f the land in which they live.[654]

[Sidenote: Scenery of the Fijian islands.]

For the Fijian islands are exceedingly beautiful. They are of volcanic
origin, mostly high and mountainous, but intersected by picturesque
valleys, clothed with woods, and festooned with the most luxuriant
tropical vegetation. "Among their attractions," we are told, "are high
mountains, abrupt precipices, conical hills, fantastic turrets and crags
of rock frowning down like olden battlements, vast domes, peaks
shattered into strange forms; native towns on eyrie cliffs, apparently
inaccessible; and deep ravines, down which some mountain stream, after
long murmuring in its stony bed, falls headlong, glittering as a silver
line on a block of jet, or spreading like a sheet of glass over bare
rocks which refuse it a channel. Here also are found the softer features
of rich vales, cocoa-nut groves, clumps of dark chestnuts, stately palms
and bread-fruit, patches of graceful bananas or well-tilled taro-beds,
mingling in unchecked luxuriance, and forming, with the wild
reef-scenery of the girdling shore, its beating surf, and far-stretching
ocean beyond, pictures of surpassing beauty."[655] Each island is
encircled by a reef of white coral, on which the sea breaks, with a
thunderous roar, in curling sheets of foam; while inside the reef
stretches the lagoon, a calm lake of blue crystalline water revealing in
its translucent depths beautiful gardens of seaweed and coral which fill
the beholder with delighted wonder. Great and sudden is the contrast
experienced by the mariner when he passes in a moment from the tossing,
heaving, roaring billows without into the unbroken calm of the quiet
haven within the barrier reef.[656]

[Sidenote: Fijian doctrine of souls.]

Like most savages, the Fijians believed that man is animated by a soul
which quits his body temporarily in sleep and permanently at death, to
survive for a longer or a shorter time in a disembodied state
thereafter. Indeed, they attributed souls to animals, vegetables,
stones, tools, houses, canoes, and many other things, allowing that all
of them may become immortal.[657] On this point I will quote the
evidence of one of the earliest and best authorities on the customs and
beliefs of the South Sea Islanders. "There seems," says William Mariner,
"to be a wide difference between the opinions of the natives in the
different clusters of the South Sea islands respecting the future
existence of