Excerpt from Atolls of the Sun I am not a scientist or scholar, and can relate only what I saw and heard, felt and imagined, in my dwell ing with savage and singular races among the wonder ful lagoons of the coral atolls, and poignant valleys of disregarded islands. If I can make my reader see and feel the sad and beautiful guises of life in them, and the secrets of a few unusual souls, I shall be satisfied. The thrills of adventure upon the sea and in the shadowy glens, the odors of rare and sweet flowers, the memories of lov able humans, are here written to keep them alive in my heart, and to share them with my friends. Life is not real. It is an illusion, a screen upon which each one writes the reactions upon himself of his sensory knowledge. The individual is the moving camera, and what he calls life is his projection of the panorama about him - not more actual than the figures and storms upon the cinema screen. In this book I have put the film that passed through my mind in wild places, and among natural people. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.