America.

Here, because the White Man both felt and looked tired after the long
climb, and because the Brown Men wanted to make a drink of green kava,
we decided to rest for an hour or two--some of the men suggesting that
we should not return till the following day. Food we had brought with
us, and everywhere on the tops of the mountains water was to be found
in small rocky pools. So whilst one of the men cut up a rugged root of
green kava and began to pound it with a smooth stone, the White Man,
well content, laid down his gun, sat upon a boulder of stone and looked
around him. I was pleased at the view of sea and verdant shore
far below, and pleased too at the prospect of some good sport; for
everywhere, on our way up to the mountains, we had seen the tracks
of many a wild pig, and here, on the summit of this spur, could rest
awhile, before descending into a deep valley on the eastern side of
the island, where we knew we would find the wild pigs feeding along the
banks of a mountain stream which debouched into Roan Kiti harbour, four
miles away.

"How is this place named, and how came it to be clear of the forest
trees?" I asked one of my native friends, a handsome young man, about
thirty years of age, whose naked, smooth, and red-brown skin, from neck
to waist, showed by its tatooing that he was of chiefly lineage.

"Tokolme it is called," he replied. "It was once a place of great
strength; a fortress was made here in the mountains, in the olden
time--in the old days, long before white men came to Ponape. See, all
around us, half-buried in the ground, are some of the blocks of stone
which were carried up from the face of the mountain which overlooks
Metalanien "--he pointed to several huge basaltic prisms lying
near--"these stones were the lower course of the fort; the upper part
was of wood, great forest trees, cut down and squared into lengths of
two fathoms. And it is because of the cutting down of these trees, which
were very old and took many hundred years to grow, that the place
where we now sit, and all around us, is so clear. For the blood of
many hundreds of men have sunk into it, and because it was the blood of
innocent people, there be now nothing that will grow upon it."

The place was certainly quite bare of trees, though encompassed by the
forest on all sides lower down. One reason for this may have been that
in addition to the large basaltic prisms, the ground was thickly covered
with a layer of