en and
fall and lie undisturbed from month to month; then for a week or ten
days, as the men husk the nuts, the women and children fish in the
daytime among the pools and runnels of the inner reef, and at night with
flaring torches of palm-leaf they stand amid the sweeping surf on
the outer side of the narrow islet, and with net and spear fill their
baskets with blue and yellow crayfish. Then when all the work is done,
the canoes are filled with the husked cocoanuts, and with laughter and
song--for they are yet a merry-hearted though vanishing people--they
return to the village, and for another six months Funafala is left to
the ceaseless call of the restless sea upon the outer reef, and the
hoarse cry of the soaring frigate birds.

One afternoon Senior and myself, accompanied by a young,
powerfully-built native named Suka, were returning to the temporary
village on Funafala--a collection of rude huts thatched with palm
leaves--from a fishing excursion on the outer reef, when we were
overtaken by a series of sudden squalls and downpours of rain. We were
then walking along the weather shore of the island, which was strewn
with loose slabs of coral stone, pure white in colour and giving forth a
clear, resonant sound to the slightest disturbing movement On our right
hand was a scrub of _puka_ trees, which afforded no shelter from the
torrential rain; on our left the ocean, whose huge, leaping billows
crashed and thundered upon the black, shelving reef, and sent swirling
waves of whitened foam up to our feet.

For some minutes we continued to force our way against the storm, when
Suka, who was leading, called out to us that a little distance on along
the beach there was a cluster of _papa_ (coral rocks), in the recesses
of which we could obtain shelter. Even as he spoke the rain ceased for
a space, and we saw, some hundreds of yards before us, the spot of which
he had spoken--a number of jagged, tumbled-together coral boulders which
some violent convulsion of the sea had torn away from the barrier reef
and hurled upon the shore, where, in the course of years, kindly Nature
had sent out a tender hand and covered them with a thick growth of a
creeper peculiar to the low-lying atolls of the mid-Pacific, and hidden
their rugged outlines under a mantle of vivid green.

As we drew near, the bright, tropic sun shone out for a while, and the
furious wind died away, seeming to gather fresh strength for another
sweeping onslaught