plains, or flat part of the country,
abounded in bread-fruit, and cocoa-nut trees; in some places, however,
there were salt swamps and lagoons, which would produce neither.

We went again a-shore on the 18th, and would have taken the advantage of
Tupia's company, in our perambulation; but he was too much engaged with
his friends. We took, however, his boy, whose name was _Tayeto_, and Mr
Banks went to take a farther view of what had much engaged his attention
before; it was a kind of chest or ark, the lid of which was nicely sewed
on, and thatched very neatly with palm-nut leaves: It was fixed upon two
poles, and supported on little arches of wood, very neatly carved; the
use of the poles seemed to be to remove it from place to place, in the
manner of our sedan chairs: In one end of it was a square hole, in the
middle of which was a ring touching the sides, and leaving the angles
open, so as to form a round hole within a square one. The first time Mr
Banks saw this coffer, the aperture at the end was stopped with a piece
of cloth, which, lest he should give offence, he left untouched;
probably there was then something within, but now the cloth was taken
away, and, upon looking into it, it was found empty. The general
resemblance between this repository and the ark of the Lord among the
Jews is remarkable; but it is still more remarkable, that upon enquiring
of the boy what it was called, he said, _Ewharre no Eatua_, the _house
of the God_: He could however give no account of its signification or
use.[41]

[Footnote 41: Mr Parkhurst, in his Hebrew Lexicon, takes notice of this
circumstance, and admits the resemblance. But in fact, there is no need
to have recourse to the Jews in particular, for something similar to
what is here mentioned. The Egyptians, according to Herodotus, Euter.
63, kept their god in a case or box, and at certain times carried it
about or drew it on a four-wheeled carriage. Diodorus Siculus says the
same thing of them, in his first book. Both these writers, it is
remarkable, use the same word for this containing vehicle; it is [Greek]
or [Greek], the temple, shrine, or sacred dwelling. The reader may have
heard of the horrid god at Juggernaut, who is drawn on a wheeled
carriage, as described in such dreadful terms by Dr Buchanan, in the
account of his travels and researches in India. The Israelites, it is
very probable from a passage in the prophet Amos, v. 26, copied the
example of some of their i