ABSTRACT
ON hearing from my kind old host of some curious ruins on a hill-side in the back country, I deter-
mined to explore them. Theodoro, my photographer, it will be remembered having finished all his plates, much to his satisfaction had been despatched across the border to the Catholic settlement of King Rocha at Aleniang-to perform his chemical operations in peace, and there abide collecting and labelling botanical specimens until he received further instructions. Accordingly one fine morning Joe Kehoe, his eldest son Lewis, and myself are trudging sturdily up the hill-ridge behind N antamarui over a rough, steep and intricate trail-I will not call it pathway -thickly carpeted with the convolvuluses Yol and Chenchel. The weeds underfoot treacherously hide from our view numerous slippery boulders and fragments of shivered basalt. By and by the labyrinth gets worse than ever, and for several hundred yards we have to fight our way on, hewing right and left with our eighteen-inch knives, climbing over fallen trunks of great forest trees and ducking under low natural archways of Kalau or hibiscus. As by degrees we worked our way nearer to the region of tall forest trees the underwood became less dense. On our right lies a green valley planted with taro, bananas, and breadfruit, with a full-fed brook singing down through it in its zigzag course beneath the mellow shadows. To our left stretches a steep mountain-slope, along whose slippery sides we scramble, picking our way cautiously amongst
gnarled roots and spreading buttresses of the ficoids Nin and A io-the lesser and greater Banyan trees. Scattered at our feet like little bright-blue olives, lie the berries of the Ckatak or EltEocarpus, dear to the fruit-pigeons, the grey-dove (M urroz), the green-doves (Kinuet and Kingking), and the violet-brown ground pigeon (Paluck). These Elreocarpi grow often to over 100 feet in height. Finally passing one of the buttressed kings of the forest we suddenly came upon a low breastwork of stones enclosing the object of our search, which turned out to be a cemetery in the shape of an irregular or broken parallelogram, as can be seen from the sketch plan. Six graves were found in the lower enclosure and three on a platform raised five feet above the level of the ground. All were little vaults not exceeding four or four and a half feet in length-roofed in with massive slabs of basalt-the graves of the Ckokalai, Kichin-Aramach or Little Folk, woodland elves, answering to our own pucks and pixies, to the Trolds, Cobolds, and Dwarfs of the Teutonic peoples, and to the Patupaiareke of the Maoris. Ethnologists would style them dwarf Negritos. These, according to Ponapean tradition, were the little dwarfish folk who dwelt in the land before the coming of the Kona and Li-ot, the giants and the cannibals. The two latter terms probably represent respectively the Malayo-Polynesian settlers and the Melanesians from the south. The speech of the dwarfs, it is said, was a chattering and a gibber as that of bats. They were dark of skin and flat-nosed (Timpak). They are believed still to haunt the dark recesses of the forest, and to be very malignant and revengeful. I was told that one man who came to this haunted dell to plant kava was caught up and spirited away by the revengeful goblins, and his lifeless body was found days afterwards stretched upon a great flat rock by the seashore off N antiati Point. A curious fact concerning this primitive race was supplied me by the Au of Marau shortly before leaving Ponape. The people at the mouth of the Palang River near the
Chokach and Kiti border are said to have been descended from the Cltokalai, who it seems were not everywhere exterminated by the Malayo-Polynesian conquerors. The Au's description runs thus. "In the speech of the Palang folk is a most foolish undercurrent of chatter; they are shorter in stature, and their skins darker than their neighbours ; their noses are flat and they are known throughout the tribes as Maclta-en-Paikop or the Paz"kop-/aces. Now the Paikop is the most ill-favoured of fishes, with wide goggle-eyes, and a face as flat as a dish."
