Arise Balol!

By. Alice Allen Innes

years I have heard about Levuka’s annual event and here I am right on the spot for the great occasion.

It is November and Cup time in Aus tralia—but who cares? For what is the Melbourne Cup compared with the Rising of the Balolo? (Balolo, a strange coral worm, is called Palolo in other parts of the Pacific).

“Actually, when will it happen?” I asked.

“Ask Billy Whoosit,” I was told, “he is the local expert.”

I sought him out. “Well,” he said, and stroked an unshorn chin, “I’d say in a couple o’ days. But ask Tommy Blank —he’s good. In fact, he’s never missed a Rising in 20 years.”

I sought Tommy Blank forthwith, but again the answer was vague. I then asked my laundress, Madam Butilutu, and she gave me a gummy, toothless grin. “I think Friday,” she said, “The reeds on the hill are just coming into flower.”

I asked a wise, old Solomon Islands Levukaite, and he sniffed the balmy breezes and said: “To-morrow, maybe! I smell the seaweed and I find the brown scum on beach to-day. .

Of all of them, the Solomon Islander alone was right.

NOW, I was determined that nothing would keep me from seeing that rising of the rare Annelid worms from their coral hideouts. I therefore bespoke me a launch —but someone mis laid the message. I bespoke a local car and I furthermore wound the alarm clock.

All failed me.

However, when the Indian houseman brought my early morning tea he muttered the magic words: “Balolo rise here, Memsahib!”

I beat all records to the bath and was well along the Levuka waterfront by 7 a.m. Alas, the early birds caught the woims, in very truth! The queer Indian owned Levuka “taxi” and its close re latives, the Atom Bomb and Returned Soldiers (both buses of hefty home-made type) flew back and forth between water front and villages, filled with yelling natives and piled baskets and well-filled leaf-bundles of Balolo. I saw also the fleet of canoes and small craft homing with the catches. They had all put out into the bay at 3 a.m. and had found the sea a living mass of Balolo, which broke the surface at 4 a.m.. Their haul has been great quantities of green and brownish worms, from four to eight inches long—luscious food, this, famed in Fijian song and story, the gift of the shark-god, himself.

I noticed that, strangely enough, not one of the local “experts,” except the old laundress and the Solomon Islander, had got to the event.

WHEN Sir Harry Luke was Governor of Fiji, I believe that he made a special effort to be at a Rising, and even brought a number of distinguished visitors along as well; but the experts had miscalculated upon that occasion also and the Balolo had risen without benefit of vice-regal patronage.

I am told that on another occasion a Rockfeller Research party also made ex tensive preparations to be in at a Rising.

Launches had been chartered, freezer space booked and air freight arranged for the Balolo, in order that scientists in the United States could study the rare

worm. All in vain—the scientific party also missed out.

I therefore triumphantly record that I did get there, albeit late, and that I have, in an aspirin bottle, some pickled Balolo to prove it —just so long as no one steals the whisky in which my Annelids are preserved