Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


At the bottom of the umu had been laid fagots of purau- and guava-wood, and on them huge trunks of the tropical chestnut, the mapé. On the trunks were laid basaltic rocks, or lumps of lava, boulders, and the stones about, as big as a man's head. The oven was completed for the lighting.

On the bushes huge nets were drying, and canoes were drawn up into the purau and pandanus clumps. As the day advanced, the artless incidents of the settlement aroused my interest. I saw about me scenes and affairs which had caused a famous poet after a week or two in this very lieu to write:

Upon this framework were set the walls, constructed of canes arranged in a delicate pattern, the fastenings being of purau or other rattan-like creepers, all tied neatly and regularly.

They discussed the strange madness that had possessed Iuda Iskalota, that he had first bought land with his forty pieces of silver and then hanged himself to a purau tree. Was it cocoanut land? they asked. Was it not good land? Often across the worn stones of the paepae stole a vei, a centipede, upon which a bare foot quickly stamped.

We had to ford a stream three or four feet deep, the Vaitapiha, and the struggle through it was a rare pleasure, the child on the back of the animal, and I with the reins and a purau twig directing and commanding in vain. We had to leap into the water and remove a boulder or two that stymied the wheels.