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Updated: May 17, 2025
The low land which comes down to the beach of coral-sand is covered by the most beautiful productions of the intertropical regions. In the midst of bananas, orange, cocoa-nut, and bread-fruit trees, spots are cleared where yams, sweet potatoes, the sugar-cane, and pine-apples are cultivated.
Captain Belcher, R.N., in a letter which Captain Beaufort showed me at the admiralty, speaking of Bow atoll, says, "I have succeeded in boring forty-five feet through coral-sand, when the auger became jammed by the falling in of the surrounding CREAMY matter."
The low land which comes down to the beach of coral-sand, is covered by the most beautiful productions of the intertropical regions. In the midst of bananas, orange, cocoa-nut, and bread-fruit trees, spots are cleared where yams, sweet potatoes, and sugar-cane, and pine-apples are cultivated.
Give them all that they need. Make everything right for them." The chief bowed, and retired with an awed air from the presence. Exactly as he passed a certain line on the ground, marked white with a row of coral-sand, Tu-Kila-Kila seized his spear and his tomahawk once more, and mounted guard, as before, at the foot of the great tree where they had seen him pacing.
Before long, two adjacent huts were found for them, near the shore of the lagoon; and Felix noticed with pleasure, not only that the huts themselves were new and clean, but also that the chief took great care to place round both of them a single circular line of white coral-sand, like the one he had noticed at Tu-Kila-Kila's palace-temple. He felt sure this white line made the space within taboo.
He had lifted his foot and was just going to cross the white line of coral-sand, when his Shadow, catching him suddenly and stoutly round the waist, pulled him back from the enclosure with every sign of horror, alarm, and astonishment. "No, you can't go," he cried, grappling with him with all his force, yet using him very tenderly for all that, as becomes a god. "Taboo! Taboo there!"
This fringe consists of coral-sand and detritus thrown up from the lagoon-channel, and of soil washed down from the hills; it is an encroachment on the channel, analogous to that low and inner part of the islets in many atolls which is formed by the accumulation of matter from the lagoon. The lagoon channels may be compared in every respect with true lagoons.
A temple slave, trembling all over at this conflict of the gods, brought out a calabash full of white coral-sand. The King of Water spat on it and blessed it. By this time a dozen natives, at least, had assembled outside the taboo-line, and stood eagerly watching the result of the combat. The temple slave made a long white mark with the coral-sand on one side of the cleared area.
At the very moment when these things were passing under the wattled roof of Muriel's hut, it happened that on the taboo-space outside, Toko, the Shadow, stood talking for a moment with Ula, the fourteenth wife of the great Tu-Kila-Kila. "I never see you now, Toko," the beautiful Polynesian said, leaning almost across the white line of coral-sand which she dared not transgress.
The fishes are remarkable for the singularity of their form, and the beauty of their colours; those brought to us by the inhabitants belonged to the Holocentrus, Scarus, Mullus, Chætodon, Heniochus, Amphacanthus, Theutis, and Fistularia. Of Crustacea we saw twenty different kinds; among them a Gonoplax of the middling size, and as white as the coral-sand, among which it lives, on the shore.
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