The two girls who had first sighted us were called, p256 in the Samoan language, taupou girls. Each village in Samoa has its taupou girl, only one to the village, who upholds the honour of that village, entertains the guests, and otherwise makes herself agreeable. She controls the feasts and functions, and in fact has more power than anyone, excepting the chief. As she is really the most virtuous woman in the village, she is made the highest dignitary at all religious gatherings, although taking no part in them.

All the villages for twenty miles up the coast had been destroyed and the people had fled to Matautu. There were about twenty taupou girls gathered here. As Jack said, they looked like girls out of a job, for when they leave their own village, they lose power. Certainly they had not shown much power in letting the lava destroy their homes. Only the Matautu taupou girls seemed to be still in favour. These girls attached themselves to Mrs. London and showed us over the village. But such a woe-begone village! On all sides the red-hot lava was creeping down, though they had managed to divert the flow by building stone walls; but they knew that unless the volcano twenty-five miles away quieted down, their homes were doomed. It was dark when we prepared to go back to the Snark. We were stopped just as we got to the launch by a white man, calling to us on the beach. We went back and found a big, jolly Irishman, waiting for us in company with a tall German.

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The Irishman was Dick Williams, the governor of p257 the island, and the German was the agent of an Apia trading concern. We went back with the governor to his house, and learned that he had been away all day helping the volcano sufferers. He invited us to stay ashore all night, promising to show us a better view of the eruption the next day. So, after a crowd of Kanakas had carried the launch up on the beach, we went to nicely furnished grass houses that the governor owned, and next morning, after a bath on the beach, we started for the lava flows with the two white men as guides. We walked miles between two flows of lava—hot lava that scorched our hair. At one place, we passed the frame of a grass house set between the walls of an old church. The owner had thought that on account of its being near a church of God it would not be ruined, and his goods would be safe. We walked over beds of lava that had cooled for several days and that, encrusted, would bear our weight; but we knew what lay beneath, for here and there, where there were fissures in the cooled crust, spits of steam and bubbling jets of lava flowed outward into the air. At one place, we found a remarkable thing—a small churchyard that had been unmolested by the flow. It looked as if the stream had parted and gone around the graveyard and joined into one stream after the place had been passed. We went on farther to a fresh lava stream that had just broken out. Close by was a large frame house, the home of the former governor of Savaii, now deserted. Here a p258 mass of lava, about three feet in thickness and several hundred yards wide, was slowly coming toward the house; red and glowing, it was advancing about an inch a minute. With long sticks we gathered the lava and pressed coins into it, to keep for souvenirs. As we returned by way of the church graveyard, we stood in the plot marvelling at such a miracle—that the molten destruction had parted at this burial place!—and we ceased to look upon the Kanaka who had built his house inside the churchyard as a joke: he had sufficient reason, after seeing the graveyard saved, to believe that his own home would be preserved.

As we came to the edge of the village, we skirted a fresh flow of lava, creeping up on a church. Inside the place were crowds of natives, all praying at once that the church be saved. They were coughing and wiping their eyes from the effects of the sulphur fumes that were enveloping them. We stood and watched this sad sight. Soon the people filed out, slowly, forlornly, and we stood by to see the end. In half an hour the first of the lava struck the building, and soon was running in the doors, setting fire to everything inflammable. Next morning when I looked for the church I found only a mass of ruins.

We lived ashore five days, and on the last day I rode nearly twenty-five miles, trying to reach the leeward side of the crater, but the barefoot native guide turned back after it grew too hot for his unprotected flesh, and I got only to within half a mile of the crater, p259 but near enough to see the awful yawning hole, nearly a mile across, emitting thousands and thousands of tons of liquid death every minute. I sat on the charred log of a cocoanut tree and wondered where it all came from. Certainly, wherever it was formed, there was no dearth of material. I afterward saw many volcanoes, but none of them had the impressive magnificence of this.

We left the harbour in the afternoon of the fifth day; our two taupou-girl friends came aboard to say good-bye, and as we looked over to their village and asked them to tell good-bye to our friends ashore whom we had not been able to see, they turned their eyes shoreward and burst into tears, for already a narrow stream of lava had broken through their village, and it would be only a matter of a few days when they would be living in another village, shorn of power, and their own pretty homes would be in ashes under the lava.

So it was that we up-anchored and set out for the Fijis, where we were to lose our last and final captain. p260