Jungle Island was the only remaining area with a remnent of the dense forest that covered the original landmass of Riven, which broke up after Gehn wrote his fifth Age into it. It also held the Rivenese village, where the majority of the surviving native population was concentrated. Access to the other islands by any but his sworn followers was forbidden. The island centered on a lagoon with an underwater railway, a school, and the wahrk gallows where Gehn punished disloyal or disobedient Rivenese by feeding them to a wahrk brought to the lake for the event. Gehn had a trained wahrk that he kept in Totem Lake that might have been the one used for the executions.

In the Book of Atrus, it is noted that Rivenese water had strange properties. It lifted up when warmed and shrunk away from heat sources. Gehn wrote in his lab journal on Crater Island that he thought it was densely populated by bacteria that were killed by prolonged exposure to heat. Apparently, this made the water very close to being a gel. Warmth higher than normal caused the bacteria to retreat from the source, causing the water to behave oddly. Gehn took advantage of this to make holes in the lagoon to provide access to his submersible rail car, to create tunnels through the sea between islands, and to shape water on Plateau Island into three-dimensional maps.

Because of the bacteria, the water of the Age wasn't safe to drink even by the Rivenese natives unless it was thoroughly boiled first. They had a medicinal powder for use when someone swallowed unboiled water and became sick.

This is the native village, composed of a number of one-room adobe huts. By the time the stranger arrived, there weren't very many natives left; maybe one or two hundred, judging by the number of huts. Nothing is known of Rivenese who may have lived outside the Age, and nothing is known how the collapse of the Age might have affected the rest of the world.

The School Room

In the school room, Rivenese children were taught D'ni reading, writing, and mathematics. The blackboard on the left had three sentences that the children were expected to be able to recite by heart, the Releshtē okh Gen (The Rules of Gehn).

Gen kenen navaot (Gehn is our master).
Gen komarnen set (Gehn created us).
Gen kodormadhen Ātrus (Gehn defeated Atrus).

Here's a picture of the classroom. Note the wooden panels near the ceiling; each contains a D'ni character.

Here's a closeup of the slate with the Rules of Gehn.

The viewer in the front center of the room, which ran off a capacitor charged by a hand-cranked generator, held a pre-recorded message from Gehn. In it, he says ".Te rekoy D’nē kēbaem revat .Aroyem be tēgtavom ga bodonagaem ….Ram" This is roughly translated as "In my D’ni [class?] you obey the five. You [attend?] to your work and you will be [learning?]… Good". More loosely translated, it's an exhortation that "In my D'ni class you obey the five. If you pay attention to your work, you will learn. …Good."

The entire Age was once heavily forested, but after Gehn was trapped there by Atrus and Katran, he deforested the other islands to make paper for his experiments in writing descriptive books. By the time the Stranger arrived, Jungle Island was the only place that still had part of the original dense forest. Riven trees tended to be thick through the trunk, but fairly short, so the canopy was not very far overhead. Gehn was clear-cutting the trees on Jungle Island when the Stranger arrived, and had events not come to a head, eventually the island would have become as barren as the rest of the Age.

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