Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/307

Rh. Thus at the village of Nandawa, on Koro island, an old man stands upon a high rock and calls to the sea-turtles, shouting in Fijian, Come! Come! We are tired of waiting! upon which several turtles appear swimming toward the shore. It is highly probable that these are regularly fed and are thus always ready for the "miracle" when strangers visit the town. Koro, by the way, is the island to which the souls of all dead pigs were supposed to go to their valhallaValhalla [sic].

At the village of Rukua on Mbenga a curious miracle play is enacted. Near the town there is a circular pit about twenty feet in diameter, the bottom of which is lined with brown-colored volcanic stones, a ring of large flat ones lying near the edge around the bottom of the depression. The pit is filled with dry sticks and a fire is maintained until the stones are red hot. Then the embers are brushed away, and out of the forest there comes a procession of young men gaily adorned with garlands of flowers and well polished with cocoanut oil. They chant as they tread slowly and deliberately over the hot stones, and then vanish into the woods, apparently uninjured; upon which pigs and vegetables are placed upon the stones and are covered with leaves and earth, and a thoroughly cooked feast is soon ready for both guests and performers. Professor Langley witnessed a similar exhibition in the Society Islands, and discovered that the radiation from the surface of the volcanic stones is very great, while the stones themselves are poor conductors of heat, thus the surface soon cools while enough heat still remains within to serve in cooking the feast. The natives can not be induced to walk over limestone, which is a good conductor and poor radiator, the surface thus remaining hot. However, the great thickness of the skin upon the sole of their unshod feet accounts in some measure for their ability to perform this "miracle." In all respects natural sole leather is superior to that provided by the "leather trust."

A pleasing art which still survives, but is doomed to extinction, is the making and decorating of tapa, or masi, as it is called in Fiji, where it is still used for screens in houses, and for various decorative purposes. Women alone take part in the manufacture of tapa. They carefully cultivate the paper mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera), and, when about six feet high, the young trees are cut down, and the bark peeled off and soaked in water. The outer skin is then scraped off with a sharp-edged shell, and the soft fibrous inner bark is ready for beating, although it may be kept indefinitely before this process is begun. For beating, the strips of bark must be thoroughly water-soaked and soft, and two are placed one over the other upon a flattened log and beaten with a rectangular mallet, iki, having three of its flat sides grooved and one plane. Each pair of strips of an inch in original width may thus be beaten out into a thin sheet of felted fibers nine inches wide, although the length is reduced. Separate sheets are then welded together by beating, the overlapping edges being first glued with a paste made from arrowroot boiled in water, this welding being so cleverly done that it is