Nick Irving’s Reviews > White Shadows in the South Seas > Status Update

Our tack was toward the eastern distance, and no glimpse of land or cloud made us aught but solitary travelers in illimitable space. The sun was beneath the deep, but in the hush of the pale light one felt the awe of its coming.

They come to the islands to stay until they die, and death means a crown the brighter for martyrdom.

“Aue te hanahana, aqua ho’i te kaikai.” - “He who will not labor, neither shall he eat.”

Yet generals send ten thousand men to certain and agonized death to gain a point toward a goal; that is the custom of generals, by which they gain honor among their people.

Yet why cavil at the vehicle by which one arrives at Nirvana?

His ghoulish laughter rose in the dark stillness of the jungle, and the hair stirred on my scalp.

Freedom is the one purpose, wisely aimed at or unwisely, of all man's struggles, toilings, and sufferings, in this earth.

"Our craft is too poor. A society built on money does not give artists and singers the freedom they had in the old days, my friend. We are bound to a wheel that turns relentlessly."

He would live as his fathers had lived, and die as they had died. A

Upon this people, sparkingly alive, spirited as wild horses, not depressed as were their conquerors by a heritage of thousands of years of metes and bounds, religion as forced upon them has been not only a narcotic, but a death potion.