Page:The Gates of Morning - Henry De Vere Stacpoole.pdf/85



HE Pacific has many industries but none more appealing to the imagination than the old sandalwood trade, a perfumed business that died when copra found its own, before the novelist and the soap boiler came to work the sea of romance, before the B. P. boats churned its swell or Honolulu learned to talk the language of San Francisco.

In those days Levua showed above the billowing green of the breadfruit, the seaward nodding palms, and the tossing fronds of the dracænas, a belt, visible from the sea, where the sandalwood trees grew and flourished. Trees like the myrtle, many branched and not more than a foot thick in the trunk, with a white deliciously perfumed wood deepening to yellow at the root.

Sanders, the trader of Levua who exported this timber, paid for it in trade goods, so many sticks of tobacco at five cents a stick, so many coloured beads or pieces of hoop iron wherewith to make knives, for a tree. He paid this price to Tahuku the chief of the tribe and he paid nothing for the work of tree felling, barking, and cutting the wood into billets. Tahuku arranged all that. He was the capitalist of Levua, though his only capital was his own ferocity and cun-