A Land Of No

Pests

WHEN the sun goes down over Tahiti and we light the reading lamp on our verandah, many visitors from another world come to keep us company.

Sometimes they are twinkling frag ments of exquisite colours that seem to be petals of flowers, borne by the night breeze from some lovely garden. At another season, it will be a numerous company, fluttering on iridescent wings a dance of the faeries about our light or, in their place, a band of tiny maenads swirling around the flame in delirious frenzy.

Occasionally, a lone wanderer—a honey bee from our neighbour’s apiary, over taken by nightfall whilst on an expedi tion to some distant garden of blossoms, comes to beg sanctuary until the mor row’s sun shall light him on his way.

Unfortunately, all our visitors do not come from the Fairy Court of la Nouvelle Cythere. Ferocious armoured harriers, bristling with “jaws that bite and claws that snatch”, ascend from some Teutonic Nibelheim to worry and sting and finally put us to flight.

Happily, these forays are not continu ous. Indeed, the people of French Oceania are particularly fortunate—as compared with the inhabitants of other tropical countries—in the almost total absence on these islands of poisonous and disease-carrying insects.

Scorpions are so rare that one may live in the islands for years without see ing one. The centipedes are small, their bite not dangerous, and domestic fowl devour any that venture into the neigh bourhood of dwellings.

There are no malaria-carrying mos ouitoes. Saint Patrick, on his way to Paradise, paused at Tahiti long enough to drive all the serpents into the sea: turning them into eels, so that they could never again invade the dry land.

Consequently, unshod natives and tourists in shorts can travel anywhere on the island, free from any fear of lurk ing monsters or flying disease-carriers.

A.C.R.