Our occupations were very various.  While some of the party would be away sketching, Mr. Osbourne and I hammered away at a novel.  We read Gibbon and Carlyle aloud; we blew on flageolets, we strummed on guitars; we took photographs by the light of the sun, the moon, and flash-powder; sometimes we played cards.  Pot-hunting engaged a part of our leisure.  I have myself passed afternoons in the exciting but innocuous pursuit of winged animals with a revolver; and it was fortunate there were better shots of the party, and fortunate the king could lend us a more suitable weapon, in the form of an excellent fowling-piece, or our spare diet had been sparer still.

Night was the time to see our city, after the moon was up, after the lamps were lighted, and so long as the fire sparkled in the cook-house.  We suffered from a plague of flies and mosquitoes, comparable to that of Egypt; our dinner-table (lent, like all our furniture, by the king) must be enclosed in a tent of netting, our citadel and refuge; and this became all luminous, and bulged and beaconed under the eaves, like the globe of some monstrous lamp under the margin of its shade.  Our cabins, the sides being propped at a variety of inclinations, spelled out strange, angular patterns of brightness.  In his roofed and open kitchen, Ah Fu was to be seen by lamp and firelight, dabbling among pots.  Over all, there fell in the season an extraordinary splendour of mellow moonshine.  The sand sparkled as with the dust of diamonds; the stars had vanished.  At intervals, a dusky night-bird, slow and low flying, passed in the colonnade of the tree stems and uttered a hoarse croaking cry.

CHAPTER III—­THE KING OF APEMAMA:  THE PALACE OF MANY WOMEN

The palace, or rather the ground which it includes, is several acres in extent.  A terrace encloses it toward the lagoon; on the side of the land, a palisade with several gates.  These are scarce intended for defence; a man, if he were strong, might easily pluck down the palisade; he need not be specially active to leap from the beach upon the terrace.  There is no parade of guards, soldiers, or weapons; the armoury is under lock and key; and the only sentinels are certain inconspicuous old women lurking day and night before the gates.  By day, these crones were often engaged in boiling syrup or the like household occupation; by night, they lay ambushed in the shadow or crouched along the palisade, filling the office of eunuchs to this harem, sole guards upon a tyrant life.

Female wardens made a fit outpost for this palace of many women.  Of the number of the king’s wives I have no guess; and but a loose idea of their function.  He himself displayed embarrassment when they were referred to as his wives, called them himself ’my pamily,’ and explained they were his ’cutcheons’—­cousins.  We distinguished four of the crowd:  the king’s mother; his sister, a grave, trenchant woman, with