Word: tristan
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...hardy people of Tristan da Cunha discovered last week that there is a force more powerful than Atlantic gales and flaming volcanoes-bureaucracy...
...Tristan islanders were hustled off their tiny island in the South Atlantic last October when a long-dormant volcano poured a river of molten rock toward their thatch-roofed houses. In traveling 6,500 miles to safety in England, they moved nearly a hundred years forward in time. At home, they had lived on a fish-and-potato diet, carded and spun wool by the light of oil lamps, ridden in bullock carts. In their new cottages near the British port of Southampton, they encountered for the first time the 20th century wonders of electric light, store clothes, supermarkets, frozen...
...most Tristan islanders, it seems a bad exchange.*Looking at his first TV show, an old man said, "I don't think much of it; the people are too small." After making a down payment on a transistor radio, another Tristan islander was baffled by the bill for the next installment, asked, "How often does a man have to pay for the same thing in h'England?" On Tristan da Cunha, the only wage-earning job was in the local crayfish cannery, where everyone got the same pay. In England, the visitors could not comprehend the idea...
...tastes. Willie Repetto, the 60-year-old leader of the islanders, claims, on the basis of a Royal Society expedition, that the lava flow has actually improved the island by creating a breakwater, and last week he appealed to the British Colonial Office, asking for help in returning to Tristan da Cunha...
...long majestic strings of rhetorical questions-"But why should sorrow be always creeping in upon joy? Why should it pierce him and find him out in this dear, beautiful place into which he had been wafted so mysteriously?" The plot-a 19th century version of the ancient tale of Tristan and Isolde-is every bit as lurid as the prose. Cryptic strangers turn up at Cornish inns; blackhearted villains display appropriately "bestial" passions; brave young Tristan nearly gets himself killed stopping the runaway horses of Isolde's barouche. Nature obligingly spurs on the action with torrential rains, impenetrable fogs...