Crater Island was also called Book Island in notes. It was the site of Gehn's first laboratory before he moved to the 233rd Age. The island had a wood chipper and a large pulp boiler for paper making, as well as other facilities built into and on the crater walls. His Guild of Bookmakers worked there to create blank books for him to use in his experiments in the Art.

The island was named after its most prominent feature, a large crater that appears to be volcanic. A lake covered much of the interior of the caldera. A sign that the volcano was not dead is the steam tap near the center of the lake. Gehn installed it to power the wood chipper, the pulp boiler, and a trap used to catch ytram, the frog-like creatures he harvested for their poison.

This shot shows the pulp boiler and a pile of wood chips under the chipper. In the upper left, you can see the entrance to a part of the facility dug into the crater wall.

This is the wood chipper, an unassuming-looking device that turned most of Riven's forests into piles of sawdust ready for the pulp boiler. The chute leads up to a cart track used to transport sections of the trees that had been cut down on Jungle Island.

A mine cart was used to transport lumber from Jungle Island to Crater Island. The track ran along the ocean floor, rather than on a bridge. Because the distance between the islands kept changing, it was easier to add track and heating elements across the bottom than to try to keep the whole thing above water. In the following movie, we are in the cart moving along the track from Jungle Island to Crater Island. The orange rings were heating elements, which formed a tunnel through the water by stimulating the bacteria in it to move away from the track.

The boiler was used to extract the fibers of wood pulp needed for making paper. The building drew water from the lake to fill the boiler. The wood was transported from the chipper by hand and loaded through the door in the side of the building. The boiler was heated by gas jets around the base of the building, which were open to the air. The burner used some form of gas for fuel. It's very possible that it might have used sulphur gas from the volcano since that would have been a fuel source that was close at hand. If so, then it would have been hazardous for the workers since burning sulphur gasses creates sulphur dioxide, which is toxic.

Inside is a chamber containing a large horizontal mesh screen that can be raised and lowered to lift the pulp out of the water to drain. The screen was lowered before the water and wood chips were loaded inside to boil. In the center was a maintenance ladder for cleaning underneath the screen.

Gehn's first laboratory:

Before he moved his laboratory to the 233rd Age, Gehn worked out of this room on the rim of the crater. The device in the center of the room is an incinerator, where he burned failed books. As of the time the Stranger visited the Age, Gehn mainly worked out of his lab in Age 233, but still came back to this one occasionally. The building has a route to a magnetic levitation car to Survey Island.

There were several work benches with equipment and personal belongings on them. The first picture shows a bookbinding table, with several blank books on it. You can see them in various stages of construction in this picture. A pile of paper is in a sewing frame, a book vise can be seen on the right, and several sewn books are on the table and shelf that have not yet been covered. There are six completed blank books on the shelf. There is also a section of a log on the table. Gehn may have been examining it to determine the quality of the batch of logs it was taken from.

The second table seems to have been used mainly for writing his journal and perhaps for writing descriptive books. On the right hand side is a heek, a gun that fired poisoned darts. It was said to have been powered by explosive pellets. On the shelf is a smoking pipe he purportedly used to smoke a halluncinogenic extract of ytram poison.

Here are close-ups of the pipe and the heek. Notice the triangular bayonet on the end of the heek, whick allowed it to be used as a short thrusting spear after firing. This was possibly because the reloading process was too slow for the device to be used solely as a gun.

The third table seems to have been used for his collection of natural artifacts and for extracting poison from ytrams. On the right is an ytram trap. After an ytram was captured, the trap was brought here before it was opened. The second picture shows a trap in the ready position on a dumbwaiter used to lower it to water level. The pellets in the cup are bait. One would be placed on the center trigger plate, and then the trap was lowered to where the ytram could get to it.

On the left end of the shelf are three jars with the preserved bodies of ytrams that had been caught.

The box of drawers held a small collection of objects Gehn found of some interest. The top drawer held various birds' eggs. The second drawer was a collection of local butterflies.

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