As the night advances the surface of the sea is oily and viscid with the interlaced bodies of millions of _mbalolo_ that feel slimy to the touch as one stirs the water. There are breaks in the mass, and natives have assured me that through these they have seen an oscillating stalk, about the thickness of a man's thigh, coiling up from the depths--a fountain of worms spouting from some chasm in the reef. The fishermen scoop up the worms with cocoanut baskets and empty them into the canoe until the hold is full. The masses of worms are boiled, cut into slabs, and sent, like wedding-cake, all over the country, packed in banana leaves. To the European taste these dark-green masses, though unappetizing to look upon, are not unpalatable. They taste like caviare. Mr. Whitmee, who made a scientific examination of the _mbalolo_ in Samoa, took a glass jar with him to the fishing, and watched the behaviour of the worm in captivity. His catch included both brown and green worms, the brown being the males and the green the females. They varied in length, and as they swam incessantly round the jar with a spiral motion he noticed that the shorter ones of six inches long had two screw turns and the longer at the most three. Fished up by the finger and thumb they broke spontaneously into short lengths at their jointings. [Illustration: Slaughtering the Turtle.] [Pageheader: HOW THE EGGS ARE FERTILIZED] At eight o'clock the _mbalolo_ have disappeared. If they break up earlier the natives believe that there will be a hurricane between January and March. As the sun gains power the _mbalolo_ may be clearly seen in dense patches with individual worms bridging the clear water between. They are now more active than in the night, the closer masses even churning the surface of the water. A little before eight they begin to disintegrate and break up; the sea becomes turbid and milky, and when it clears they are gone. Mr. Whitmee's captives in the glass jar behaved like their fellows in the sea. After swimming more rapidly for a few moments they gave a convulsive wriggle and broke into half-a-dozen pieces each, which wriggled about near the surface, squirting out their contents. The vase looked as if a teaspoonful of milk had been emptied into it, and the little transparent envelopes of the fluid sank empty to the bottom, just as the green worms discharging their cargo of eggs began also to settle down. After a few minutes' immersion in the fertilizing fluid the eggs themselves sank gently to the bottom, where they lay among the husks that had given them birth and being. Under the magnifying glass a faint whitish spot was detected on each of the tiny green eggs. Thus by a voluntary act of self-immolation the worms had handed on their lives to a new generation. CHAPTER XXVII GAMES