Australia's Heritage. 
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occupation by an earlier race : detached pillars 
composed of large stones, long stretches of 
broken walls indicating walled towns, and 
fragments of rough masonry cemented with a 
chunam of coral lime and river sand. Much of 
Santo is covered by noble forests of timber, and 
the littoral is of remarkable fertility. The 
inhabitants, though nearly all thorough savages, 
have a better reputation than most of the people 
inhabiting the larger islands of the group, and 
the record of white men who have lost their 
lives in the group is low on Santo. 
An island with an evil reputation in the past 
is Tanna, for the inhabitants are savage and 
treacherous, and though there are English traders 
living among them in security, the Tanna people 
have perpetrated some fearful massacres upon 
vessels engaged in trading and recruiting native 
labour. The whole island is a magnificent 
panorama of tropical island beauty, thirty-five 
miles long by eleven in width. Towards the 
southern end the land trends away in a gradual 
slope from lofty mountains, densely wooded 
and enveloped in mist and clouds. The low- 
lying coast lands are of surpassing fertility, and 
millions of coco-palms encompass the shores, 
