NIUE. 173 



hundred feet above high-water mark. The terraces are numbered as they 

 appear above the undercut cliffs. 



The second terrace is composed entirely of reef rock, the third terrace 

 consists of a mass of rubble at the bottom ; at the top a great many fossils 

 were found.^ The flat of the third terrace is quite extensive, nearly half a 

 mile wide in places. A good road runs on the level of this terrace around 

 the island. The fourth terrace is seen at intervals on the face of the island 

 as a hill about 200 feet above low-water mark. The ascent to the crest 

 behind Alofi, which was about one eighth of a mile inland, is steep to a point 

 of about 200 feet in height. The path then slopes steadily downward 

 with occasional swales for about two and a half miles. The interior of 

 the island is evidently lower than the outer rims, from thirty to sixty feet 

 perhaps than the crest immediately behind Alofi itself. The surface of 

 this interior sink was not honej'combed or pitted by erosion to the extent 

 observed in Makatea or in Ngele Levu, although there were a few deep pits 

 seen ; the others were nearly all small. 



A very fertile, apparently shallow, reddish-colored soil, the residuum of 

 the disintegration of a large mass of limestone, shows, as at the Bahamas, 

 the amount of decomposition which has taken place. It exists everywhere 

 in the interior of the island. This soil supports a dense growth of ferns, 

 bushes, and trees, and here and there we found patches of larger forest trees, 

 from forty to sixty feet in height. Bananas, breadfruit, and mangos are 

 common. There are only a few cocoanut trees in the interior ; they seem 

 to be limited to the second and third terraces on the sea face. 



To the south of Alofi the cliffs resemble in every respect the limestone 

 cliffs of Kambara, and photographs of the two can hardly be distinguished 

 one from the other (Pis. 107, fig. 2 ; 108-110). Seen at a slight angle looking 

 north or south along the west shore, the heads of the deep ravines which 

 have been worn into the face of the limestone terrace by undercutting and 

 cutting back, appear like so many buttresses running at right angles to the 

 island (Pis. 107, fig. 2; 108), extending out more or less according to the 

 extent of disintegration by atmospheric and marine agencies to which the 

 limestone rock has been subjected. 



1 A number of tertiary fossils were given to me by the Rev. F. E. Lawes, collected probablv buck of 

 the tbird terrace, consisting of gasteropods, bivalves, and corals. 



