have a
woman's hand touch him or any of his personal belongings; secondly, he
must never eat clams nor any food from a fire in which clams had been
cooked; thirdly, he must never touch a crocodile, nor travel in a canoe
that carried any part of a crocodile even if as large as a tooth.

Of a different black were his teeth, which were deep black, or, perhaps
better, LAMP-black. They had been made so in a single night, by his
mother, who had compressed about them a powdered mineral which was
dug from the landslide back of Port Adams. Port Adams is a salt-water
village on Malaita, and Malaita is the most savage island in the
Solomons--so savage that no traders or planters have yet gained a
foothold on it; while, from the time of the earliest beche-de-mer
fishers and sandalwood traders down to the latest labor recruiters
equipped with automatic rifles and gasolene engines, scores of white
adventurers have been passed out by tomahawks and soft-nosed Snider
bullets. So Malaita remains today, in the twentieth century, the
stamping ground of the labor recruiters, who farm its coasts for
laborers who engage and contract themselves to toil on the plantations
of the neighboring and more civilized islands for a wage of thirty
dollars a year. The natives of those neighboring and more civilized
islands have themselves become too civilized to work on plantations.

Mauki's ears were pierced, not in one place, nor two places, but in a
couple of dozen places. In one of the smaller holes he carried a clay
pipe. The larger holes were too large for such use. The bowl of the pipe
would have fallen through. In fact, in the largest hole in each ear
he habitually wore round wooden plugs that were an even four inches in
diameter. Roughly speaking, the circumference of said holes was twelve
and one-half inches. Mauki was catholic in his tastes. In the various
smaller holes he carried such things as empty rifle cartridges,
horseshoe nails, copper screws, pieces of string, braids of sennit,
strips of green leaf, and, in the cool of the day, scarlet hibiscus
flowers. From which it will be seen that pockets were not necessary to
his well-being. Besides, pockets were impossible, for his only wearing
apparel consisted of a piece of calico several inches wide. A pocket
knife he wore in his hair, the blade snapped down on a kinky lock. His
most prized possession was the handle of a china cup, which he suspended
from a ring of turtle-shell, which, in turn