64 
The people warmed up to us considerably as the day wore on, and the 
adults went to the ship for chest X-rays and EKGs with enthusiasm. 
The people are almost all reef islanders; they call their reef Islands 
Rowa. The tidal wave that destroyed their village occurred in 1944, and 
they had abandoned Rowa and moved here permanently. They still make the 
launch or canoe trip in three to four hours to their coconut plantations 
on Rowa. 
Our party is suffering from on-shore life: Walter, Judy and Don all 
had tropical ulcers start with associated lymphoangitis and edema. I 
have had a split toenail, and the party that had climbed to the crater 
lake on Gaua suffered for two days from nettles. Don has spots from 
his still-uncured fungus infection and Paul has had a severe URI. Our 
Captain now has classical herpes zoster of a left thoracid dermatome. 
Late this evening, about 9 p.m., a canoe-laod of Lehalora young men, 
six in number, who had been off across Big Bay (Lemesu) , arrived at our 
ship and we took them on board for bleedings, hemoglobins, thick and thin 
smears, hematocrits, EKGs and full PEXs. Four of the six were unmarried, 
and they obviously provide much of the life of Lehaloroj and with these in 
our study also, the whole resident community is now under survey. 
Paul has been brooding and vacillating on his decision to leave us 
at Santa Cruz. It is not an option I had given him, but he has taken it 
and has worked hard, even furiously, doing more than his share, obviously 
with the probability of his early departure in mind. I can ill afford to 
lose him and, yet, I cannot afford to raise any issue with him, nor would 
I want to. No one has worked better or more diligently than Paul, and it 
is thus a great loss to us not to have him for the last half of the expe- 
dition. Yet, he has now decided that he must be off. I have no word from 
him about how things went in Paris, but I suspect that he is not rushing 
back to his family, but rather to still-unsettled emotional ties in France. 
This is only conjecture, for nothing certain has been said to me by Paul 
or by anyone else. 
The steep slopes or canyon-like walls on all sides of the bay, leaving 
only a small 45° slit open to the sea and sky, produce a depressing at- 
mosphere here, from my point of view. Judy, however, finds the tight 
little community fascinating and lovable, and compares their existence to 
that of the household in "Women of the Dunes". It is a fine comparison 
and psychological insight to separate those enchanted and those terrified 
by such a situation. 
Lehali, Ureparapara (Noibipai) October 10, 1972 
We landed at about 8:30 a.m. , after an hour of reconnaissance of the 
coast, during which the Captain all but abandoned hope of landing us. 
We first tried with the sixteen foot shore-boat and could not attempt 
