them quite a bit though. The bad part about that was that Lucy and Deborah both ended up returning to medical pods for some "upgrades" to their looks. Both now have bountiful tracts of land on their chests, much like I do. Debbie doesn't like the change and has been a bit nasty to me on occasion because of that.

Anyway, the professors looked at the ground which has a foundation of black sand, although there is a thick layer of iron rich red soil once you get clear of the tideline. They said that the sand appeared to be primarily powdered lava, so it was formed by lava flows and then waves pounding on it had turned it into sand. I guess this is why Hawaii back on Earth has black sand beaches. From that they looked at the fact that our island is a huge mostly flat circle with a lagoon in the middle and theorized that Trinary Island was an extinct volcano.

But the real thing is that they say is was a "shield type" volcano, so the high point on the inner edge of the crater was only about one hundred feet above the ground, and you had a long somewhat gentle slope toward the ocean. This gives us an island where the center lagoon is about a third of a mile across, and then we have more than a half mile of land before reaching the ocean. The whole island is more than a mile in diameter. Of course, the inner crater collapsed so the lagoon does not have cliff walls all the way around, which gives us some beaches to the lagoon.

The space is nice because we also have a garden, and its not just an herb garden. Meiling's bag of seeds was about fifty pounds. We had a huge variety of fruits, vegetables and herbs to plant, including the tea plants which we also traded for our two rabbits. Oh, those rabbits have proven very popular with Devon and Tameka. They had heard tales of rabbits in the concubine barracks on Borneo, but none of the concubines in the barracks believed that rabbits were found off Earth. We do have to be careful that Devon and Tameka don't play too rough with our rabbits, but Laquesha has been very willing to make sure that the children play nice.

Sorry, I was writing about our "garden". Its more of a small orchard and farm, although some plants did not do all that well. We had cherry seeds, but the trees have barely sprouted. Meiling says they need cold weather to encourage the flowers to form, so they have been struggling in our tropical paradise. The pomegranate does well, as do the sunflowers and several of the herbs, but other plants have failed in the heat. Meiling and Katya spend quite a bit of time making sure that the various plants get the right amount of water and fertilizer. They've had a lot more success after John developed the new fertilizer based on the bones of a couple of the fishes in our oceans. Sadly, it can't be replicated. We're guessing that a huge part of the reason the fertilizer is so good must be come bacteria found in the fish bones.