Wild Life in Southern Seas
by Louis Becke (9781458990099)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Tia Kau. FOUR miles north-west from Nanomaga, a tiny isle of the lately annexed Ellice Group in the South Pacific, lies a great " patch " of submerged coral, called Tia Kau?the best fishing ground in all the wide South Sea, except, perhaps, the atolls of Arrecifos and Christmas Island, in the North Pacific. Thirty years ago, when the smoke and glare from many a whaler's try-pots lit up the darkness of the ocean night from the Kermadecs to the far Pelews, the Tia Kau was known to many a sailor and wandering trader. But now, since the whaling industry died, and the trading vessels are few and far between, the place is scarcely even known by name. A hot, steamy mist lies low upon the glassy surface of the sleeping sea encompassing Nanomaga, and the lazily swelling rollers as they rise to the lip of the reef have scarce strength enough to wash over its flat, weedy ledges into the lagoon beyond. For since early morn the wind had died away; and the brown- skinned people of the little reef-girt island, when they rose from their slumbers and looked out upon the dew-soaked trees, and heard the moan of the distant breakers away on Tia Kau, said to one another that the day would be calm and hot till the sun was high and the wind came. And, as your true South Sea Islander dreads the blistering rays of the torrid sun as much as he does the stinging cold, each man lay down again upon his mat and smoked his pipe or cigarette, and waited for the wind to come. Along the silent and deserted beach long lines of coco-palms, which slope seaward to the trades, hang their drooping, languid plumes high above the shallow margin of the lagoon, which swishes and laps in gentle wavelets along the yellow sand. A shoal of pale grey mullet swim close inshore, for out beyond in the deepening green f...

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