36 MYSTIC ISLES 



where man might kill lesser beings for his food and 

 sport. 



Always, in the approach to the island in steamship, 

 schooner, or canoe, one is amazed and transported by 

 the varying aspect of it. A few miles away one would 

 never know that man had touched it. His inappreci- 

 able structures are erased by the flood of green color, 

 which, from the edge of the lagoon to the spires of La 

 Diademe, nearly eight thousand feet above the water, 

 makes all other hues insignificant. In all its hundred 

 miles or so of circumference nature is the dominant note 

 — a nature so mysterious, so powerful, and yet so soft- 

 handed, so beauty-loving and so laughing in its indul- 

 gences, that one can hardly believe it the same that 

 rules the Northern climes and forces man to labor in 

 pain all his days or to die. 



The scene from a little distance is as primeval as when 

 the first humans climbed in their frail canoes through 

 the unknown and terrible stretches of ocean, and saw 

 Tahiti shining in the sunlight. A mile or two from the 

 lagoon the fertile land extends as a slowly-ascending 

 gamut of greens as luxuriant as a jungle, and forming 

 a most pleasing foreground to the startling amphithe- 

 ater of the mountains, darker, and, in storm, black and 

 forbidding. 



Those mountains are the most wonderful examples of 

 volcanic rock on the globe. Formed of rough and crys- 

 talline products of the basic fire of earth, they hold high 

 up in their recesses coral beds once under the sea, and 

 lava in many shapes, tokens of the island's rise from the 

 slime, and of mammoth craters now almost entirely 

 obhterated by denudation — the denudation which made 



