[Note: this transcription was produced by an automatic OCR engine]

32 WITH NATIVES IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC

But our ideas change when we enter his village
home, with its dancing-grounds with the big drums,
the sacred stone tables, idols and carved tree-trunks,
all in a frame of violently coloured busheswred, purple,
brown and orange. Above us, across a blue sky, a
tree with scarlet flowers blows in the breeze, and long
stamens fall slowly down and cover the ground with
a brilliant carpet. Dogs bark, roosters crow and
from a but a man creeps out—others emerge from the
bush and from half-hidden houses which at first we
had not noticed. At some distance stand the women
and children in timid amazement, and then begins a
chattering, or maybe a whispered consultation about
the arrival of the stranger. We are in the midst of
human life, in a busy little town, where the sun pours
through the gaps in the dark forest, and flowers give
colour and brightness, and where, after all, life is not
so very much less human than in civilization.

Then the forest has lifted its veil, we have entered
the sanctuary, and the alarming sensation of nature’s
hostility is softened. “7e white men like to talk
about our mastery over nature, but is it not rather
true that we flee from nature, as its most intense
manifestations are oppressive to us? Is not the
savage, living so very close to nature, more its master,
or at least its friend, than we are? We need space
and the sight of sun and sky to feel happy; the night
of the forest, the loneliness of the ocean are terrible
to us, whilst to the native they are his home and his
element.

It is evident that under our first strong impression