A HISTORY OF FIJI 303 



formed. Thus at the village of ISTandawa, on Koro island, an old man 

 stands upon a high rock and calls to the sea-turtles, shouting in Fijian, 

 Come ! Come ! We are tired of waiting ! upon which several turtles 

 appear swimming toward the shore. It is highly probable that these 

 are regularly fed and are thus always ready for the "miracle" when 

 strangers visit the town. Koro, by the way, is the island to which the 

 souls of all dead pigs were supposed to go to their valhalla. 



At the village of Eukua on Mbenga a curious miracle play is en- 

 acted. Near the town there is a circular pit about twenty feet in 

 diameter, the bottom of which is lined with brown-colored volcanic 

 stones, a ring of large flat ones lying near the edge around the bottom 

 of the depression. The pit is filled with dry sticks and a fire is main- 

 tained until the stones are red hot. Then the embers are brushed 

 away, and out of the forest there comes a procession of young men gaily 

 adorned with garlands of flowers and well polished with cocoanut oil. 

 They chant as they tread slowly and deliberately over the hot stones, and 

 then vanish into the woods, apparently uninjured; upon which pigs 

 and vegetables are placed upon the stones and are covered with leaves 

 and earth, and a thoroughly cooked feast is soon ready for both guests 

 and performers. Professor Langley witnessed a similar exhibition in 

 the Society Islands, and discovered that the radiation from the surface 

 of the volcanic stones is very great, while the stones themselves are poor 

 conductors of heat, thus the surface soon cools while enough heat still 

 remains within to serve in cooking the feast. The natives can not be 

 induced to walk over limestone, which is a good conductor and poor 

 radiator, the surface thus remaining hot. However, the great thick- 

 ness of the skin upon the sole of their unshod feet accounts in some 

 measure for their ability to perform this "miracle." In all respects 

 natural sole leather is superior to that provided by the " leather trust." 



A pleasing art which still survives, but is doomed to extinction, is 

 the making and decorating of tapa, or masi, as it is called in Fiji, where 

 it is still used for screens in houses, and for various decorative pur- 

 poses. "Women alone take part in the manufacture of tapa. They care- 

 fully cultivate the paper mulberry {Broussonetia papyrifera) , and, when 

 about six feet high, the young trees are cut down, and the bark peeled 

 off and soaked in water. The outer skin is then scraped off with a 

 sharp-edged shell, and the soft fibrous inner bark is ready for beating, 

 although it may be kept indefinitely before this process is begun. For 

 beating, the strips of bark must be thoroughly water-soaked and soft, 

 and two are placed one over the other upon a flattened log and beaten 

 with a rectangular mallet, ihi, having three of its flat sides grooved and 

 one plane. Each pair of strips of an inch in original width may thus 

 be beaten out into a thin sheet of felted fibers nine inches wide, although 

 the length is reduced. Separate sheets are then welded together by 

 beating, the overlapping edges being first glued with a paste made from 

 arrowroot boiled in water, this welding being so cleverly done that it is 



