Page:Williams and Calvert, Fiji and the Fijians, New York, 1860.djvu/541

 MBTJA. 603 " The Tiliva new chapel does the little company of natives who built it much credit. The present Chief, Ra Hezekiah Vunindanga, (successor to Raitono,) is a very sensible and persevering man. On commencing this chapel, he adopted it as a principle, that neither material nor labour could be too good for the house in which the true God was to be worshipped. Acting in accordance with this principle, he, and some of his men who had fame for ' lifting up the axe,' travelled over many miles of the surrounding country, in search of timber for the frame of the building. Whilst they were thus employed, the old men enlivened the village by the rap, tap, tap, of the beaters with which they separated the fibre from the fleshy part of the nut-husk, that it might be plaited into sinnet, for the ornamental lashmgs. At intervals of two or three days, the joyous shout of the returning wood-cutters broke the quiet of the evening, a signal at which those who were left in the village — old men, women, and children — ran off to assist their weary friends in dragging some giant of the forest to the spot where it was to become a pillar in the Lord's house. Happier groups than these formed, eye never saw. In about three months eighty beams of from twelve to fifty feet long were collected, many of them from a distance of ten or twelve miles, and by manual labour only. The logs were vesi, or green-heart, the most valuable timber in the islands. These were carefully wrought into a very substantial frame ; completed by walls and roof. The sketch will give you an idea of the outside of the chapel ; and you may form one of the appearance of the inside, by supposing yourselves between two colonnades of mahogany pillars, sixteen pillars in each colonnade, and three feet apart. These support a circular mahogany cornice, or wall- plate, seven inches in diameter, on which the capitals are wrought in sinnet. Between the pillars is seen the inner fence, formed of bright canes, the whole extent of which, fifty feet by nine feet, is divided by black lines into diamonds of one inch and a half long. The tops of the doors and windows are finished as the outside, in triangular pediments, done in black sinnet. The foot of each spar is secured to the cornice by ornamental bands. The roof is relieved by alternate rows of open and closed reed-work, divided from each other by jet-black lines, three and four inches wide. The wings of the communion rail are of orna- mented reed-work. The centre of the balusters is made of the warrior's spear and the scented sandal-wood. The rail itself is a piece of beautiful nut. " Often, whilst superintending their operations, have I heard the builders cheer each other by chanting such passages as the following :