Ends of The Earth by Mary Gaunt — Read

The thunder of the surf on the lee shore filled the air, but it did not drown the singing of the women as they beat out the tappa cloth and kept time to the beating of the hammers. Luli, hushing her baby to rest, and watching her husband, the big white man with the fiery red beard, listened, and felt triumphant, too. She would have liked to join those singers, but she was the wife of the white man, and pride forbade, so she listened, and beat time softly with her hands while her husband slept.

-"Oh, my phalangi, my phalangi, the white man, the red-haired white man," they sang; "he has built us a boat, a boat. She is like the white man's ships; she has windows that twinkle in the sun, she is long and straight as a cocoa palm, and forty young men it takes to pull her across the waves. Oh, my phalangi, great shall his reward be. La, la-lo, la-la-la," they sang, and in a minor key other voices took up the song, "Oh, my phalangi, my phalangi, hark to the band, the band; it is the white man's band," and then another sound broke in which certainly even triumphant Luli could not describe as musical, for it was suspiciously like a sailing-ship's fog-horn. It was, in fact, a fog-horn which Paul Richon had simply annexed from a stranded copra schooner fast going to pieces on the outer reef. He had sold it to the men of Lofola for the promise of much copra, and taught them how to use it. At the sound of the hoarse blast Richon turned over, rubbed his eyes, and sat up. "Hallo, Luli, what's all this row about? They launched the boat last week, and made tow-row enough then to last them for a month of Sundays."