Nadi

Nadi is the point of departure for the narrator’s small-plane flight to Taveuni, a journey that becomes more than travel: trapped in a cramped aircraft with an elderly pilot, he is made to feel how precariously human life depends on another person’s body. The episode turns the route between the islands into a threshold for his meditation on mortality, before the narrative moves toward his encounters with Ana, José, and Gordon.

Setting and Departure

Returning from Auckland, the narrator plans to spend a few days in Fiji before beginning the long journey home. He has already spent a week in the islands but missed Taveuni, which he describes as the “Garden Island of Fiji,” prized for its exceptional lushness and relative preservation. The flight from Nadi offers the means to reach this destination, but its conditions transform a convenient connection into an ordeal.

The scheduled Sunflower Airlines flight from Nadi is full. The narrator’s luggage travels on that service, while he and four other passengers are put aboard a six-seat aircraft he calls the “matchbox plane.” They climb into it almost on all fours. Its white-haired pilot welcomes them with a broad smile, announces that no refreshments will be served, and forbids unnecessary trips along the aisle—a wry restriction in a cabin with a central passage only about fifteen centimetres wide.

The Flight as an Ordeal

The pilot’s manner is friendly, but the aircraft and the circumstances of the flight unsettle the narrator. The man has lost two fingers from the hand with which he greets the passengers; the plane’s windscreen is cracked, and some of its instruments are not working, at least temporarily. As the aircraft takes off, strong winds buffet it, and the engine strains to carry it over Mount Tomaniivi on Viti Levu. The pilot turns repeatedly to ask where the passengers have come from and points out their position on a map, gesturing enthusiastically toward the coral reefs as he talks.

The narrator is accustomed to travelling between islands in small aircraft, yet this flight leaves him acutely uneasy because there is only one pilot. His fear is not primarily of mechanical failure: he imagines the pilot fainting in the tropical heat at an altitude of five thousand feet. The older man is about thirty years his senior, and the narrator finds himself wondering about his health, his arteries, and what he might have eaten or drunk. Even the landscape outside—the mountain, dolphins, and reefs—cannot hold his attention. He feels shut in, unable to escape, and misses the gin bottle packed in the luggage travelling on the regular flight.

Mortality and the Narrator’s Reflection

The flight brings the narrator’s ordinary awareness of physical vulnerability into sharp focus. He imagines himself not as an abstract traveller but as a fleshy vertebrate fastened to a seat, dependent for survival on the equally mortal person at the controls. His racing pulse gives bodily force to that dependence. He also wonders about the pilot’s inner life, recognizing that he knows nothing of the stranger’s beliefs, private troubles, or circumstances beyond the cockpit.

Addressing Vera, the narrator insists that this is not simply a story about fear of flying or a travel narrative. He presents the episode as an unusually immediate encounter with a feeling he carries more generally, one that ordinarily surfaces on waking or when he is drunk. In this case, the prospect of having his life entrusted to an ageing pilot in a damaged, poorly equipped aircraft brings the feeling forward while his senses remain fully alert. He wants to examine what he thought and experienced during the flight, which lasted five quarters of an hour, as a way of explaining his outlook on life.

Narrative Significance

Nadi matters as the launch point for a journey whose immediate destination is Taveuni but whose narrative function is inward. The flight’s concrete details—an overloaded schedule, a six-seat aircraft, a narrow aisle, a cracked windscreen, and a pilot flying alone—make mortality feel contingent and physical rather than abstract. The narrator’s fear also establishes the concerns that shape his account of the island: he introduces the reflection just as he is about to turn to meeting Ana and José and to his conversations with Gordon. Thus the passage links the geographic transition from Nadi to Taveuni with a transition into the story’s sustained questions about vulnerability, existence, and death.