Isle of Dreams

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23145, 17 September 1938, Page 4 (Supplement)

Isle of Dreams

By G.H.

IN ''The Trumpet Is Mine," Mr. Cecil Lewis recounts the realisation of his boyhood dream to visit the South Sea Islands. It is a dream that has suffered disillusionment hundreds of times within recent years, but Mr. Lewis is not the ordinary traveller any more than he is the average dreamer. Long before lie made the trip he was learning all he could of the Islands and their inhabitants. Ho studied the early navigators, lie read the contemporary writers, especially those who acknowledged the spell of the Islands —Keable, O'Brien and Nordhoff and Hall. His interest grew with his knowledge; he know infinitely more about the natives than they themselves did; ho knew their racial history, their legends, their manners and customs. The time came when lie obtained a passage in a cargo boat leaving Panama, and ho arrived in high excitement at Papeete ready to be disappointed, ready to find everything

A Traveller Finds Happiness

ugly and commercialised, ready for anything except the deadly negative quality of all that his eyes rested on. For a few days he was lull of misgivings: then he acquired a little place of his own away from the town a couple of miles along the coast, and began to feel the spell of Tahiti. Mr. Lewis is the perfect traveller in that he is submissive to the spirit of tho place and is seldom besot by his own preconceived ideas. Ho enjoyed the friendship of the natives, talked, played and lived with them, and found them instinctively generous and gentle, knowing little of tho greed and envy of tho more civilised races. Their simplicity and child-like happiness charmed him, so that he dreaded tho thought that ho must depart and cut himself off from happiness. The writer adds yet another book to tho glory of the South Seas. "The Trumpet Is Mine" has, however, little save its subject in common with other accounts. Its point of view, its detachment. its very attractive reality belong essentially to this year of grace. "The Trumpet Is Mine." by Cecil Lewis (Peter Davies).