I felt like some wandering Jew as I tramped along by the seashore. Notwithstanding that I was alone, I forgot my immediate sorrows, for I felt that I was seeing the world, and the scenery that I saw around me was very beautiful. It was a lovely day. The inland mountains rose till their distant peaks seemed to pierce the blue vault of heaven. Lines of plumed palms and picturesque bread-fruits stretched for miles and miles. On the slopes grew the ndrala-trees, covered with scarlet blossoms. Along the shores gleamed the blue lagoons, shining like mirrors as the swell from the calm sea broke into sheafs of iridescent foam by the coral reefs. It seemed incredible that only a few years before the death-drums of the cannibal tribes had echoed through that paradise of silent, tropical forest.
As I tramped onward, my reflections were suddenly disturbed by a sight that one could not easily forget. Just below the forest-clad slopes stood a covey of nude native girls. Their tawny bodies were glistening in the sunlight as they emerged one by one from the depths of the lagoon by the shore. I was so near that I saw their brown, shapely, graceful bodies steaming in the hot sunlight. In their wet masses of unloosed hair still clung faded hibiscus blossoms of the day before, stuck in the thick folds by large tortoise-shell combs. They were having their morning bath. Though I knew well that it was wrong of me to remain concealed in the bamboo bush, still I remained there. As they stood chattering and laughing, thinking that they were quite unobserved, a young white man, of the “knut” type, emerged from the coco-palms just opposite them. I saw at a glance that he was a tourist. He had a camera with him. Directly he spotted that sight he made a frenzied effort to place the camera on its tripod, and so get a snapshot that did not crop up every day.
At this moment I too came out and revealed myself. As the native girls caught sight of us, they gave a frightened scream. They could not blush, for Nature, in their fashioning, had already made them, at their birth, blush from their head to their perfect toes, a terra-cotta hue.
“Lako tani! Lako tani!” (“Go away!”) they shouted. Lo! ere we could believe our eyesight, up went twenty pairs of pretty nut-brown feet—splash! they had all dived back into the lagoon.
The Knut fixed his eyeglass and gasped out: “Well, I nevah!”
The covey of frightened girls had disappeared, gone to the bottom of the deep lagoon.
“Good Lord! they’ve drowned themselves,” was his horrified ejaculation as I came up to him. It was true enough, there was no sight of a head on the water; only a bubbling on the glassy surface, as though a fearful death-struggle was in progress beneath.
“You’ve done it now!” said I. “Fijian girls are so modest that sooner than be spied upon at such a moment they would die. They are as modest as white women.”
“No!” was his awestruck comment as he stared at the water beyond the coral reefs just in front of us. His eyeglass dropped from his eye; he gave another horrified exclamation at the thought of those beautiful, dusky Eves committing suicide through his curiosity.
It was at this moment that a slight commotion became visible in the centre of the lagoon; then up poked a mass of dishevelled hair, a pair of sparkling dark eyes and a set of pearly teeth. Next moment up came another, then three more—till in a few seconds they all clambered, splashing, ashore. There they stood, a flock of graceful, soft, tawny shining bodies sparkling in the sunlight, each one modestly attired in her pretty sulu (fringed loin-cloth). They had snatched up their scanty attire ere they had dived into the lagoon in order to arrange their toilettes in its secret depths.