PACIFIC ISLANDS UNDER JAPANESE MANDATE 



m >m& w m 



607 



Photograph by Junius B. Wood 



"AIX MEN'S HOUSE," OR BACHELORS' CEUB, IN TRUK I CAROLINE ISLANDS 



The club is the common sleeping place for any man without a home, as well as the 

 storage shed for disabled canoes and other rubbish. It usually has a roof of thatch and is 

 open on all sides. 



thighs. However, they follow modern 

 conveniences and wear the long loops 

 wrapped around the ears close to the head 

 when they work, while skirts drape the 

 gaily tattooed legs of the social leaders of 

 former days. 



That night there were open-air movies 

 and Japanese sword dancing by sailors 

 and a couple of proficient native boys on 

 the lawn of the official residence. Visit- 

 ors and dignitaries had chairs, while the 

 others stood or squatted on the cool grass. 



Movies were a novelty to the natives, 

 but comparatively few had the energy to 

 walk the quarter mile from the settlement 

 to the grounds. An American comic of 

 an indestructible man wrecking furniture, 

 and pictures of Japanese warships, in- 

 cluding a boat crew feverishly lowering 

 a cutter, were the hits of the evening. 



THE MYSTERIOUS CITY OE NANMATAIy 



Late that night, when the others were 

 sipping the inevitable tea on the broad 

 veranda, I slipped away down the long 

 hill toward the settlement. In a pocket 



was a little map in India ink and water 

 colors which Kubary had made in 1874 

 of the ruins of Nanmatal, the city of 

 stone walls and canals off the east coast 

 of Ponape which has outlived the facts 

 of its origin (see illustrations on pages 

 597, 598, and 600). 



Storms through countless generations 

 have filled the broad, straight canals until 

 the sands are dry at low tide, but the 

 walls of heavy basaltic monoliths, in some 

 places 30 feet high, have withstood 

 typhoons and earthquakes, proof of a 

 civilization forgotten when Quiros came, 

 in 1595, and found the natives living then 

 in flimsy houses of thatch and sticks. 



Charles Darwin, F. W. Christian, the 

 Rev. MacMillan Brown, Dr. Amberg, and 

 others of greater or lesser fame have 

 delved in the ruins near Metalanim harbor 

 and evolved theories of their origin. 

 They do not agree whether the patch of 

 land, 1,200 yards long and half as wide, 

 once was a tropical Venice or whether 

 through the ages it has been gradually 

 sinking, swallowed by the sea and smoth- 



