"Look here," he said. "What is it that interests you in these islands? I've never known anyone to visit them for pleasure before. Is it the women, or what?"
Under pressure, I admitted that Nature seemed to have spent her best effort among the Paumotuans in fashioning the men.
"You're right," said Tino. "The women are healthy enough, of course, but they don't set your heart beating a hundred to the minute. They have fine hands and white teeth, and you won't find such black hair in all the world as you find in these atolls. But that's the size of it. You can't praise them any further for looks. Maybe you haven't noticed their ears, because they always cover them up with their hair; but they're large, and their feet and ankles—tough as sole leather and all scarred over with coral cuts. That is well enough for the men, but with the women it's different. Makes you lose your enthusiasm, don't it?"
I had seen a good many striking exceptions in our wanderings, but I agreed that, in the main, what he said was true.
"Well, if it isn't the women, what else is there to be interested in? Not the islands themselves? Lord! When you've seen one you've seen the lot. Living on one of them is like living aboard ship. Not room to stretch your legs. They're solid enough, and they don't sink; but in a hurricane I'd a heap rather take my chances out to sea with the Winship than to be lashed to the stoutest coconut tree in the whole group. Now you take Rutiaro. It was washed over seventeen years ago and all but twenty of the people killed. They are back to seventy-five now, but wait till the next bad blow down that way. They'll drown like rats just as they did before.
"Well, we won't have to stop long," he added, grouchily. "I'll take what copra they have and get out. It's a God-forsaken hole. They only make about twenty-five tons a year. The island could produce three times that amount under decent management. They're a lazy, independent lot, at Rutiaro. You can't get 'em to stir themselves."
I asked him what they had to gain by stirring themselves.
"Gain?" he said. "They have everything to gain. There are only two frame houses on the place. The rest of them are miserable little shelters of coconut thatch. I haven't sold them enough corrugated iron in ten years to cover this cockpit. You remember Takaroa and Niau and Fakahina? Well, there's my idea of islands. Nice European furniture—iron beds, center tables, phonographs, bicycles—"
A further catalogue of the comforts and conveniences of civilization which the inhabitants of Rutiaro might have and didn't convinced me that this was the atoll I had been looking for, and I regretted that our stay there was to be so brief. I did not begrudge the inhabitants of richer atolls their phonographs and bicycles. They got an incredible amount of amusement out of them; listened with delight to the strange music, and spent entire evenings taking turns with the bicycles, riding them back and forth from the lagoon beach to the ocean shore. But the frame houses were blots on the landscape, crude, barnlike structures, most of them, which offend the eye like factory chimneys in a green valley. Rutiaro had none of these things, and, having no interest in it from the commercial point of view, I awaited impatiently our arrival there.
At ten o'clock we were three miles to windward of the village island. It lay at the narrower end of the lagoon, the inner shore line curving around a broad indentation where the village was. The land narrowed in one direction to a ledge of reef. At the farther end there was a small motu not more than three hundred yards in length by one hundred broad, separated from the main island by a strip of shallow water. Seen from aloft, the two islands resembled, roughly, in outline, an old-fashioned, high-pooped vessel with a small boat in tow. I could see the whole of the atoll from the mainmast crosstrees, the lagoon, shimmering into green over the shoals, darkening to an intense blue over unlit valleys of ocean floor; a solitude of sunlit water, placid as a lake buried in the depths of inaccessible mountains. I followed the shore line with my glasses. Distant islands, ledges of barren reef, leaped forward with an effect of magic, as though our atom of a vessel, the only sail which relieved the emptiness of the sea, had been swept in an instant to within a few yards of the surf. Great combers, green and ominous looking in the sunlight, broke at one rapidly advancing point, toppled and fell in segments, filling the inner shallows with a smother of foam. Beyond it lay the broad fringe of white, deserted beach, the narrow forest of shrub and palm, the empty lagoon, a border of misty islands on the farther side. I had seen the same sort of a picture twenty times before, always with the same keen sense of its desolate beauty, its allurement, its romantic loveliness. Tino had said, "When you've seen one you've seen them all," and an old skipper once told me that "the atolls are as much alike as the reef points on that sail." It is true. They are as monotonous as the sea itself and as fresh with varying interest.