the afternoon; in the dark hours of the night the sea burst upon the
island like a flood; the settlement was razed, all but the church and
presbytery; and, when day returned, the survivors saw themselves
clinging in an abattis of uprooted coco-palms and ruined houses.

Danger is but a small consideration. But men are more nicely sensible of
a discomfort; and the atoll is a discomfortable home. There are some,
and these probably ancient, where a deep soil has formed and the most
valuable fruit-trees prosper. I have walked in one, with equal
admiration and surprise, through a forest of huge breadfruits, eating
bananas and stumbling among taro as I went. This was in the atoll of
Namorik in the Marshall group, and stands alone in my experience. To
give the opposite extreme, which is yet far more near the average, I
will describe the soil and productions of Fakarava. The surface of that
narrow strip is for the more part of broken coral limestone, like
volcanic clinkers, and excruciating to the naked foot; in some atolls, I
believe, not in Fakarava, it gives a fine metallic ring when struck.
Here and there you come upon a bank of sand, exceeding fine and white,
and these parts are the least productive. The plants (such as they are)
spring from and love the broken coral, whence they grow with that
wonderful verdancy that makes the beauty of the atoll from the sea. The
coco-palm in particular luxuriates in that stern _solum_, striking down
his roots to the brackish, percolated water, and bearing his green head
in the wind with every evidence of health and pleasure. And yet even
the coco-palm must be helped in infancy with some extraneous nutriment,
and through much of the low archipelago there is planted with each nut a
piece of ship's biscuit and a rusty nail. The pandanus comes next in
importance, being also a food tree; and he, too, does bravely. A green
bush called _miki_ runs everywhere; occasionally a purao is seen; and
there are several useless weeds. According to M. Cuzent, the whole
number of plants on an atoll such as Fakarava will scarce exceed, even
if it reaches to, one score. Not a blade of grass appears; not a grain
of humus, save when a sack or two has been imported to make the
semblance of a garden; such gardens as bloom in cities on the
window-sill. Insect life is sometimes dense; a cloud of mosquitoes, and,
what is far worse, a plague of flies blackening our food, have sometimes
driven us from a meal on Apem