ENGINE OF THE GODS FULL
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patricknunn.This communication shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of Tokens to any U.S. Ocean geoscientist Patrick Nunn is author of Worlds In Shadow: Submerged Lands in Science, Memory and Myth (Bloomsbury, ВЈ16.99). вЂњHow we approach them is key to how we understand them.вЂќ вЂњEvery culture has such stories,вЂќ he said. We were drinking sweet milky tea and eating sugar-glazed buns, warm from the oven, in a sidewalk cafe on Marks Street in Suva. So, as Mata reminded me when I last saw him, we shouldnвЂ™t treat stories of FijiвЂ™s sunken islands in isolation. Many more have shared memories, ranging from the doleful tolling of underwater church bells off the English coast to stories from Australia of a giant kangaroo that wilfully sliced the land apart, allowing the ocean unwelcome ingress. Some cultures have written memories of land being submerged. We even ascended to the bottom of his neck, trying to make out his head in the clouds above. We passed his massive footprints on the cliffs, saw the hole his spear made when he viciously propelled it at a rival we climbed the mountains that were his knees, looked down on the villages built - propitiously - on his feet. Mata said that if you listened hard enough, you couldnвЂ™t just hear them talking, but also roosters crowing and mosquitoes buzzing.ДЇrom Solo, we sailed south to the island of Ono, an extinct volcano home of the вЂ vuвЂ™ (spirit) named Tanovo. When our boat entered Solo Lagoon, still a few miles from the lighthouse, it slowed we bowed our heads and clapped thrice to show proper respect to the people of this sunken land. But many years ago, according to local traditions, there was a large, inhabited island here named Lomanikoro that one day sank, leaving just a tiny lone rock behind. The first thing we encountered was a rock named Solo, on which stands a red-and-white striped lighthouse. Mata and I once travelled to the southern Fijian island of Kadavu. The past lives here in a way that Westerners simply canвЂ™t understand. And if youвЂ™re tempted to chuckle, have pause, for every Fijian has heard dozens of such stories. An unmistakable sign of the power of the unknown. The spirits of the people of undersea Vuniivilevu, sensing someone disrespecting of their presence, had crippled the boat. No one was in any doubt what had happened. To show our respect to the people of this undersea land - the people whom local fisherfolk insist can be seen moving around down there on moonlit nights - our boats slowed as they passed over Vuniivilevu, and everyone kept quiet.Д®xcept one person, whose boatвЂ™s engine sputtered and died, only to be ignominiously towed into Suva eight hours later. To return to Suva, FijiвЂ™s capital, we hired two small boats for a trip that remained inside the reef but crossed the site of the вЂsunken islandвЂ™ named Vuniivilevu. Once we were on Moturiki Island, excavating at Naitabale and finding the 2,800-year-old remains of the earliest-known Fijian. Touch the rudder gingerly and you scratch the surface of the deep history of the Pacific.ДЇijiвЂ™s most famous archaeologist is Sepeti вЂMataвЂ™ Matararaba, who, over the course of nearly three decades, taught me most of what I know about its vanished islands. She met her end at the hands of mutineers who set Captain Bligh off on an open-boat journey of more than 3,700 miles, sailing through Fiji and dodging assailants in Timor. In one corner, you can touch the rudder of HMS Bounty, retrieved from remote Pitcairn Island after the rest of the ship was burned in 1790. If you ever find yourself in these Pacific isles, go to the Fiji Museum in Suva. Their people have knowledge and understandings they hesitate to share for fear youвЂ™ll judge them preposterous. But stay long enough, and you learn that this, too, is illusory. The noise and the smoke in the crowded cities lie at the opposite end of the spectrum to the effortless tranquillity of FijiвЂ™s smaller islands, with their deserted beaches, unpolluted reefs and grassy hills. But thatвЂ™s untrue.ДЇiji is a land of contrasts. I once called it a geisha landscape: one so emblematic, so evocative of a place that an unwitting observer might easily be tricked into thinking its outward appearance hid nothing of note.

ENGINE OF THE GODS FULL

When the sun shines, the ocean landscape seems boundless, an unruffled turquoise both an open highway and a full larder.

Engine of the gods