(1) Nalik, his wife and five dogs.
(2) Three young women, each with several dogs.
(3) Old Sru, chief of the district, with numerous dogs.
(4) Two boys and three girls, who carried baskets of food, crayfish
nets, boar-spears, &c. Large number of dogs, male and female.
(5) The white man, to whom, as soon as he appeared, the whole of the
dogs immediately attached themselves.
(6) Small boy of ten, named Toka, the terror of the village for
his illimitable impudence and unsurpassed devilry. But as he was a
particular friend of the white man (and could not be prevented) he was
allowed to come. He had three dogs.
Before we started old Sru, Nalik, and myself had some Hollands, two
bottles of which were also placed in the care of Nalik's wife. The
“devil,” as Toka was called, mimicked us as we drank, smacked his lips
and rubbed one hand up and down his stomach. One of the big girls cuffed
him for being saucy. He retaliated by darting between her legs and
throwing her down upon the sand.
Presently we started, the women and children going ahead, with the
exception of the “devil,” who stuck close to me, and carried my Snider
in one hand and my double-barrel muzzle-loader in the other.
For the first two or three miles our way lay along the hard, white
beach, whose sands were covered everywhere by millions of tiny,
blue-backed, red-legged soldier crabs, moving to and fro in companies,
regiments, and divisions, hastening to burrow before the daylight
revealed their presence to their dreaded enemies--the golden-winged sand
plovers and the greedy sooty terns, who yet knew how to find them by the
myriad small nodules of sand they left to betray their hiding-place.
Oh, the sweet, sweet smell of the forest as it is borne down from the
mountains and carried seaward, to gladden, it may be, the heart of some
hard-worked, broken-spirited sailor, who, in a passing ship, sees from
aloft this fair, fair island with its smiling green of lear, and soft,
heaving valleys, above the long lines of curving beach, showing white
and bright in the morning sun! And, as you walk, the surf upon the reef
for ever calls and calk; sometimes loudly with a deep, resonant boom,
but mostly with a soft, faint murmur like the low-breathed sigh of a
woman when she lies her cheek upon her lover's breast and looks upward
to his face with eyes aglow and lips trembling for his kiss.
Far, far above a feint note. 'Tis but a snow-white tropic bird,
suspended in mid-air on motionless wing, his long scarlet pendrices
almost invisible at such a height. Presently, as he discerns you, he
lets his aerial, slender form sink and sink, without apparent motion,
till he is within fifty feet, and then he turns his graceful head from
side to side, and inquiringly surveys you with his full, soft black eye.
For a moment or two he flutters his white wings gently and noiselessly,
and you can imagine you hear his timid heart-beats; then, satisfied with
his scrutiny, his fairy, graceful form floats upward into space again,
and is lost to view.
Leaving the beach and the sound of the droning surf behind us we turned
to the starboard hand, and struck through the narrow strip of littoral
towards the mountains. For the first mile or so our way was through a
grove of pandanus-palms, nearly every one of which was in full fruit; on
the branches were sitting hundreds of small sooty terns, who watched
our progress beneath with the calm indifference borne of the utter
confidence of immunity of danger from any human being.
Once through the sandy stretch on which the pandanus loves to grow,
we came to the outlier of the mountain lands--low, gently undulating
ridges, covered on both sides of the narrow track with dense thickets
of pineapples, every plant bearing a fruit half-matured, which, when
ripened, was never touched by the hand of man, for the whole island was,
in places, covered with thickets such as this, and the wild pig only
revelled among them.
“They grow thickly,” I said to Nalik.
“Ay, _tahina_* they grow thickly and wild,” he replied, with some
inflection of sadness in his voice; “long, long ago, before my father's
father lived, there was a great town here. That was long before we of
this land had ever seen a white man. And now we who are left are but as
dead leaves.”
* Friend.
“How came it so to be?”
He shook his head. “I cannot tell. I only know that once we of this land
numbered many, many thousands, and now we are but hundreds. Here, where
we now walk, was once a great town of houses with stone foundations; if
ye cut away the _fara_ (pineapples) thou wilt see the lower stones lying
in the ground.”
We pressed onward and upward into the deeper forest, then turned
downwards along a narrow path, carpeted thick with fallen leaves, damp
and soft to the foot, for the sun's rays never pierced through the dense
foliage overhead. And then we came out upon a fair, green sward with
nine stately coco-palms clustered, their branches drooping over the
river of my dreams, which lay before us with open, waiting bosom.