st fish, and then the entire oven was rapidly covered up with wild
banana leaves in the shape of a mound.

The moment Nalik and I had laid down our rods, and whilst the oven was
being prepared, Toka and the two other boys sprang into the water at
one end of the pool and began to disturb the bottom with their feet. The
young girls and women, each carrying a small finely-meshed scoop-net,
joined them, and in a tew minutes they had filled a basket with
crayfish, some of which were ten inches in length, and weighed over a
pound, their tails especially being very large and fleshy.

"Shall we boil or bake them?" asked Nalik as the basketful was brought
up to me for examination.

"Boil them," I replied, for I had brought with me several pounds of
coarse salt taken from our wrecked ship's harness cask and carefully
dried in the sun, and a boiled crayfish or crab is better than one
baked--and spoiled.

A tall, graceful girl, named Seia, came forward with a large wooden
bowl, nearly eighteen inches in diameter at the top, and two feet in
depth--no light weight even to lift, for at its rim it was over an inch
thick. Placing it on the ground in front of Sru and myself, she motioned
to the other girls to bring water. They brought her about two gallons
in buckets made of the looped-up leaves of the taro plant, and poured it
into the vessel; then Nalik and old Sru, with rough tongs formed of the
midrib of a coconut branch, whipped up eight or ten large red-hot stones
from a fire near by, and dropped them into the vessel, the water in
which at once began to boil and send up a volume of steam as Seia tipped
the entire basketful of crustacean delicacies into the bowl, together
with some handfuls of salt. Then a closely-woven mat was placed over the
top and tied round it so as to keep in the heat--that is the way they
boil food in the South Seas with a wooden pot!

From time to time during the next quarter of an hour more red-hot stones
were dropped into the bowl until old Sru pronounced the contents to be
_tunua_, _i.e._, well and truly cooked, and then whilst the now bright
red crayfish were laid out to cool upon platters of green woven coconut
leaf, the first oven of fish and bananas was opened.

What a delightful meal it was! The fat, luscious fish, cooked in their
own juices, each one deftly ridden of its compact coating of silvery
scales by the quick hands of the women, and then turned out hot and
smoking upon a platter of lea