116 "ALBATROSS" TROPICAL PACIFIC EXPEDITION. 



From the southern point of the island to the eastward extends for 

 about five miles a wide reef flat, full of patches and bars of beach rock, 

 incipient shingle beaches, and piles of coral shingle, with sand bars and 

 sand islets on the lagoon face of the reef flat, with many wide rather 

 shallow gaps giving access to large bodies of water to the interior of the 

 lagoon. At the south end there is a large island marked for its superb 

 vegetation. 



The Nullipore and Pocillipore knolls^ of the outer edge of the reef 

 platform were remarkably brilliant in their coloring, and with the sun 

 shining on the edge of the reef flat the contrast between the different shades of 

 blue to green and the metallic colors of the tongues of water breaking upon 

 these brilliantly colored coral knolls was most striking ; blue, red, green, yel- 

 low, orange, all contrasting to the white surf dashing across the flat ; and as 

 seen from the ship, with the dark blue foreground of the deeper water. The 

 yellow belt of beach rock or conglomerate, inside the brilliantly colored 

 outer edge, formed a striking contrast to the high gray shingle beach or the 

 brilliantly illuminated dead white or cream-colored coral sand beach running 

 in between the masses of the dark green belt of shrub vegetation growing 

 back of the top of the beach shingle and topped with rows of high cocoanut 

 trees, — all this combined with the light blue sky dotted with the low lines 

 of trade wind clouds, formed a kaleidoscope of colors very different from 

 that of an ordinary sea beach. 



Aki-Aki. 



Plates 68, 69, 201, 203. 



Aki-Aki is a circular island, three quarters of a mile in diameter, formed 

 of elevated coralliferous limestone. It is well wooded. Thei'e is no lagoon, 

 a very insignificant sink occupying the western portion of the island. The ' 

 beach of Aki-Aki is highest at the south end (PI. 68, fig. 1), where there is 

 a shingle beach fully twelve to fifteen feet ; it is not more than from four 

 to five feet high at the north end, with an occasional short stretch of coral 



' These are developed to such an extent that they are sketched as islets on the edge of the reef flat 

 in the survey of the entrance to Hao by H. M. S. " Blossom." 



