MYSTIC ISLES 159 



ville it was 29.51, the lowest, the skippers said, in seven 

 years. The William Olsen, a San Francisco barken- 

 tine, kedged out into the lagoon as fast as possible, and 

 through the tearing sheets of rain I glimpsed other ves- 

 sels reaching for a holding-ground. The Fetia Taiao 

 had made an anchorage a thousand feet toward the 

 reef. The waves were hammering against the quays, 

 and the lagoon was white with fury. 



In the club, after all had been made secure, the skip- 

 pers and managers of trading houses gathere.d to dis- 

 cuss the weather. Tahiti is not so subject to disastrous 

 storms as are the Paumotu Islands and the waters to- 

 ward China and Japan, yet every decade or two a tidal- 

 wave sweeps the lowlands and does great injury. 

 Though this occurs but seldom, when the barometer 

 falls low, the hearts of the owners of property and of 

 the people who have experienced a disaster of this 

 kind sink. The tides in this group of islands are dif- 

 ferent from anywhere else in the world I know of in 

 that they ebb and flow with unchanging regularity, 

 never varying in time from one year's end to another. 



Full tide comes at noon and midnight, and ebb at six 

 in the morning and six in the evening, and the sun rises 

 and sets between half past five and half past six o'clock. 

 There is hardly any twilight, because of the earth's fast 

 rotation in the tropics. This is a fixity, observed by 

 whites for more than a century, and told the first sea- 

 men here by the natives as a condition existing always. 

 Another oddity of the tides is that they are almost in- 

 appreciable, the difference between high and low tide 

 hardly ever exceeding two feet. But every six months 

 or so a roaring tide rolls in from far at sea, and, sweep- 



