10 FUNAFUTI ATOLL. 



The largest islet of the atoll extends for seven miles, occupying 

 about half the windward side. In shape it resembles a reversed 

 capital L, or more nearly the Australian aboriginal club called 

 " Liangle." The concave side is presented to the lagoon ; against 

 the centre of concavity sand has been banked up, so as to greatly 

 increase the diameter of the islet, which here attains its maximum 

 breath of seven hundred yards. Here is situated the principal 

 or permanent village, Fungafari ; here also is the only supply of 

 fresh water and the gardens. North and south of this area the 

 islet rapidly narrows to a width of about a hundred yards, which 

 is maintained for the greater part of its length. About a mile 

 south of the village, at a spot called Luamanif, is a well beaten 

 track, the porterage, where, to avoid the long pull by the passage, 

 the natives haul their canoes overland across the islet, a distance 

 of about seventy yards, and launch them on the other side. A 

 considerable area of perhaps a dozen acres in the centre of the 

 islet is occupied by a swamp, which from the fact of being ringed 

 round with Rhizophora will be called the Mangrove Swamp. The 

 native name of this locality is, I believe, Tisala. This swamp is 

 somewhat the shape of a sagittate leaf of an aroid like the taro ; 

 the tip of the leaf answering to the south-east corner, while the 

 lobes represent two branches, a broad western one stretching 

 nearly across the island and penetrating almost to the village, 

 and a narrow northern branch. Along its whole eastern border 

 the swamp is walled in by a bank of shingle and rolled coral 

 blocks, which rise twelve or fifteen feet above the flat, and on the 

 further side of which the waves break at high tide. This shingle 

 bank is narrowest and lowest in the centre, and carries a few 

 scattered palms and pandanus. On its inland face a strip of 

 Rhizophora luxuriates in soft, dark brown, rather deep mud. 

 The chief expanse of the Mangrove Swamp is bare of vegetation, 

 extremely level, of soft decomposing coral rock, whose interstices 

 are filled with mud. At high tide it is covered ankle deep with 

 water which drains away at half ebb. Following the retreating 

 water northward, several large deep pools are encountered in the 

 northern arm. On closer approach these are seen to be in such 

 free communication with the ocean, that not the tides alone but 

 every individual wave pulsates therein. Some have an easterly 

 and westerly disposition, which suggests that they are breaks in 

 the roofs of tunnels which extend under the shingle rampart, 

 and open outside the reef a hundred yards away. A child, 

 I was told, once disappeared into one of these pools, the dead 

 body of which was afterwards recovered on the ocean beach. 

 Striking as may be this natural siphon of the northern arm, by 

 which the rising tide floods the swamp, yet the western limb sur- 

 passes it in interest. Here, at a spot a quarter of a mile east of 

 the Mission Church, round flat-topped table-like bosses three to 



