I can describe what I saw, but I cannot hope to convey any idea of the sensation produced by the eye-witness. Gliding to and fro in sinuous coils were long striped water-snakes, blue and black, pink and black, green and black. Did Matthew Arnold dream of such a cavern when he wrote:
“When the sea snakes coil and turn,
Dry their mail, and bask in the brine”?
Our boatman caught two of the sheeny, harmless creatures, and after hooding them we carried them back to the steamer, but pity proved stronger than the lust of possession and we gave them their liberty. I can see them now (as one after the other I threw them over the side) making directly for the cave. Did they reach it? Who shall say?
Glued to the fretted roof were the nests of innumerable swallows, and in the dim innermost recesses queer bat-like creatures hung suspended by their claws. An eerie feeling possessed us, a sudden silence reigned, the impossible seemed possible here, the real unreal. One of our native boatmen struck the rock with the butt-end of an oar—it gave back a strange, reverberant, hollow sound, then from the darkness within came a weird, mocking echo.
With the help of a rope, furnished by our helmsman, I climbed a sort of natural stairway, and crouching on an overhanging ledge, looked down. The peculiar malachite green of the water now seemed intensified a hundred-fold, and the boat, its occupants, even the coral garden below, became green under my eyes. The cave was as cold as winter inside, in spite of the tropical heat without—cold and yet airless, as if the spell of an enchantment held the place in thrall. One and all we were glad to back out of it, re-hoist the sail, and return to our floating home.
Not far from this cave was a barren rock, standing out above the sea, stark and sheer, a veritable All-Alone-Stone, only that there was no Madam Gairfowl perched thereon. Below this rock is a submarine cavern, only to be reached by diving. Here, so the legend goes, an island chief once held a beautiful maiden in thrall, until he won her to his will. He had stolen her from her tribe and here he hid her. In this same cavern, too, in more recent years, a maiden of Vavau saved the life of her wounded lover by nursing him secretly during the course of a tribal feud. For the details of these pretty stories, however, I must refer my readers to Mariner’s “Tonga.” I was further told that the captain of a British man-of-war once had the hardihood to dive in search of the entrance of this cave, and that he found it to be all that it was described, but that in returning to the surface he grazed his back against the coral, and died a few days later of acute blood poisoning.
TOWN OF APIA
At sunset we heaved the anchor and steamed for Apia. Our course was still in a north-easterly direction and so continued for three hundred and forty-five miles, when we attained the Samoan or Navigator group. This last name was given by their discoverer, Bougainville, who christened them thus out of compliment to the dexterity of the natives, whom he found sailing their canoes far out at sea.
The group consists of ten inhabited islands, of which the principal are Savaai, Upolu, Tutuila, Manu’a Olosenga, Ofu, Manono, and Apolima. Upolu—Stevenson’s Island—although not the largest, is by far the most important. It is forty miles long and ten broad. We passed along the eastern end, coasting along two lovely rocky islets covered with vegetation of the most varied green.