Kandavu is about 27 miles long, four wide, and lies SO miles from Viti 

 Levu. This- charming volcanic uplift is practically shut off from the %7orld. 

 On it are only four or five white planters who have no telephones or tele- 

 graph stations, no roads and no post offices worth talking about. There is 

 no communication with the other islands except "by occasional-very occasional- 

 Fijian craft. Now and then a native journeys from one village to another 

 over ill-kept jungle trails, almost impassible to Europeans. Ky artist com- 

 panion - a dextrous painter of animal life - and I put up at the hospitable 

 home of I/r . and Mrs. !£., educated English people and the only Europeans on 

 the western end of the island. Their house was built on an eminence, itself 

 surrounded by verdure-clad hills, except towards the northwest where an open- 

 ing in the hilly amphitheatre furnished a view of a beautiful bay. In its turn 

 the bay was protected and cut off from the ocean by a coral reef that continuous- 

 ly threw up a succession of many- sounding breakers whose outlines were plainly 

 visible by contrast with the blue waters of the bay. Trees of every tropical 

 variety, both wild and cultivated, covered the bowl of this ancient crater, 

 while birds of many kinds - parrots, parakeets, sun birds, Fiji "robins", 

 honeyeaters, fantails, pigeons, doves, hawks, gave additional color to the 

 landscape and lent musical notes to the loud babbling of a brook that ran 

 past the house on its way to the ocean. 



As if to perfect this Fijian paradise, the white blossoms of several 

 Frangipane trees blew their strong fragrance through our rooms day and night. 



Unless I was too fatigued from tramping over hill and dale through the 

 rather difficult jungle, I rose an hour before day-break that I might refresh 

 myself (oh 1 , the satisfaction of going abroad only in pajamas and slippers) 

 by drinking in the glories of the starlight sky, much of which I had seen in 

 1923 for the first time. Standing well within the bowl of the long inactive 

 prater, the oncoming dawn was an entirely new experience. As the eastern 

 heavens lightened, the shadows of the valley beneath appeared to deepen, but 

 at last the honeyeaters began their earliest notes, and with these matin songs 

 the outlines of cocoa palms, breadfruit trees, mangoes, bananas and other 

 plants assumed individuality until over the edges of the green-rimmed hills 

 streamed the first rays of the morning sun. They fell upon the opposite 

 slopes, bringing with them a perfumed atmosphere redolent of the ever-flower- 

 ing trees, shrubs and vines that clothed the green hillsides to their very 

 tops . 



Of course, the wonders of rosy-fingered dawn have been celebrated in 

 song, verse and prose many times these thousand years, but my contention is 

 that when dark night rolls back into the ocean around wild Kandavu it does 

 so in a fashion all its own. 



Other sunrises may be as impressive and as beautiful, but when viewed 

 from the Korolevu crater they have charms inherent in their environment — 

 charms due to just those every-day surroundings that are tropical life . 



what is true of the scenery, the flora, the fauna and the met ero logy of 

 Polynesia is also true of its human element. I am quite sure that while 

 writers of Oceanic fiction often draw upon their boundless stories of paste- 

 board heroes and heroines for tales that are largely products of an excited 

 imagination, there are many lives at this moment being lived on the islands 

 of the South Seas that properly belong either to a century in advance or several 



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