How Did Those Flies
p. 75 · Read in the full issue
Get In There?
And No Food Shortage
HERE, EITHER. “Too many cooks” doesn’t apply to the Islands, for all these Fijians helped make the “lovo”, or ground oven, which cooked these kurnalas at a recent Fiji village gathering. Relow, near Nukualofa, Tonga, sucking pigs are prepared for another gathering. Hot work, but the results were worth it. Photos Rob Wright.
They were showing me around their fine, new, broadcasting station in Tonga, and they paused to describe their “prize entomological puzzle".
BETWEEN the sound-proofed studio and the adjoining operat ing-room there is the usual large window, consisting of two panes of glass, three inches apart, sealed in a window-frame. On the bottom of the frame, inside, between the panes of glass, were a dozen large, dead flies.
“How do you think those damned flies got in there?” asked the station manager.
“Obvious,” said I. “The carpenters left ’em there when they put the thing together”.
“Wrong,” said he. “We thought that had happened, the first time.
So we had the window taken out, and the bodies removed, and the frame carefully sealed up again. But there they are again—and yet they couldn’t have got in.”
They gloom over it, on the odd occasions when there is nothing else to do. The office theorist argues that there were fly-eggs in the wood of the window-frame, and they hatch out at intervals. But no one really believes it.—RWR.
Mr. A. L. Borrows, assistant to the general manager of the British New Guinea Development Co. Ltd., is one of the 30 selected by Australia for the Duke of Edinburgh’s Study Conference in Canada in May.