Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Night in a Fijian House—A Colossal Bed—The City of a Dream- —A Fascinating Fijian—How to drink Yanggona—Wanted, a Stanley—Where are the Settlers ?—The Fairy Fortress In the pitch dark, we forded a river, allowing the horse to find his own way in and out, and at last came up to a five-foot-high palisade of thick bamboos, surrounding a cluster of dim, tall objects that looked more like haystacks than anything else. My men lowered the bars of a gate, and I rode into the village. All was dark and silent, but the men soon routed out the inhabitants of the biggest house, ran and looked for a light. and succeeded in finding a ship's lantern. This they lit, and then proceeded unceremoniously to take possession of the house, lighting a fire in the small square fire-pit near the door, " shooing" the sleepers out from under their mats on the floor, and depositing my various packages in convenient places. The inhabitants took all this quite as a matter of course, merely asking (or so I judged) who the marvellous apparition might be, and then squatting down outside the doorways to stare their fill, in stolid amazement. While the men were making tea, and opening a tin of meat, I looked about me with interest, examining my quarters. The house was about thirty feet by FIJI TO THE CANNIBAL ISLANDS fifteen or twenty. There was only one room. The roof was very high, and supported by a central post cut from a big bread-fruit tree. All round the walls were pillars, or, rather, pilasters, of similar wood, about four feet apart. The raf- ters were of bamboo, the ridge-pole of bread-fruit. Between the pillars of the walls was fine tapestry- work of reeds, which were laced together with black and red sinnet (cocoanut fibre) woven in pretty patterns. The floor was covered w...