THE SOLOMON ISLANDS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXV, Issue 16550, 14 May 1914, Page 4

THE SOLOMON ISLANDS.

NATURE IN MALAITA. (By A MISSIONARY OBSERVER.) I. Whon I was a child, they taught mo to say, " How doth the little busy bee." If tho composer of that moral -little poem had lived in the Solomon Islands he would have been like the wise man after whom they are named, and have talked rather of the wonderful industry of the ant. Bake your bread and place it on a table to cool, and if you leave it three minutes too long, that is, three minutes after tho temperature within it has become bearable, it will be swarming with tiny yellow-brown ante. Drop a little jam upon your tablecloth, and you will find next day that these same little creatures have eaton a hole in the place. Spill a few grains of sugar on the table, and you will find a whole army carrying it away. Who tells them? How do they know? Thoy always do know, and promptly, too. One evening a. specially beautiful, large, silver-marked moth was bumping its poor, foolish head against my light. Next morning I saw the same moth, apparently unhurt, moving rapidly across the floor. But when I looked more closely, it was upside down and was being borno along by hundreds of ants —ants of a slightly larger size this time. The spaces between the boards of the wooden floor called for wondrous feats of engineering skill, and excited little scouts ran round and about the band of bearers. I have seen dead locusts and grasshoppers borne along in this fashion, and oven a good-sized tarantula,• to which the largest New Zealand spider is as a dwarf. . Drawers and boxes left without cam-i phor aro soon busy ant nurseries, and I the island housekeeper dare not leave 1 tho undisturbed corners so dear to the heart of the sloven. I

Our cottage is raised upon, piles of hardwood. These piles are capped by zinc trays and thickly tarred. The white ants have been kept at bay for six or seven years. They cannot work in tho light, but must make mud roads, under which they tunnel their way along. They cannot burrow into tarred wood, or carry mud across zinc. But they have at least bridged a narrow place in a zinc cap, and their first long strip of road was discovered the day before yesterday. It was scraped away, and tho poor builders were destroyed with boiling water. Yesterday morning tho road was rebuilt, and busy streams of workers were passing up and down the tunnel. Tho work of destruction was repeated. To-day the road took a new route, but it was there again. Imagine my joy on opening a drum supposed to bo Kerol disinfectant, to find that tar had been sent instead. That post shall have a new coat to-morrow. I am fond of twilight strolls, but have sometimes had to curtail my evening walk and take refuge in the house from yet another kind of ant, winged this time. It has two long, flimsy, membranous wings, and when it alights it drops them and crawls. On some nights,

just after sundown, the air is thick with these little creatures. They do not sting, but when they creep down one's neck and up one's loose sleeves, the only thing to do is to retire as soon as one's most pressing duties will permit, and get rid of the unwelcome intruders. Then there are tiny black ants that fly and sting, and yellow tree ants, and hosts and hosts of other kinds, all busy, each, in its own way. Our provisions aro kept in a safe that hangs by a wire which passes through the neck of a broken glass bottle, oiled and slippery. And our tables have a ring of vaseline round each leg, for ants cannot cross vaseliue. From flying, stinging ants, the transition to mosquitoes is a natural one. Malaita is covered with forest down to the water's edge, and fringed with mangrove swamps, where mosquitoes most do congregate. I remember an eerie adventure once inside a lagoon. Tho captain of the little schooner that was taking us back to our station was newer to the islands than we were, and there had been more than one murder since his arrival. The man who succeeded him as mate of a small trader had been killed in just such a lagoon not long before. We bad anchored off an island where there was a little band of native Christians, and some of them had put off in canoes and come aboard. We had lights astern, and were having a belated meal, when suddenly thero came a voice out of the darkness: "Have you any muskets aboard?" Tho impulsive skipper said "No," and then bethought himself of two things: First, that the admission to a stranger was scarcely wise; and secondly, that there was a useless old gun in the hold. "Yes, I have one; but what do you want to know for?" "I want a musket for fight—him altogether. All day him he sleep, but longnight time he fight, and ho kill him us fellow, and me, want one musket for fight him." Somebody said something in an alarmed tone about a gun, and the answer from the darkness came back :

'' No more; him he no gun; him he calico with holes long him belong fighthim musket."

I burst out laughing, for the tension was relieved. A " musket" was a mosquito net, and it was these wicked little

enemies who slept all day and fought all night. In pidgin English "kill" means "hurt" or "strike" as well as murder. By-and-by we had a. sample of what they could do, and we each paid for our night in that lagoon by a slight attack of -malarial fever.