450 THE LACCADIVES AND THE WEST COAST. 
arrives, their gigantic progenitors above) dot the smooth green 
plots and half conceal the snowy paths (clean and trim, as in 
some ancient virgin’s garden), which divide the various tiny 
properties. In this part of the island, where the trees yield 
habitually nearly a couple of hundred nuts a year, a single 
rood is the estate of a millionaire. 
A hundred artificial divisions separate inevitably the roots, 
and round them we wrangle or smile as the spirit moves us, 
but high over head the up-risen crowns blend in everlasting 
harmony in the blue heaven, one and undivided. 
February 20th.-—During the night we came on to Pere-Mull- 
Par, a huge triangular atoll, with only one small bank (say 200 
yards in length by 50 in breadth) at the N. KE. corner above high 
water mark, but with the greater portion of the boundary 
reef more or less visible at low water. 
As we neared the reef, we saw a huge flock of large sea birds 
fishing away out to seaward. They were fully a_ mile off, and 
it was impossible to find out what they were. I went after 
them in the steam cutter, but they moved away nearly as fast 
as we steamed, and after an hour’s chase, and running at least 
nine miles, they were still three quarter of a mile distant. My 
impression is, they were so large and white, and fished so like 
Cormorants, that they were Sula piscator, but I have never shot, 
or even seen, this bird alive, so that I cannot feel certain. 
Any how they were white and fished like Cormorants. These 
latter birds, as a rule, always desire to be prinit inter pares. 
The flock swims along very rapidly, probably chasing 
a shoal of fish. Each Cormorant, the moment he finds that he is 
last, rises and flies to the front, and so the whole flock is 
incessantly playing a sort of “ pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake baker’s 
man’’ game—there being an unbroken stream of birds per- 
petually flying from the rear to the front of the flock. The 
rapidity with which the flock, two-thirds of it in the water and 
one-third in the air, manage to move is surprising ; in the present 
ease the flocks moving in this manner cannot have progressed 
at a slower rate than between 8 and 9 miles an hour. 
We entered the atoll without difficulty near the southern ex- 
tremity, at noon. Not a bird was to be seen, except a few 
Turnstones about the partly bare portions of the reef. The 
lagoon up which we steamed was mostly very shallow and 
dotted about with lumps and bosses of dead coral, through 
which it was difficult to steer, going at the pace our cutter can 
go. As.we ran on towards the bank at the N. E. corner, two 
or three S. fuliginosa passed, and these were all we saw of this 
species here from first to last. Clearly this is not one of its 
head-quarters. Nearing the sand bank, we saw an immense 
