Word: vailima
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...starry sky,/ Dig the grave and let me lie..." You know you're on a true literary pilgrimage when your taxi driver can recite Robert Louis Stevenson's Requiem in the time it takes to wind five kilometers up the hill from Apia to the old plantation home of Vailima. It was here that the Scottish writer (1850-1894) - who blended boy's-own adventure with psychological insight and a sense of history in such tales as Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Body Snatchers - came to die. "Our place...
...These days Vailima is itself a museum, and literary curiosity beats a path to its door. The house Stevenson and his American wife Fanny carved into the mountainside recently made it into Patricia Schulz's bestselling 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, and each year up to 12,000 Stevensonians, tourists and scholars climb the hill to peer into the world of a man who has kidnapped the imagination of generations. Devoted pilgrims will hike a further hour to the author's final resting place on the peak of Mount Vaea. Here, under the breadfruit trees, they...
...heavy coffin." Telefoni's memory of Tusitala, or "Writer of Tales," as he was known locally, is entwined with his own family history: "He had a very close relationship with an old uncle of mine." That man was Harry Moors, an American trader who helped secure the lands of Vailima for Stevenson, and whose daughter married Telefoni's grandfather...
...largeness," says Samoan-born writer Albert Wendt. But somewhere along the way, the writer got lost. "When we came to the scene, the memory of Tusitala was becoming almost mythical," says RLS Preservation Foundation president James Winegar, a former Mormon missionary from the U.S. who helped set up the Vailima museum with aloe vera millionaire Rex Maugham in 1994. Not only the memory of the writing had faded - Vailima, too, had seen better days. After a 1990 cyclone all but destroyed what had become the official residence of Samoa's head of state, the foundation assumed responsibility for Vailima...
...December 1894, at 44, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage. His mother was present, and it is her account of the death that Editor Neider presents. There is nothing more from Fanny. The spell was broken, the ledger book was closed, and there was nothing left but to sell Vailima and eventually return to the States. Twenty years later she died, and her ashes were carried back to Samoa...