American Artist In The South Sea by John La Farge

Author:John La Farge [Farge, John La]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317856788
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

Another Samoan Malaga, Nov. 30th.

Fagaloa Bay, on the N. E. side of Upolu.

We are on another malaga. I have not quite recovered from illness, so that the trip is not all enjoyment, and I write to you in some dejection and with an effort. We are going around the island, some hundred miles, in our two boats; our own managed by Samau, the tulafale, as coxswain, with four men to carry provisions, etc., and plenty of luggage and food for all of us; and Seumanu’s boat with ten rowers. We left the day before yesterday, in the early dove-coloured morning, all grey with partial rain, the mountains covered at top, and low down in the gorges, the mist and smoke from villages rising up in straight lines that looked like enormous waterfalls. Our first landing was at Falefd, where a river falls over wide rocks in its way to the sea, not so differently from other pretty waterfalls, except that it makes a broad spread of water that joins the sea, so that from some points one might imagine that the ocean runs in to meet it.

And then behind the frame of the wide fall and its bordering trees, one sees the mountains of the dim interior. There we rested at midday, and I lay on the mats, ill and tired, while Charley explained to the young woman of the house, wife of the native teacher, the meaning of a large sheet of the spring fashions of this year, which she had pinned up, with many other pictures from newspapers, upon the screen that divided the house. Her husband was away, attending the great meeting or Fono at Malua, the missionary school, where the toleration or rejection of the siva has been, or is being discussed. I am told now that the native clergy have held their own; and that though not reproving their white brethren, they have not quite concurred in a full freedom of toleration, but have arranged some middle term by which the question will be always limited to individual cases.

Later in the afternoon I sketched at the waterfall, in that curious silence filled with the sustained sound of rushing water, that belongs to such places, within which a faint, sharper thrill was the gliding of the surf upon the beach behind it. The place was shaded in its own shade, thrown over it by the hills that enclose and make it. Here and there, the sun caught the roll of the water, and the distant valley and mountains behind it were all floating in hot light and moisture that came down in great gusts with wafts of heat.

In the evening we came into this beautiful bay with high mountains on either side, and fringes of lower land. The bay, as its name indicates, is a very long one, running far inland. The site we are in is charming, the great mountains right behind us, and from their lower sides, long waterfalls creep down the cliffs and glisten through the top branches of the palms.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.