Dismal Key

Dismal Key is a small island, part of the Ten Thousand Islands archipelago in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Florida.

It lacks a permanent source of fresh water, which is available only by being imported, collected from rainfall, or extracted from the local cacti. In pre-Columbian times it was inhabited by members of the Calusa nation, highly skilled as fishers, artisans and traders. A huge mound of oyster shells, 15 feet high, remains as a monument to the Calusa. In recent times, Dismal Key has no permanent human habitation - only the occasional hermits, poachers, smugglers and tourists.

Dismal Key is the locale for the second half of the novel Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen.

Famous quotes containing the words dismal and/or key:

    I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
    The time has been, my senses would have cooled
    To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair
    Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
    As life were in’t. I have supped full with horrors;
    Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,
    Cannot once start me.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    At the last, tenderly,
    From the walls of the powerful fortress’d house,
    From the clasp of the knitted locks, from the keep of the well-closed doors,
    Let me be wafted.

    Let me glide noiselessly forth;
    With the key of softness unlock the locks—with a whisper,
    Set ope the doors O soul.
    Walt Whitman (1819–1892)