Two journalists both named Jim arrive by water taxi on the shell collector's isolated Kenyan island shore.

The shell collector begins losing his sight as a child in Canada while hunting caribou with his father.

An ophthalmologist brings the young shell collector to a Florida beach, where he digs up his first shell.

At 58, after a career in academia and having a son, the shell collector retires to a remote island in the Lamu Archipelago.

The shell collector discovers an American woman named Nancy gravely ill with malaria on his shore and nurses her back to health.

Nancy and the shell collector sleep together; she cries afterward and accuses him of running away from the world.

After ten hours catatonic from a cone snail bite, Nancy wakes and recounts an awe-inspiring, transformed experience.

The shell collector refuses Nancy's plea to be bitten by another cone snail and sends her back to her family.

The mwadhini arrives with his brothers and begs the shell collector to cure his daughter Seema's malaria with cone snail venom.

The shell collector finds the smallest cone snail he can and uses it to sting Seema, curing her malaria.

News of Seema's recovery spreads internationally, drawing floods of sick visitors who invade the shell collector's home.

The shell collector's son Josh arrives on the island and befriends three orphaned boys camped nearby.

Josh is bitten by a cone snail and dies.

The shell collector reaches for a cone snail in the dark surf and realizes the venom is already spreading through his own body.

One year after his near-fatal bite, the shell collector and Seema share a quiet, companionable routine on the reef together.

This pool follows the major turning points of the shell collector's life, beginning with the journalists' arrival and reaching back to his Canadian childhood and the discovery of shells as his sight fails. It traces the chain of events set off by Nancy's miraculous cone snail cure, which leads to the mwadhini's plea, Seema's healing, and the flood of unwanted visitors. The death of his son Josh marks the story's emotional center, bringing a period of profound loss. The shell collector's own near-fatal bite while wading at night forces a reckoning with his isolation. His survival and the quiet companionship he finds with Seema in the final scene signal a hard-won transformation.

The shell collector's headline story from blindness to the reef.

The shell collector reluctantly lets the two Jims inside his home and truthfully answers all their questions.

The shell collector takes the two Jims along on his morning shell-collecting routine along the reef.

The young shell collector learns Braille and devotes himself to reading everything available about shells and mollusks.

At 16, the shell collector leaves Canada to crew sailboats visiting tropical islands, learning to identify shells entirely by touch.

Dr. Kabiru from Lamu helps the shell collector nurse Nancy through several severe relapses of her malaria.

Nancy describes to the shell collector how she left her family and traveled the world searching for inner peace and spiritual purpose.

The mwadhini promises the shell collector that curing Seema will be the last thing asked of him and he will then be left in peace.

The shell collector begins avoiding the crowds of visitors by retreating to inland paths, where thorns and obstacles disorient him.

Cut off from the familiar reef, the shell collector begins to doubt his own ability to correctly identify the shells he handles.

Josh teaches the three orphaned boys about shells and takes them into the water to find them.

The shell collector reluctantly begins tutoring the orphaned boys in shell identification himself, fearing they will be poisoned otherwise.

The two Jims tell the shell collector that Nancy has given them the rights to publish her story.

The shell collector travels by boat to the town of Lamu with the two Jims for an evening outing during Ramadan.

A local teenager offers the three men a hookah pipe and explains that tonight Allah determines the course of the world for the coming year.

After midnight, a crab fisherman carries the three men back to the island by motorized mtepe.

This pool fills in the texture of the shell collector's life, beginning with the journalists' first interactions on the island and reaching back to the formative years in which the young shell collector taught himself to navigate the world through touch. It covers the practical details of Nancy's illness and recovery, including Dr. Kabiru's role and Nancy's own account of the spiritual wandering that brought her to the island. The mwadhini's specific promise of solitude, Josh's work with the orphaned boys, and the shell collector's growing disorientation when driven inland all deepen the story's portrait of a man at odds with the world around him. The pool closes with the evening trip to Lamu, capturing the quiet buildup before the story's climax.

The supporting moments and quieter storylines behind the main arc.

The young shell collector's father takes him to an ophthalmologist in Florida, where doctors confirm his vision is failing permanently.

Holding his first shell, the young shell collector realizes he can feel it more completely with his hands than he ever could have seen it with eyes.

Settled on his island, the shell collector has an epiphany that not fully understanding why shells are beautiful is itself a profound privilege.

A cone snail crawls in from the ocean across the shell collector's floor and bites the recovering Nancy, leaving her catatonic.

The mwadhini tells the shell collector that Nancy's miraculous cone snail cure is a sign from Allah and challenges his uncertain view of fate.

Josh arrives on the island and is appalled that his father refuses to use cone snails to help the many sick people gathered outside.

Visitors steal much of the shell collector's prized shell collection and injure themselves on the coral reefs.

A monsoon sweeps over the island in the desolate weeks following Josh's death.

The mwadhini returns after Josh's death, declares the shell collector will now have his peace, and takes the orphaned boys to an orphanage.

Smoking hashish in Lamu, the shell collector imagines God bent over parchment, writing the course of the world for the coming year.

Wading back to the island after midnight in an altered state, the shell collector becomes deeply enraptured by the sensory world of the reef.

Carrying a cone snail through the dark surf, the shell collector suddenly realizes he has been planning to paralyze or kill the journalists.

The shell collector hurls the cone snail back into the surf and immediately feels a spreading stiffness in his shoulder.

Seema, who has been secretly stocking the shell collector's home with supplies for years, finds him unconscious on the shore at dawn.

The story ends with a blind bullia snail feeling its way through the sand, dragging its shell forward into private, unlit horizons.

This pool traces the internal and spiritual turning points that shape the shell collector's journey, beginning with the childhood revelation that blindness could open a deeper way of sensing the world. It moves through his hard-won acceptance of nature's mystery, the shock of Nancy's venom-induced transformation, and the mwadhini's challenge to the shell collector's uncertain view of fate. The deaths and departures that follow — Josh's, and nearly the shell collector's own — are framed as moments of reckoning rather than mere plot events. The pool closes with the story's final image: a blind snail feeling its way through the sand, a quiet mirror of the shell collector's own stumbling path toward connection.