GREAT COCO ISLAND 101 



happiest Indian memories. We rose at the break of 

 dawn, and all day long we roamed our happy hunting- 

 grounds on the reefs or in the jungle, and at night, 

 after nodding over a pipe under the stars, we slept 

 past power of poppy and mandragora and all the 

 drowsy syrups of the East. But yet we averted 

 Nemesis, by yielding ourselves patiently to mosquitoes 

 and sandflies : these and the thorns of the jungle 

 soon brought us to a state of general itchiness quite 

 such as Thersites desired for Agamemnon in the play. 



I set down my observations of this island knowing 

 that they are of little more value than impressions, 

 seeing that it is a hard thing to observe on a great 

 scale in a place where one has to make his way 

 through tangled jungle with a hatchet in one hand 

 and a compass in the other, and with mosquitoes 

 screaming at him and biting him all the time. It is 

 a narrow strip of land, between 7 and 8 miles long 

 and perhaps 3 half-miles broad, encompassed by coral- 

 reefs, whereon day and night the league-long roller" 

 thunders perpetually. Its surface is rather steeply 

 undulating, the highest ridges reaching to nearly 200 

 feet above sea-level. The prevailing rock is a hard 

 and compact sandstone, with occasional extremely thin 

 seams of crystalline limestone, and in places a fine 

 breccia-conglomerate occurs. The whole island is 

 covered with a dense and gloomy forest, made impass- 



