Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/689

Rh or pandanus tree, and from this hut or the profusion of this tree the mountain took its name of Nakauvadra. Here Lutunasobasoba lived several years, and when at last he felt his end to be near he summoned his children around him and gave them his dying commands, ordering them to separate and settle in different parts of the wide land he had discovered. Under these conditions Fiji was peopled, and the greater part of the saga is taken up with the wanderings of these children. Besides being the dwelling place of their gods, Nakauvadra Mountain was the first circle of the Fijian inferno, the point of departure for the unseen world that lay to the westward. Nearly all South Sea islanders point to some spot on their island where the spirits of the dead leap into the ocean to be ferried over to the world of shades. These "jumping-off places" (thombothombo) are generally steep cliffs facing the place whence tradition says the race originally came. Whatever may become of the soul hereafter, to Nakauvadra it must first betake itself before leaping into the ocean. From the populous district of the Lower Rewa there is but one path to the Nakauvadra Mountain, called the "Sala ni Yalo" (Path of the Shades). Chance led to its discovery, or rediscovery, if it is true that Europeans had before noticed it. Last year a surveyor was sent to traverse the boundaries of lands claimed by the tribe of Namata. His native guides led him along a high ridge, the watershed between the river Rewa and the eastern coast of the island. As they cut their way through the undergrowth that clothed the hilltop, he noticed that the path was almost level, and seldom more than two feet wide, and that the ridge joined hilltop to hilltop in an almost horizontal line. The surveyor had a patch of the undergrowth cleared away and found that without doubt the embankments were artificial. Following the line of the ridge, the valleys had been bridged with Jbanks thirty or forty feet high. The level path thus made extended, so the natives said, clear to Nakauvadra, fifty miles away. For a people destitute of implements this was a remarkable work. I thought at first that this was a fortification on a gigantic scale, for Fijians never undertake any great work except for defense, under the spur of a pressing necessity. It could not be a road, because the ancient Fijians preferred to go straight over obstacles, like the soldier ants in Africa, that climb trees rather than go round them. The old men at Bau, whom I questioned, knew nothing of its history except that it was called "The Path of the Shades," and that it was an extension of one of the spurs of the Kauvadra Mountain. I asked for guides to take me over it, and they chose three gray-headed elders of the Namata tribe. We started in heavy rain. My guides were reticent at first, but as we went on the spirit of the place seemed to possess them, and at each turn of the path they stopped to describe to me the particular