Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/529

Rh Reef, we find a small cavernated volcanic rock, the last remnant of an island, surrounded by a broad lagoon which is edged on its seaward side by a rim of coral reef over which the surf breaks ceaselessly. In other cases, as at Cakau-momo, the island has washed away and only the submerged reef is left to mark its former site.

The very land has age and life and is vanishing before our eyes. In the past the islands were higher, but now the loftiest mountain peaks are not over 4,600 feet.

The earthquake waves, which must have accompanied many of the changes of elevation, may have given rise to the myth of a deluge, which under varied forms is found almost universally among the natives of the tropical Pacific, but we need not resort to such remote or hypothetical occasions for the establishment of the flood-myths, for almost every year between February and March there is a severe storm in Fiji, and recent floods of the Rewa River are now the topic of native song.

It is to the rich tropical forest which clothes them that the Fijis owe their charm. Even the sheltered relatively dry leeward slopes of the mountains are fairly well covered with forest, but on the sides which face the southeast trade wind the vegetation crowds into every nook and cranny of the precipices even to the summits of the highest peaks. So copious is the rainfall that the Rewa River is larger than any in England and is navigable for fifty miles above its mouth, its width being fully three thousand yards, where it meets the ocean.

The beauty of the mountain valleys produces an impression which time can not efface from the memory. Great Tahitian chestnuts, the "Ivi" (Inocarpus edulis), with buttressed trunks, tower far above like columns of an ancient temple garlanded in green, while overarching the rock pools of the stream are the rich brown stems of tree-ferns crowned by emerald sprays of nature's lace-work. Broad-leaved caladiums cluster in the water, and the clambering Pandanus winds in reptilian folds over the high boughs, where dainty orchids nestle far from the reach of all below. Now and again there is a flash of color, where some cockatoo or parrot or brilliant butterfly appears only to vanish in the leafy maze, or here and there through a break in the canopy a furtive beam of sunlight penetrates to gild the greenness of the shade. One looks in vain for dead trees and old decaying logs for all is life in this luxuriant growth. Death has here no lasting place, for termites and ants and a host of parasitic plants set hungrily upon all that weaken, and the dying trunk shrinks into other greenness and passes phoenix-like into other life. Wilkes spoke truly when he said of the islands, "So beautiful was their aspect that I could scarcely bring my mind to the realizing sense of the well-known fact that they were the abode of a savage, ferocious and treacherous race of cannibals." To-day there are