trip of
brilliant blue sea shining above them, and now and then a glint of
snowy foam. Two pandanuses frame the view, their long leaves waving
softly in the breeze that comes floating down the valley. Half asleep,
I know the delights of the lotus-eaters' blessed isle.

CHAPTER XIII

AOBA

Next day I landed in Aoba, at "Albert's." He was an American negro,
who, after having been a stoker and sailor, had settled here as a
coprah trader. His language was of the strangest, a mixture of biche la
mar, negro French and English, and was very hard to understand. With
the help of two native women he kept his house in good order, and
he was decidedly one of the most decent colonists of the group,
and tried to behave like a gentleman, which is more than can be said
of some whites. He seemed to confirm the theory that the African is
superior to the Melanesian. Albert sheltered me to the best of his
ability, although I had to sleep in the open, under a straw roof,
and his bill of fare included items which neither my teeth nor my
stomach could manage, such as an octopus. There were several other
negroes in Aoba; one was Marmaduke, an enormous Senegalese, who had
grown somewhat simple, and lived like the natives, joining the Suque
and dancing at their festivals. He occasionally came to dinner at
Albert's; this was always amusing, as Albert thought himself far
superior to Marmaduke, and corrected his mistakes with still more
comical impossibilities. Both were most polite and perfectly sober. The
talk, as a rule, turned on stories of ghosts, in which both of them
firmly believed, and by which both were much troubled. Marmaduke was
strangled every few nights by old women, while a goblin had sat on
Albert's chest every night until he had cleared the bush round his
house and emptied his Winchester three times into the darkness. This
had driven the ghosts away,--a pretty case of auto-suggestion. I
was interested in hearing these stories, though I should hardly have
thought a sensible man like Albert could have believed such things.

The people of Aoba are quite different from those of the other
islands,--light-coloured, often straight-haired, with Mongolian
features; they are quite good-looking, intelligent, and their habits
show many Polynesian traits. The Suque is not all-important here:
it scarcely has the character of a secret society, and the separation
of the sexes is not insisted on. Men and women live together, and the