in the foliage, and once swallowed up in the green
depths which are his home and his protection, neither eye nor ear
can find any trace of him.

But our ideas change when we enter his village home, with its
dancing-grounds with the big drums, the sacred stone tables, idols and
carved tree-trunks, all in a frame of violently coloured bushes--red,
purple, brown and orange. Above us, across a blue sky, a tree with
scarlet flowers blows in the breeze, and long stamens fall slowly down
and cover the ground with a brilliant carpet. Dogs bark, roosters
crow and from a hut a man creeps out--others emerge from the bush
and from half-hidden houses which at first we had not noticed. At
some distance stand the women and children in timid amazement, and
then begins a chattering, or maybe a whispered consultation about
the arrival of the stranger. We are in the midst of human life, in
a busy little town, where the sun pours through the gaps in the dark
forest, and flowers give colour and brightness, and where, after all,
life is not so very much less human than in civilization.

Then the forest has lifted its veil, we have entered the sanctuary,
and the alarming sensation of nature's hostility is softened. We white
men like to talk about our mastery over nature, but is it not rather
true that we flee from nature, as its most intense manifestations are
oppressive to us? Is not the savage, living so very close to nature,
more its master, or at least its friend, than we are? We need space
and the sight of sun and sky to feel happy; the night of the forest,
the loneliness of the ocean are terrible to us, whilst to the native
they are his home and his element.

It is evident that under our first strong impression of the native's
life we overlook much--the filth, the sores, the brutality of social
life; but these are really only ripples on an otherwise smooth
existence, defects which are not less present in our civilization,
but are better concealed.

The next day we followed the coast of Malekula southward. There are
immense coral reefs attached to the coast, so that often the line of
breakers is one or two miles away from the shore. These reefs are a
solid mass of cleft coral stones constantly growing seaward. Their
surface is more or less flat, about on a level with the water at low
tide, so that it then lies nearly dry, and one can walk on the reefs,
jumping over the wide crevices in which the sea roars and gurgles
with the rise a