A collector of corals would find many sorts there.  They are wonderful, these stony plants, graceful, strange, bizarre.  The Tahitian, who has a score of names for the winds, and who classifies fish not only by their names, but changes these names according to size and age, makes only a few lumps of the coral.  It is to’a, and when round is to’a ati, to’a apu; when branching, uruhi, uruana; when in a bank, to’a aau; when above the surface of the water, to’a raa.  A submerged mass is to’a faa ruru, and the coral on which the waves break, to’a auau.  However, the native knows well that one species of coral, the ahifa, is corrosive, irritating the skin when touched, and another, which is poisoned by the hara plants, is termed to’a harahia.

Coral makes good lime for whitening walls, and is cut into blocks for building.  Many churches in Tahiti were built of coral blocks.  The puny fortifications erected by the French in the war with the Tahitians decades ago were of coral stones, and are now black with age and weather.

I headed my canoe toward the barrier reef, and tied it to a knob of coral.  Then I stepped out upon the reef itself, my tennis shoes keeping the sharp edges from cutting my feet.  It was the low tide succeeding sunrise, and the water over the reef was a few inches deep, so that I could see the marine life of the wall, the many kinds of starfish, the sea-urchins, and the curious bivalves which hide with their shell-tips just even with the floor of the lagoon, and, keeping them barely even, wait for foolish prey.

The floor of the lagoon was most interesting; the prodigality of nature in the countless number of low forms of life, their great variety, their beauty, and their ugliness, and, appealing to me especially, the humor of nature in the tricks she played with color and shape, her score of clowns of the sea equaling her funny fellows ashore, the macaws, the mandrills, the dachshunds, and the burros.

The sunlight on the water at that hour was like silver spangles on a sapphire robe.  I paddled near to the Marara, and watched her let go her anchor and send her boat ashore with a stern line.  Fastened to a cannon and passed around a bitt on the schooner, the crew hauled her close to the embankment, and soon she was broadside to, and her gangway on the quay.  Her captain, M. Moet, Woronick, a pearl merchant, a government physician, and the passengers from the Paumotus were soon ashore shaking hands with friends.  I walked behind them to Lovaina’s for coffee, and was introduced to them all.

Woronick took me to his house across the street from the Tiare Hotel, and there opened a massive safe and showed me drawer after drawer of pearls.  They were of all sizes and shapes and tints, from a pear-shaped, brilliant, Orient pearl of great value, to the golden pipi of inconsiderable worth.  Woronick spoke of a pearl he had bought some years ago in Takaroa, the creation of which, he said, had cost the lives of three men including a great savant.