CHAPTER II
A real discovery. Polynesia analyzed. The astounding nature of the Filberts. Their curious sound, and its reason. We make a landing. Our first glimpse of the natives. The value of vaudeville.
There is nothing better, after a hurricane, than six hours' sleep. It was high noon when we were awakened by William Henry Thomas and the odor of coffee, which drew us to the quarter-deck. There, for the first time, we were able to make an accurate survey of our surroundings and realize the magnitude and importance of what had befallen us. While we slept Captain Triplett had warped the denuded Kawa through a labyrinth of coral and we now lay peacefully at anchor with the island lying close in-board.
Its appearance, to put it mildly, was astonishing. Let me remind the reader that for the previous four months we had been prowling through the Southern Pacific meeting everywhere with disappointment and disillusionment. We had inspected every island in every group noted on every map from Mercator to Rand-McNally without finding any variation in type from, "A," the low lying coral-atoll of the well-known broken doughnut formation, to, "B," the high-browed, mansard design popularized by F. O'Brien. [Footnote: This is the type "E". of Melville's overrated classification—Ed.] In a few of the outlying suburbs of Melanesia and the lower half of Amnesia, we had found a few designs which showed sketchy promise of originality: coral reefs in quaint forms had been begun, outlining a scheme of decoration in contrast with the austere mountains and valleys. But everywhere these had been abandoned. Either the appropriation had given out, or the polyps had gotten to squabbling among themselves and left their work to be slowly worn away by the erosive action of sea and shipwrecked bottoms. [Footnote: In Micronesia it was even worse, the islands offering a dead-level of mediocrity which I have never seen equalled except in the workingmen's cottages of Ampere, New Jersey, the home of the General Electric Company.] Add to the geographic sameness the universal blight of white civilization with its picture post-cards, professional hula and ooh-la dancers, souvenir and gift shops, automat restaurants, movie-palaces, tourists, artists and explorers, and you have some idea of the boredom which had settled down over the Kawa and her inmates.
Only a few days before Whinney, usually so philosophical, had burst out petulantly with: "To hell with these islands. Give me a good mirage, any time." Swank and I had heartily agreed with him, and it was in that despondent spirit that we had begun our Fourth of July celebration.
As we sat cozily on deck, sipping our coffee, it slowly dawned on us that we had made the amazing discovery of an absolutely new type of island!—something so evidently virgin and unvisited that we could only gaze in awe-struck silence.
"Do you know," whispered Swank, "I think this is the first time I have ever seen a virgin"—he choked for an instant on a crumb—"island."
We could well believe it.
The islands lay before us in echelon formation. The one in our immediate foreground was typical of the others. Its ground-floor plan was that of a circle of beach and palm enclosing an inner sea from the center of which rose an elaborate mountain to a sheer height of two thousand, perhaps ten thousand, feet. The general effect was that of a pastry masterpiece on a gigantic scale. [Footnote: Oddly enough the scene struck me as strangely familiar but it was not until weeks afterward that I recalled its prototype in the memory of a decoration worn by General Grosdenovitch, Minister very-extraordinary to America from Montenegro just before the little mountain kingdom blew up with a faint pop and became absorbed by Jugo-Slovakia (sic).] We could only stare in open-mouthed amazement, thrilled with the thought that we were actually discoverers. A gorgeous feature of our find, in addition to its satisfactory shape, was its color. Sand and vegetation were of the conventional hues, but where the flanks of the rock rose from the enclosed pool we observed that they were of the pure elementary colors, red, blue and yellow, fresh and untarnished as in the latest masterpiece from the brush of the Master of All Painters. Here before our eyes was an unspoiled sample of what the world must have looked like on varnishing day.
Swank, who is ultra-modern in his tendencies, was in ecstasies over the naive simplicity of the color scheme. "Look at that red!" he shouted. "Look at that blue!! Look at that yaller!!!" He dove below and I heard rattling of tubes and brushes that told me he was about to commit landscape. This time I knew he couldn't possibly make the colors too violent.