The Pacific Triangle

MILES AWAY ROSE THE FUMES OF KILAUEA
During the day they were ashen and at night like rose dawn

THE LARGEST CAULDRON OF MOLTEN ROCK ON EARTH
Eight hundred feet below it seethed

Photo, Otto C. Gilmore

A RIVER OF ROCK POURING OUT INTO THE SEA

Photo, Otto C. Gilmore

WHIRLING EDDIES OF LAVA UNDERMINING FROZEN LAVA PROJECTIONS

At sunrise next morning we were docked at Hilo on the island of Hawaii, two hundred miles from Honolulu. There was nothing here impressive to me, despite the waterfalls. For two and a half hours we drove by motor over the turtle-back surface of Hawaii toward Kilauea. Tree-ferns, palms, and plantations stretched in unending recession far and wide. A sense of mystery and awe crept slowly over me as we neared the region of the volcano. At eleven we arrived at the Volcano House.

Yet, in a mood of strange indifference I gazed across the five miles of flat, dark-brown frozen lava which is the roof of the crater. Ash-colored fumes rose from the field of fissures, like smoke from an underground village. Sullen, sallow vapors, these. Sulphur banks, tree molds cast in frozen lava, empty holes! Nothing within left to rot, but fringed with forests and brush, sulphur-stained or rooted in frozen lava. Everywhere promise of volcanic fury, prophecy of the end of the world.

The road lay like a border round the rim of an antique bowl which had been baked, cracked, chipped, but shaped to a usefulness that is beauty. All day long we waited, watching the clouds of gray fumes rise steadily, silently, and with a sad disinterestedness out of the mouth of the crater.

Frozen, the lava was the great bed of assurance, a rock of fearlessness. It seemed to say to the volcano: "I can be indifferent. Down there, deep down, is your limitation. Rise out of the pit and you become, like me, congealed. There, down in that deep, is your only hope of life. This great field of lifeless lava is proof of your effort to reach beyond your sphere. So why fear?" And there was no fear.

THE LAKE OF SPOUTING MOLTEN LAVA
In the volcano of Kilauea. At night the white here shown is pink and terrifying

As night came on the gray fumes began to flush pink with the reflection of the heart of the crater. We set out in cars for the edge. Extinct craters yawned on every side, their walls deep and upright. Some were overgrown with green young trees, but as we came nearer to the living crater, life ceased. Great rolls of cloud-fumes rose from the gulch to wander away in silence. What a strange journey to take! From out a boiling pit where place is paid for by furious fighting, where pressure is father of fountains of boiling rock, out from struggle and howling fury, these gases rose into the world of living matter, into the world of wind and water. Out of the pit of destruction into the air, never ceasing, always stirring down there, rising to where life to us is death to it. The lava, seething, red, shoots aimlessly upward, only to quell its own futile striving in intermittent exhaustion.

We stood within a foot of the edge. Eight hundred feet below us the lava roared and spit. In the night, the entire volcano turned a pink glow, and before us lay three-quarters of a mile of Inferno come true. The red liquid heaves and hisses. Some of it shoots fully fifty feet into the air; some is still-born and forms a pillar of black stone in the midst of molten lava. From the other corner a steady stream of lava issues into the main pool, and the whole thumps and thuds and sputters and spouts, restless, toiling eternally.

On our way to the crater we were talkative. We joked, burnt paper over the cracks, discussed volcanic action, and expressed opinions about death and the probability of animal consciousness after death. But as we turned away from the pit we fell silent. It was as though we had looked into the unknown and had seen that which was not meant for man to see. And the clouds of fumes continued to issue calmly, unperturbed, with a dreadful persistence.

Just as our car groped its way through the mists to the bend in the road, a Japanese stepped before us with his hands outstretched. "Help!" he shouted. "Man killed." We rushed to his assistance and found that a party of Japanese in a Ford had run off the road and dropped into a shallow crater. Down on the frozen bed below huddled a group of men, women, and children, terrified. As we crawled down we found one Japanese sitting with the body of his dead companion in his arms, pressing his hot face against the cold cheek of his comrade. A chill drizzle swept down into the dark pit. It was a scene to horrify a stoic. To the wretched group our coming was a comfort the richness of which one could no more describe than one could the torture of lava in that pit over yonder.

Japanese are said to be fatalists. They hover about Kilauea year in and year out. One man sat with a baby in his arms, his feet dangling over the volcano. Playfully he pretended to toss the child in, and it accepted all as play. The same confidence the dead man had had in the driver whose carelessness had overturned the car. And now it seemed that his body belonged in the larger pit at which he had marveled not more than half an hour earlier.

As I look back into the pit of memory where the molten material, experience, has its ebb and flow, I can still see the seething of rock within a cup of stone, the boiling of nature within its own bosom. Where can one draw the line between experience past and present? Wherever I am, the shooting of that fountain of lava is as real as it was to me then; nor can conglomerate noises drown out the sound of lava pouring back into lava, of undermined rock projections crashing with a hissing sound back upon themselves. It is to me like the sound of voices when King Kamehameha I forced the natives of the island of Oahu over the Pali, and the group of terrified Japanese were like the fish in the coral caves at Kaneohe when aware of the approach of a fish that feeds upon them.

Yet there is a sound rising clear in memory, perhaps more wonderful even than the shrieking of tortured human beings or the hissing of molten lava. As I stood upon the rim of Halemaumau there arose the vision of Kapiolani, the Hawaiian girl who, defying superstition, ventured down into the jaws of the crater and by her courage exorcised Kilauea of its devils. What in all the world is more wonderful than frailty imbued with passion mothering achievement? Kapiolani may be called Hawaii's Joan of Arc. Unable to measure her strength with men, she defied their gods. A world of prejudice, all the world to her, stood between her and Kilauea. Courage triumphant had conquered fear. In defiance of her clan and of her own terror, she was the first native to approach the crater, and in that she made herself the equal of Kilauea. As she cast away the Hawaiian idols, herself emerged an idol.

CHAPTER IV
THE SUBLIMATED, SAVAGE FIJIANS

A century ago a number of Australian convicts escaped to Fiji. They brought to these savage cannibal islanders all the viciousness and arrogance of their type, and imposed themselves upon the primitive natives. The effect was not conducive of the best relations between white people and natives, nor did it have an elevating influence upon the latter. However, despite their cannibalism and their unwillingness to yield to the influence of our benign civilization, the Fijians are a people in many ways superior to both the Polynesians east of them and the true Melanesians or Papuans to the west. They are more moral; they are cleanly; their women occupy a better position in relation to their men; and in character and skill they are superior to their neighbors. I was impressed with this dignity of the Fijians, conscious and unconscious, from the time I first laid eyes on them. I felt that, notwithstanding all that was said about them, here was a people that stood aloof from mere imitation.

Yet such is the nature of reputation that when I announced my intention of breaking my journey from Honolulu to Australia at Fiji, my fellow-passengers were inclined to commiserate with me. They wondered how one with no special purposes—that is, without a job—could risk cutting loose from his iron moorings in these savage isles. Had they not read in their school geographies of jungles and savages all mixed and wild, with mocking natives grinning at you from behind bamboo-trees, living expectations of a juicy dinner? They warned me about dengue fever; they extolled the virtues of the Fijian maidens, and exaggerated the vices of the Fijian men. The word "cannibals" howled round my head as the impersonal wind had howled round the masts of the steamer one night. But the adventurer soon learns that there is none so unknowing as the average globe-trotters (the people who have been there); so he listens politely and goes his own way.

When, therefore, I got the first real whiff of tropical sweetness, mixed though it was with copra and mold, all other considerations vanished. From the cool heights the hills looked down in pity upon the little village of Suva as it lay prostrate beneath the sun. If there was any movement to be seen, it was upon the lapping waters of the harbor, where numerous boats swarmed with black-bodied, glossy-skinned natives in that universal pursuit of life and happiness. As the Niagara sidled up to the pier and made fast her hawsers, these black fellows rushed upon her decks and into the holds like so many ants, and what had till then been inanimate became as though possessed.

2

I had been under the impression that the natives were all lazy, but the manner of their handling of cargo soon dissipated that notion. Further to discredit the rumor-mongers, three Fijians staged an attempt to lead a donkey ashore which would have shamed the most enthusiastic believer in the practice of counting ten before getting angry and trying three times before giving up. The Fijian is as indifferent to big as to little tasks, and seems to be alone, of all the dwellers in the tropics, in this apathetic attitude toward life. There is none in all the world more lazy, indolent, and do-nothing than the white man. As soon as he comes within sight of a native anywhere, that native does his labor for him; you may count on it.

So it was that with fear and trembling I announced to the stewards that I had a steamer trunk which I wanted ashore with me. They grunted and growled as the two of them struggled with it along the gang-plank and dropped it as Atlas might have been expected to drop the earth, and stood there with a contemptuous look of expectation. I took out two half-dollars and handed one to each. The sneer that formed under their noses was well practised, I could see, and they took great pains to inform me that they were no niggers, they would not take the trunk another foot. There it was. I was lost, scorned, and humiliated. Why did I have so much worldly goods to worry about? Just then a portly Fijian stepped up. Beside him I felt puny, doubly humble now. Before I had time to decide whether or not he was going to pick me up by the nape of the neck and carry me off to a feast, he took my trunk instead. Though it weighed fully a hundred and sixty-five pounds, it rose to his shoulders—up there a foot and a half above me—and the giant strode along the pier with as little concern as though it were empty. The two stewards stood looking on with an air of superiority typical of the white men among colored.

I cannot say that mere brawn ever entitles any man to rank, and that the white generally substitutes brain for brawn is obvious. But I failed to see wherein they justified their conceit, for to men of their type the fist is still the symbol of their ideal, as it is to the majority of white men. And as I came away from the ship again that afternoon I found a young steward, a mere lad, standing in a corner crying, his cheek swollen and red. I asked him what happened. "The steward hit me," he said, trying to restrain himself from crying. "I thought I was through and went for my supper so as to get ashore a bit. He came up and asked me what I was doing. I told him, and he struck me with his fist." Yet the stewards thought themselves too good to do any labor with black men about. No ship in a tropical port is manned by the sailors; there they take a vacation, as it were.

From the customs shed to my hotel the selfsame Fijian carried my trunk majestically. I felt hopeful that for a time at least I should see the last of stewards and their ilk. But before I was two days in Suva I learned that shore stewards are often not any better, and was happy to get farther inland away from the port for the short time I could afford to spend in the tropics.

Meanwhile, some of the younger of my fellow-passengers came on shore and began doing the rounds, into which they inveigled me. From one store to the other we went, examining the moldy, withered, incomplete stocks of the traders. Magazines stained brown with age, cheap paper-covered novels, native strings of beads formed part of the stock in trade. We soon exhausted Suva.

At the corner of the right angle made by Victoria Parade and the pier stood a Victoria coach. A horse slept on three legs, in front of it, and a Hindu sat upon the seat like a hump on an elongated camel. We roused them from their dozing and began to bargain for their hire. Six of us climbed into the coach and slowly, as though it were fastened to the ground, the horse began to move, followed by the driver, the carriage, and the six of us. For an hour we continued in the direction in which the three had been standing, along the beach, up a little knoll, past corrugated-iron-roofed shacks, and down into Suva again; the horse stopped with the carriage behind him in exactly the same position in which we had found them, and driver and beast went to sleep again.

Much is heard these days about the effects of the railroad and the steamer and the wireless telegraph on the unity of the world, but to those travelers and that Hindu and to the Fijians whom we passed en route, not even the insertion of our six shillings in the driver's pocket has, I am sure, as much as left the faintest impression on any of us except myself. And on me it has left the impression of the utter inconsequence of most traveling.

Thus Suva, the eye of Fiji and of the needle of the Pacific, is threaded, but there is nothing to sew. The unexpected never happens. There are no poets or philosophers, no theaters or cabarets in Suva, as far as mere eye can see,—nothing but smell of mold and copra (cocoanut oil).

In Suva one cannot long remain alert. The sun is stupefying. The person just arrived finds himself stifled by the sharp smells all about him as though the air were poisoned with too much life. The shaggy green hills, rugged and wild in the extreme, show even at a distance the struggle between life and death which moment by moment takes place. Luxuriant as on the morning of creation, the vegetation seems to be rotting as after a period of death. In Suva everything smells damp and moldy. You cannot get away from it. The stores you buy in, the bed you sleep in, the room you eat in,—all have the same odor. The books in the little library are eaten full of holes through which the flat bookworms wander as by right of eminent domain. Offensive to the uninitiated is the smell of copra. The swarms of Fijians who attack the cargo smell of it and glisten with it. The boats smell of it and the air is heavy with it. If copra and mold could be banished from the islands, the impression of loveliness which is the essence of the South Seas would remain untainted. Yet to-day, let me but get a whiff of cocoanut-oil from a drug store and I am immediately transported to the South Seas and my being goes a-wandering.

3

I seldom dream, but at the moment of waking in strange surroundings after an unusual run of events my mind rehearses as in a dream the experiences gained during consciousness. When the knuckles of the Fijian—and he has knuckles—sounded on my door at seven to announce my morning tea, I woke with a sense of heaviness, as though submerged in a world from which I could never again escape. At seven-fifteen another Fijian came for my laundry; at seven-thirty a third came for my shoes. Seeing that it was useless to remain in bed longer, I got up. I was not many minutes on the street before I realized the urgency in those several early visits. Daylight-saving is an absolute necessity in the tropics, for by eight or nine one has to endure our noonday sun, and unless something is accomplished before that time one must perforce wait till late afternoon for another opportunity. To keep an ordinary coat on an ordinary back in Suva is like trying to live in a fireless cooker while angry. Even in the shade one is grateful for white duck instead of woolens, so before long I had acquired an Irish poplin coat. Yet Fiji is one of the most healthful of the South Sea islands.

Owing to the heat, most likely—to give the white devils their due—procrastination is the order of life. "Everything here is 'malua,'" explained the manager of "The Fiji Times" to me. "No matter what you want or whom you ask for it, 'wait a bit' will be the process." And he forthwith demonstrated, quite unconsciously, that he knew whereof he spoke. I wanted to get some information about the interior which he might just as easily have given me off-hand, but he asked me to wait a bit. I did. He left his office, walked all the way up the street with me to show me a photographer's place where I should be able to get what I was after, and stood about with me waiting for the photographer to make up his mind whether he had the time to see me or not. There's no use rushing anybody. The authorities have been several years trying to get one of the off streets of Suva paved. It has been "worked on," but the task, turned to every now and then for half an hour, requires numerous rest periods.

In Fiji, every one moves adagio. The white man looks on and commands; the Indian coolie slinks about and slaves; the Fijian works on occasion but generally passes tasks by with sporty indifference. Yet there is no absence of life. Beginning with the noise and confusion at the pier, there is a steady stream of individuals on whom shadows are lost, though they have nothing on them but their skins and their sulus. The Fijian idles, allows the Indian to work, happy to be left alone, happy if he can add a shilling to his possessions,—an old vest, a torn pair of trousers of any shape, an old coat, or a stiff-bosomed shirt sans coat or vest or trousers. Tall, mighty, and picturesque, his coiffure the pride of his life, he watches with a confidence well suited to his origin and his race the changes going on about him.

Thus, while his island's fruits are being crated and carted off by the ship-load for foreign consumption, he helps in the process for the mere privilege of subsidized loafing. All the fun he gets out of trade in the tropics seems to be the opportunity of swearing at his fellows in fiji-ized versions of curses taught him by the white man. Or he stands erect on the flat punt as it comes in from regions unknown, bearing bananas green from the tree, the very picture of ease and contentment. Yet one little tug with foreign impertinence tows half a dozen punts, depriving him even of this element of romance in his life.

Still, there is nothing sullen in his make-up. A dozen mummy-apples—better than bread to him—tied together with a string, suffice to make his primitive heart glad. Primitive these people are; their instincts, never led astray very far by such frills and trappings as keep us jogging along are none the less human. Unfold your camera and suggest taking a picture of any one of them and forthwith he straightens up, transforms his features, and adjusts his loin-cloth; nor will he forget to brush his hair with his hand. What a strange thing is this instinct in human nature anywhere in the world which substitutes so much starch for a slouch the moment one sees a one-eyed box pointing in his direction! None ever hoped to see a print of himself, but all posed as though the click of that little shutter were the recipe for perpetual youth.

The motive is not always one of vanity. Generally, at the sound of the shutter, a hand shoots out in anticipation of reward. In the tropics it is no little task to bring oneself together so suddenly, and the effort should be fully compensated. The expenditure of energy involved in posing is worthy of remuneration. Nevertheless, vanity is inherent in this response. The Fijian is a handsome creature, and he knows it. He knows how to make his hair the envy of the world. "Permanent-wave" establishments would go out of business here in America if some skilled Fijian could endure our climate. He would give such permanence to blondes and brunettes as would cost only twenty-five cents and would really last. He would not plaster the hair down and cover it with a net against the least ruffle of the wind. When he got through with it it would stand straight up in the air, four to six inches long, and would serve as an insulator against the burning rays of the sun unrivaled anywhere in the world. While I squinted and slunk in the shade, the native chose the open highway. Give him a cluster of breadfruit to carry and a bank messenger with a bag of bullion could not seem more important.

The Fijians, notwithstanding the fact that they take less to the sentimental in our civilization than the Samoans, are a fine race. Their softness of nature is a surprising inversion of their former ferocity. What one sees of them in Suva helps to fortify one in this conclusion; a visit farther inland leaves not a shadow of doubt. And pretty as the harbor is, it is as nothing compared with the loveliness of river and hills in the interior.

I was making my way to the pier in search of the launch that would take me up the Rewa River, when a giant Fijian approached me. He spoke English as few foreign to the tongue can speak it. A coat, a watch, and a cane—a lordly biped—he did not hesitate to refer to his virtues proudly. He answered my unspoken question as to his inches by assuring me he was six feet three in his stocking feet (he wore no stockings) and was forty-five years old. For a few minutes we chatted amicably about Fiji and its places of interest. There was never a smug reference to anything even suggestive of the lascivious—as would have been the case with a guide in Japan, or Europe—yet he cordially offered to conduct and protect me through Fijiland. Had I had a billion dollars in gold upon me I felt that I might have put myself in his care anywhere in the world. But I was already engaged to go up the Rewa River and could not hire him. Cordially and generously, as an old friend might have done, he told me what to look for and bid me have a good time.

4

I took the launch which makes daily trips up the Rewa. The little vessel was black with natives—outside, inside, everywhere, streaming over to the pier. It was owned and operated by an Englishman named Message. Even in the traffic on this river combination threatens individual enterprise. "The company has several launches. It runs them on schedule time, stopping only at special stations, regardless of the convenience to the Fijians. It is trying to force me out of business," said Mr. Message, a look of troubled defiance in his face. "But I am just as determined to beat it."

So he operates his launch to suit the natives, winning their good-will and patronage. It was interesting to see how his method worked. No better lesson in the instinctive tendency toward coöperation and mutual aid could be found. He had no white assistant, but every Fijian who could find room on the launch constituted himself a longshoreman. They enjoyed playing with the launch. They helped in the work of loading and unloading one another's petty cargo, such as kerosene, corrugated iron for roofing (which is everywhere replacing thatch), and odd sticks of wood. And the jollity that electrified them was a delightful commentary on this one white man's humanity.

Delight rides at a spirited pace on this river Rewa. The banks are seldom more than a couple of feet above the water. The launch makes straight for the shore wherever a Fijian recognizes his hut, and he scrambles off as best he can. Here and there round the bends natives in takias (somewhat like outrigger canoes with mat sails, now seldom used), punts, or rowboats slip by in the twilight.

The sun had set by the time all the little stops had been made between Suva and Davuilevu, the last stopping-place. Each man, as he stepped from this little float of modernism, clambered up the bank and disappeared amid the sugar-cane. What a world of romance and change he took into the dark-brown hut he calls his own! What news of the world must he not have brought back with him! A commuter, he had probably gone in by that morning's launch, in which case he spent three full hours in "toil" or in the purchase of a sheet of corrugated iron or a tin of oil. He may have helped himself to a shirt from somebody's clothes-line in the spare time left him. One thing was certain, there were no chocolates in his pockets, for he had no pockets, and I saw no young woman holding a baby in her arms for daddy to greet.

Yet even from a distance one recognized something of family affection. To enter and examine closely would perhaps have made a difference in my impressions. I was content with these hazy pictures, to see these dark-skinned people merge with their brown-thatched huts curtained by shadows within the cane-fields. When night came on all was dissolved in shadow, and voices in song rose on the cool air.

5

The Rewa River runs between two antagonistic institutions. At Davuilevu (the Great Conch-Shell) there is a mission station on one side and a sugar-mill on the other. Both are deeply affecting the character and environment of the Fijians, yet the contrast in the results is too obvious to be overlooked by even the most casual observer.

As I stepped off the boat a young New Zealander whose cousin had come down with us on the Niagara and whom I had met the day of our arrival in Suva, came out of a building across the road. He was conducting a class in carpentry composed of young Fijian students of the mission. They were so absorbed in their work that they barely noticed me, and the atmosphere of sober earnestness about the place was thrilling. From time out of mind the Fijians have been good carpenters, the craft being passed down from generation to generation within a special caste. Their shipbuilding has always been superior to that of their neighbors, the Tongans. It was not to be wondered at, therefore, that the main department here should be that of wood-turning, and some of the work the students were doing at the time was exceptionally fine.

The buildings of the mission had all been constructed with native labor under the direction of the missionaries. They were simply but firmly built, the absence of architectural richness being due fully as much to the spirit of the missionaries as to the lack of decorativeness in the character of the natives.

However, there was something to be found at the mission which was harshly lacking at the sugar-mill. The students moved about in a leisurely manner, cleanly and thoughtful; whereas across the river not only were the buildings of the very crudest possible, but the Hindus and the Fijians roamed around like sullen, hungry curs always expecting a kick. Those who were not sullen, were obviously tired, spiritless, and repressed. Their huts were set close to one another in rows, whereas the mission buildings range over the hills. The crowding at the mill, upon such vast open spaces, gave the little village all the faults of a tenement district. Racial clannishness seems to require even closer touch where space is wide. The very expanse of the world seems to intensify the fear of loneliness, so men huddle closer to sense somewhat of the gregarious delights of over-populated India. But there is also the squeezing of plantation-owners here at fault, and the total disregard of the needs of individual employees.

The mill is worked day and night, in season, but it is at night that one's reactions to it are most impressive. The street lamps, assisted by a dim glow from within the shacks, the monotonous invocation of prayer by Indians squatting before the wide-open doors, the tiny kava "saloons," and the great, giant, grinding, grating sugar-mills crushing the juice out of the cane and precipitating it (after a chain of processes) in white dust for sweetening the world, are something never to be forgotten. The deep, pulsating breath of the mill sounded like the snore of a sleeping monster. Yet that monstrous mill never sleeps.

The sound did not cease, but rather, became more pronounced after I returned that night. Deeply imprinted on my memory was the figure of a sullen-looking Indian at his post—small, wiry, persistent—with the whirring of machinery all about him, the steaming vats, the broken sticks of cane being crunched in the maw of the machine. The toilers sometimes dozed at their tasks. I was told that once an Indian fell into one of the vats in a moment of dizzy slumber. The cynical informer insisted that the management would not even stop the process of turning cane into sugar, and that into the tea-cups of the world was mixed the substance of that man. My reflection was along different lines,—that into the sweets of the world we were constantly mixing the souls of men.

6

But unfortunately those who look after the souls of these men at the mission are apt to forget that they have bodies, too, and that body is the materialization of desire. There is something wonderful, indeed, in the sight of men known to have been of the most ferocious of human creatures going about their daily affairs in an attitude of great reverence to the things of life. And reverence added to the extreme shyness of the Fijian is writ large in the manner of every native across the way from the mill. Sometimes I felt that there was altogether too much restraint, too much checking of wholesome and healthy impulses among them for it to be true reverence. That was especially marked on Sunday morning, when from all the corners of the mission fields gathered the sturdy black men in the center of the grounds where stood the little church.

They were a sight to behold, altogether too seriously concerned to be amusing, and to the unbiased the acme of gentleness. There they were—muscular, huge, erect, and black, their bushy crops of coarse hair adding six inches to their heads; dressed in sulus neatly tucked away, and stiff-bosomed white shirts over their bodies. Starched white shirts in the tropics! And the Bible in Fijian in their hands. In absolute silence they made their way into the church, the shuffle of their unshod feet adding intensity to that silence. When they raised their voices in the hymns it seemed to me that nothing more sincere had ever been sung in life. But then something occurred which made me wonder.

From the Solomon Islands had come on furlough the Rev. Mr. Ryecroft and his delicate wife. He was a man of very gentle bearing and great fervor. He and his plucky wife had suffered much for their convictions. All men who really believe anything suffer. The missionary is as much anathema in his field as the anarchist is in America, and is generally as violent an agent for the disruption of custom. Mr. Ryecroft rose to speak before the congregation. He spoke in English and was interpreted by the missionary in charge. He told of his trials in the Solomon Islands, and appealed for Fijian missionaries to go back with him and save the blood-thirsty Solomons. I watched the faces of these converted Fijians. Some of them were intent upon the speaker, repugnance at the cruelties rehearsed coming over them as at something of which they were more afraid as a possible revival in themselves than as an objective danger. Some, however, fell fast asleep, their languid heads drooping to one side. I am no mind-reader, nor is my observation to be taken for more than mere guess-work, but I felt that there were two conflicting thoughts in the minds of the listeners, for while Mr. Ryecroft was urging them to come arrest brutality in the Solomons there were other recruiters at work in Fiji for service in Europe. While one told that the savage Solomon Islanders swooped down upon the missionary compound and left sixteen dead behind them, in Europe they were leaving a thousand times as many every day, worse than dead. To whom were they to listen!

That afternoon Mr. Waterhouse, one of the missionaries, asked me to give the young men a little talk on my travels, he to interpret for me. I asked him what he would like to have me tell them and he urged me to advise them not to give up their lands. I complied, pointing out to them how quickly they would go under as a race if they did so. The response was more than compensating.

The outlook is all the more reassuring when you sit of an evening as I did in the large, carefully woven native house, elliptical in shape, with thatched roof and soft-matted floors, which serves as a sort of night school for little tots. The children, who were then rehearsing some dances for the coming festival, sat on tiers of benches so built that one child's feet were on a level with the shoulders of the one in front. Like a palisade of stars their bright eyes glistened with the reflections of the light from the kerosene lamps hanging on wires from the rafters. Lolohea Ratu, a girl of twenty, educated in Sydney, Australia, spoke to them in a plaintive, modulated voice, soft and low. All Fijian voices are sad, but hers was slightly sadder than most of them, tinged, it seemed, with knowledge of the world. She had studied the Montessori method and was trying to train her little brothers and sisters thereby. But she was not forgetful of what is lovely in her own race, primitive as it is, and was preparing these children in something of a compromise between native and foreign dances. Round and round the room they marched, the overhanging lamps playing pranks with their shadows. Others sat upon the mats, legs crossed, beating time and clapping hands in the native fashion. Their glistening bodies and sparkling, mischievous eyes, their response to the enchanting rhythm and melody borrowed from a world as strange to them as theirs is to us, showed their delight. I wondered what strange images—ghostly pale folk—they were seeing through our songs. Perhaps the music was merely another kind of "savage" song to them, even a wee bit wilder than their own. On the following day they were to sing and dance to the amazement of their skeptical elders.

Thus does Fijian "civilization" steer its uncertain course between the two contending influences from the West—the planters and the missionaries—just as the river Rewa runs between them over the jungle plains, struggling to supplant wild entangling growths with earth culture.

7

And that "civilization" leans at one time toward the mill and at another toward the mission. Frankly, Fiji grows more interesting as one gets away from these two guy-wires and floats on the sluggish river. My opportunity of seeing that Fiji which is least confused by either influence came unexpectedly. The missionaries generously invited me to go with them up the river in their launch early Monday morning. Everywhere along the banks of the broad, deep stream stood groups of huts and villages amid the sugar-cane fields. I gazed up the wide way of the river toward the hazy blue mountains which stood fifty miles away. They seemed to be a thousand miles and farther still from reality. The Himalayas which lured the Lama priest and Kim could not have been more enticing. Because of the cloying atmosphere of the day, this distant coolness was like an oasis in the desert, and I longed for some phantom ship to bear me away on the breeze.