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beach to wash ( swim means “wash”).
    Sometimes Bislama is easier to understand if you imagine it originating with a drunken sailor slurring orders to a Melanesian laborer. Take the initially baffling phrase “ Sarem olgeta doa. ” Now jump back a century, imagine that sailor barking at an islander, “Shut them doors.” Perhaps in his hurry or inebriation the words would emerge something like “ Sarem doa. ” Melanesian languages require an extra word to denote the plural, so the reasonable islander would respond to the order by shutting just one door. The sailor, if he hadn’t gone and shut the extra doors himself, might happen upon this plural construction: “Shut them, altogether! ” Loosen the pronunciation, let “altogether” serve as the plural article, and you have the modern Bislama: “ Sarem olgeta doa. ”
    Bislama can be poetic in its literalness. A pijin blong solwata is the bird we all associate with salt water: a seagull. A telescope is a glas blong looklook big. A condom is a rubba blong fakfak.
    French words have also slipped into the language. To know is to savve (from the third-person singular save of the verb savoir ). There are Polynesian words: Food is kai-kai . Children are pikinini (though some say that word originated with the English label for black children, or the Spanish pequeño ). Now phrases are being traded back and forth between various pidgin-speaking countries. The Ni-Vanuatu borrow from Papua New Guinea when they tell you good-bye: lookim yu bakagen . But the strongest word of all is pan-Oceanic. If something or someplace is tabu , it is forbidden. You stay away from it.
    The stars faded, and Tanna appeared like an ink stain across the horizon. The silhouette gradually grew into a series of folded mountainsides. Blue smoke curled from thatched roofs. Surf fringed the shoreline, exploding occasionally into bouquets of white spray. Sunlight broke across a ridge serrated by rows of palms. There was no harbor. We maneuvered past a reef and eased alongside a cement jetty that jutted out from a tongue of coral stone at Lenakel, Tanna’s only town.
    I tossed my pack on the grass and waited. I had sent a message ahead to Port Resolution, which was within striking distance of the fabled John Frum stronghold at Sulphur Bay. The villagers at Port Resolution knew someone with a truck. They would come and fetch me.
    â€œPort Resolution? They will certainly not come to collect you. They are rubbish men,” advised a stern Tannese man who installed himself on the grass next to me. His name was Kelsen. He had come to claim his new wheelbarrow from the Havanna . It shone. Kelsen had an untidy beard, which he tugged on constantly, and a ponderous brow, which at first I mistook for a mark of wisdom. He sat with me as I waited by the sea. I told him I was looking for former John Frum cult members.
    â€œThe John Frum people are all going to hell, that much is certain,” said Kelsen.
    I was heartened. “So then some people here still believe in John Frum?”
    â€œYes, the fools believe. But nogud yu stap long John Frum people. They are dirty. They have nothing to eat. They are fighting each other.”
    Kelsen said he lived at the base of the Yasur volcano. He promised to tell me a magic story about the volcano that I would never forget. Nobody else could tell me the story. Just Kelsen. He owned it. The story had been passed down for generations. He was considering writing it down and selling it.
    â€œI can tell it to you,” he said.
    â€œI’m listening,” I said.
    Kelsen’s eyes narrowed. He had a better plan. It was best to tell the story at his home. If I wanted to hear it, I would have to forget about the sinners at Port Resolution and Sulphur Bay and come stay with him. Kelsen had built a hotel of his own at the base of the volcano.
    The day was getting on. I didn’t have much choice. Kelsen threw