He shook his head. “I cannot tell. I only know that once we of this land numbered many, many thousands, and now we are but hundreds. Here, where we now walk, was once a great town of houses with stone foundations; if ye cut away the fara (pineapples) thou wilt see the lower stones lying in the ground.”
We pressed onward and upward into the deeper forest, then turned downwards along a narrow path, carpeted thick with fallen leaves, damp and soft to the foot, for the sun’s rays never pierced through the dense foliage overhead. And then we came out upon a fair, green sward with nine stately coco-palms clustered, their branches drooping over the river of my dreams, which lay before us with open, waiting bosom.
III
Under the shade of the nine cocos we made our camp, and old Sru and the women and children at once set to work to build a “house” to protect us in case it rained during the nights. Very quickly was the house built. The “devil” was sent up the cocos to lop off branches, which, as they fell, were woven into thatch by the deft, eager hands of the women, who were supervised by Sivi, Nalik’s handsome wife, amid much chatter and laughter, each one trying to outvie the other in speed, and all anxious to follow Nalik and myself to the river.
The place was well chosen. For nearly a hundred yards there was a clear stretch of water flowing between low, grassy banks on which were growing a few scattered pandanus-palms—the screw pine. Half a mile distant, a jagged, irregular mountain-peak raised high its emerald-hued head in the clear sunshine, and from every lofty tree on both sides of the stream there came the continuous call of the gentle wood-doves and the great grey pigeons.
With Nalik and myself there came old Sru and the imp Toka, who at once set to work and found us some small crayfish for bait. Our rods were slender bamboos, about twelve feet long, with lines of the same length made of twisted banana fibre as fine as silk, and equally as strong. My hook was an ordinary flatted Kirby, about half the size of an English whiting hook; Nalik preferred one of his own manufacture, made from a strip of tortoise-shell, barbless and highly polished.
Taking our stand at a place where the softly-flowing current eddied and curled around some black boulders of rock whose surfaces were but a few inches above the clear, crystal stream, we quickly baited our hooks and cast together, the old chief and the boy throwing in some crushed-up crayfish shells at the same time. Before five seconds had passed my brown-skinned comrade laughed as his thin line tautened out suddenly, and in another instant he swung out a quivering streak of shining blue and silver, and deftly caught it with his left hand; almost at the same moment my rod was strained hard by a larger fish, which darted in towards the bank.
“First to thee, Nalik; but biggest to the rebelli”2 cried old Sru, as with some difficulty—for my rod was too slight for such a fish—I landed a lovely four-pounder on the grass.
Nalik laughed again, and before I had cleared my hook from the jaw of my prize he had taken another and then a third, catching each one in his left hand with incredible swiftness and throwing them to the boy. The women and girls on the opposite bank laughed and chaffed me, and urged me to hasten, or Nalik would catch five ere I landed another. But the rebelli took no heed of their merriment, for he was quite content to let a few minutes go whilst he examined the glistening beauty which lay quivering and gasping on the sward. It was nearly eighteen inches in length, its back from the tip of the upper jaw to the tail a brilliant dark blue flecked with tiny specks of red, the sides a burnished silver, changing, as the belly was reached, to a glistening white. The pectoral and lower fins were a pale blue, flecked with somewhat larger spots of brighter red than those on the back, and the tail showed the same colouring. In shape it was much like a grayling, particularly about the head; and altogether a more beautiful fresh-water fish I have never seen.
We fished for an hour or more, and caught three or four dozen of this particular fish as well as eight or nine dark-scaled, stodgy bream, which haunted the centre of the pool where the water was deep. Then as the sun grew fiercer they ceased to bite, and we ceased to tempt them; so we lay down and rested and smoked, whilst the women and children made a ground-oven and prepared some of the fish for cooking. Putting aside the largest—which was reserved for the old chief and myself—Nalik’s kindly, gentle-voiced wife, watched the children roll each fish up in a wrapper of green coconut leaf and lay them carefully upon the glowing bed of stones in the oven, together with some scores of long, slender green bananas, to serve as a vegetable in place of taro or yams, which would take a much longer time to cook. On the top of all was placed the largest fish, and then the entire oven was rapidly covered up with wild banana leaves in the shape of a mound.
The moment Nalik and I had laid down our rods, and whilst the oven was being prepared, Toka and the two other boys sprang into the water at one end of the pool and began to disturb the bottom with their feet. The young girls and women, each carrying a small finely-meshed scoop-net, joined them, and in a tew minutes they had filled a basket with crayfish, some of which were ten inches in length, and weighed over a pound, their tails especially being very large and fleshy.
“Shall we boil or bake them?” asked Nalik as the basketful was brought up to me for examination.
“Boil them,” I replied, for I had brought with me several pounds of coarse salt taken from our wrecked ship’s harness cask and carefully dried in the sun, and a boiled crayfish or crab is better than one baked—and spoiled.
A tall, graceful girl, named Seia, came forward with a large wooden bowl, nearly eighteen inches in diameter at the top, and two feet in depth—no light weight even to lift, for at its rim it was over an inch thick. Placing it on the ground in front of Sru and myself, she motioned to the other girls to bring water. They brought her about two gallons in buckets made of the looped-up leaves of the taro plant, and poured it into the vessel; then Nalik and old Sru, with rough tongs formed of the midrib of a coconut branch, whipped up eight or ten large red-hot stones from a fire near by, and dropped them into the vessel, the water in which at once began to boil and send up a volume of steam as Seia tipped the entire basketful of crustacean delicacies into the bowl, together with some handfuls of salt. Then a closely-woven mat was placed over the top and tied round it so as to keep in the heat—that is the way they boil food in the South Seas with a wooden pot!
From time to time during the next quarter of an hour more red-hot stones were dropped into the bowl until old Sru pronounced the contents to be tunua, i.e., well and truly cooked, and then whilst the now bright red crayfish were laid out to cool upon platters of green woven coconut leaf, the first oven of fish and bananas was opened.
What a delightful meal it was! The fat, luscious fish, cooked in their own juices, each one deftly ridden of its compact coating of silvery scales by the quick hands of the women, and then turned out hot and smoking upon a platter of leaf, with half a dozen green, baked bananas for bread! Such fish, and so cooked, surely fall to the lot of few. Your City professional diner who loves to instruct us in the daily papers about “how to dine” cannot know anything about the real enjoyment of eating. He is blasé he regulates his stomach to his costume and to the season, and he eats as fashion dictates he should eat, and fills his long-suffering stomach with nickety, tin-pot, poisonous “delicacies” which he believes are excellent because they are expensive and are prepared by a chef whose income is ten times as much as his own.
So we ate our fish and bananas, and then followed on with the crayfish, the women and children shelling them for us as fast as we could eat, the largest and fittest being placed before the old chief and the white man. And then for dessert we had a basket of red-ripe wild mangoes, with a great smooth-leaved pineapple as big as a big man’s head, and showing red and green and yellow, and smelling fresh and sweet with the rain of the previous night. Near by where we sat was a pile of freshly-husked young coconuts, which a smiling-faced young girl opened for us as we wanted a drink, carefully pouring out upon the ground all the liquid that remained after Sru and myself had drank, and then putting the empty shells, with their delicate lining of alabaster flesh, into the fire to be consumed, for no one not of chiefly rank must partake even of that which is cast aside by a chief or his guests.