There was no hurry; Stevenson was my companion on this trip and his words were never far from me: "Extreme business," says the master, "is a symptom of a deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity."

A few miles further on I stopped to give Roki a lift. He was a pastor, spotless in a fawn lava-lava and wearing a shirt as crisp as an arrowroot biscuit, and he had missed the bus to Taelefaga. We turned off the main road and onto a rough track that dropped steeply and suddenly to skirt the rim of a savage precipice. Streaks of water fell from the cliffs, and as we churned down in second gear I could see across the land to where the endless ocean had submerged the rest of the globe. Finally we came into Taelefaga - a poor smatter-ing of shacks and fale on the edge of a rocky coast, dull and dirty with an ashen grit underfoot.

A bunch of ragged children skipped around the car as I drove Roki to the very door of his church. Inside were seats for maybe 60 parishioners, three or four pictures of Jesus and a Cassio keyboard.

"There are 2,000 churches in Samoa," Roki told me. With a population of 160,000 that meant one church for every 80 inhabitants. It was obvious - this was the missionaries' revenge for being brought to the boil in all those cooking pots.

I went on from Taelefaga, up and over the Le Mafa pass, driving towards the eastern end of the island, passing through a string of small settlements, each with no more than half a dozen houses to its name. The hills above me were daubed in greens that were purple and greens that were fluorescent; the high ridges were hard and scalloped into outlandish shapes.

Then I headed south, past Saleaaumua, Malaela and Ulutogia. The sky became mottled and lifeless and dusk descended to the very fringes of the road I was travelling, and those fringes were peopled by families enjoying the evening freshness; bands of children, girls carrying babies, parents sitting in groups, hardly bothering to notice me as I went by.

The road turned again at Cape Tapaga, to the west, and I began to search for a fale to sleep in. Stevenson nudged me with his words: "to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive...", he said, but for once I disagreed with him - a meal and a night's rest were beginning to look pretty desirable to me. At Faofao I discovered what was needed - a shanty of a shop and, nearby, a large fale the size of four living-rooms, with the mother of all mothers occupying a large broken-down sofa. A young man, the matriarch's son, led me to the beach where five or six small fale had been built in a line, a few yards from the ocean. One was for me, the others were uninhabited. The young man set about making me comfortable. He switched on a single light bulb and, in its dull yellow gleam, I watched him lay out a mattress and a mosquito net. Then he disappeared, returning after 20 minutes with a chair and a table, beer and food.

I wallowed in the pleasure of it. I had several hundred square miles of the earth's surface to myself. I could see my future stretching before me - a rosy, out-of-focus twilight; and me with a new career as an indolent bum, clad always in a scarlet lava-lava with sand for ever between my toes, a dozen dusky handmaidens eternally within earshot. Now I knew why the crew of the Bounty had mutinied, and why Stevenson had chosen to live here - he had been unable to do otherwise: "Few men who come to the islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm shades and the trade wind fans them till they die...No part of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor." The master spoke true.

The air was warm and the sound of the waves beyond the lagoon inspired my dreams. When I came awake eventually, the six o'clock bus to Apia was revving up its engines just behind me on the main road. I rolled over and watched the stars vanish and the clouds unwrap themselves from the islets of Nuutele and Nuulua. The rising sun brushed the sky and picked out the diamonds in the spray that drifted up as mist from the reef. The beach was deserted and not even a canoe crossed the sea.

I swam: the Pacific's only swimmer. The water was limpid and revivifying, serenity itself, velvet untroubled by my presence; an element that yielded to my body without a ripple, and closed behind it without a sign of disturbance. A woman appeared on the shore, an orange lava-lava tied around her, coming through a gaggle of palm trees that leant against the sky like a pen and ink drawing of skinny girls with untidy topknots. The woman placed my breakfast on the table while I towelled myself dry; three fish sandwiches in bread cut solid as doorsteps, and gallons of tea in a chipped enamel pot.

I dawdled shamelessly along the coast that day and the next, gossiping and drinking, and it wasn't until 36 hours later that I drove, in the dark, back into Apia. In the centre of town, on an open space in front of a tall government building, there was a blaze of floodlights illuminating a prayer meeting. There was a choir, an elec-tronic keyboard, electric guitars and a crowd of roughly 2,000 people, swaying and praying.

A preacher stood at a microphone and aimed the word of the Lord at his audience in a succession of broadsides. His accent was Australian; not tinkling cymbals, either, but rather the sound of empty tin cans rattling down a corrugated-iron roof. His voice was relentless, but in the pauses, when he came up for air, the choir gave him harmony and joy. And the singers linked arms, unified in fervour, eyes shut, smiles seraphic, halfway to paradise.