OUR LOST SEA.

• Author: Griffin, Elle

While I was researching this month's feature story, "Salt of the Earth," (p. 44) I discovered a long-forgotten journal written by Alfred Lambourne. Titled, "Our Inland Sea" it chronicles the year he spent living on Gunnison Island in the middle of the Great Salt Lake.

He arrived in the winter of 1895, and his intention was to explore the unplumbed depths of his own psyche against the backdrop of a salted sea. "The seeking of isolation proceed not out of a mere love of solitude," he quotes, "but out of a love and desire to sequester a man's self for a higher conversation."

Once stranded, his thoughts turn to darker matter. The birds taunt him night and day. "Do the gulls never sleep?" he wonders. "For the third part of a year now, I have listened to their ceaseless clamor ... My dogs may bay at the moon, the owl on the cliff may scatter demoniac laughter, but they cannot outnoise those obstreperous gulls."

He refers to one particularly ominous raven as the Devil, and it is He who discovers the secrets of the island. First, there is the grave-digger Jean Baptiste, a man who escaped exile on a neighboring island only to be discovered at the mouth of a river, a link of chain still attached to his ankle bone. "Of spectres," Mr. Lambourne says, "the Inland Sea has one of its own."

Then he discovers a human skull, which leads him to unearth a stone tomb containing a skeleton outfitted with battle-axe, poisoned arrowheads, and beads. He descends into a...