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.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 54479
   :PG.Title: Faery Lands of the South Seas
   :PG.Released: 2017-04-02
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: James Norman Hall
   :DC.Creator: Charles Bernard Nordhoff
   :DC.Title: Faery Lands of the South Seas
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1921
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

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FAERY LANDS OF THE SOUTH SEAS
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      Faery Lands
      Of the South Seas

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      :alt: These lagoons swarm with strange forms of life unknown in northern waters

      These lagoons swarm with strange forms of life unknown in northern waters

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      FAERY LANDS
      OF THE SOUTH SEAS

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      *By*
      James Norman Hall
      *and*
      Charles Bernard Nordhoff

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      Harper & Brothers Publishers
      New York and London

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      FAERY LANDS OF THE SOUTH SEAS

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      Copyright, 1921, by Harper & Brothers
      Printed in the United States of America
      C-K

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   CONTENTS

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CHAP.

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`Preface`_

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I.  `A Leisurely Approach`_
II.  `In the Cloud of Islands`_
III.  `Marooned on Mataora`_
IV.  `The Land of Ahu Ahu`_
V.  `A Memory of Mauké`_
VI.  `Rutiaro`_
VII.  `A Debtor of Moy Ling`_
VIII.  `An Adventure in Solitude`_
IX.  `The Starry Threshold`_
X.  `Costly Hospitality`_
XI.  `His Mother's People`_
XII.  `In the Cook Group`_
XIII.  `At the House of Tari`_
XIV.  `In the Valley of Vaitia`_
XV.  `Tahitian Tales`_
XVI.  `Anchored off the Reef`_
XVII.  `The Englishman's Story`_
XVIII.  `Aboard the "Potii Ravarava"`_

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.. _`PREFACE`:

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   PREFACE

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The islands of the South Seas are places of an
interest curiously limited.  The ethnological problem
presented by the native is interesting only to men
of science, commerce is negligible, there is little real
agriculture, and no industry at all.  There remains the
charm of living among people whose outlook upon life
is basically different from our own; of living with a
simplicity foreign to anything in one's experience,
amid surroundings of a beauty unreal both in actuality
and in retrospect.

It is impossible to write of the islands as one would
write of France or Mexico or Japan—the accepted
viewpoint of the traveler is not applicable here.  A
simple attempt to impart information would prove
singularly monotonous, and one is driven to essay a
different task; to pry into the life of the mingling
races, hoping to catch something of its significance and
atmosphere.  In making such an attempt it is necessary
at times to dig deeper than would be consistent
with good taste if names were mentioned, and for this
reason—in the case of certain small islands—the
ancient Polynesian names have been used instead of
those given on the chart.  All of the islands described
are to be found in the Paumotu, Society, and Hervey
groups.

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\J.\N.\H.
\C.\B.\N.

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TAHITI, *April 10, 1921*.





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.. _`A Leisurely Approach`:

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   Landfall

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   Faery Lands
   Of the South Seas

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   CHAPTER  I

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   A Leisurely Approach

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I don't remember precisely when it was
that Nordhoff and I first talked of this
adventure.  The idea had grown upon us,
one might say, with the gradual splendor
of a tropical sunrise.  We were far
removed from the tropics at that time.  We were, in fact,
in Paris and had behind us the greatest adventure we
shall ever know.  On the Place de la Concorde and
along the Champs-Élysées stood rank on rank of
German cannon, silent enough now, but still menacing,
their muzzles tilted skyward at that ominous slant one
came to know so well.  For a month we had seen them
so, children perched astride them on sunny afternoons,
rolling pebbles down their smooth black throats;
veterans in soiled and faded horizon blue, with the joy
of this new quiet world bright on their faces, opening
breech-blocks, examining mechanism with the skill of
long use at such employment; with a kind of wondering
hesitation in their movements too, as though at any
moment they expected those sinister monsters in the
fantastic colors of Harlequin to spring into life again.

Those were glorious days!  Never again, I think,
will there be such a happy time as that in Paris.  The
boulevards were crowded, the tables filled under every
awning in front of the cafés; and yet there seemed to
be a deep silence everywhere, a silence intensified by the
faint rustling of autumn leaves and the tramping of
innumerable feet.  One heard the sound of voices, of
laughter, of singing, the subdued, continuous rumble
of traffic; but not a harsh cry, not a discordant note.
All the world seemed to be making holiday at the
passing of a solemn, happy festival.

Well, we had kept it with the others—Nordhoff and
I—and have the memory of it now, to be enjoyed
over and over again as the years pass.  But there was
danger that we might outstay the freshness of that
period.  We were anxious to avoid that for the sake of
our memories, if for nothing else.  While we were not
yet free to order our movements as we chose, we
pretended that we were, and so one rainy evening in
the December following the armistice we decided to call
that chapter of experience closed and to go forward
with the making of new plans.

For we meant to have further adventure of one kind
or another—adventure in the sense of unexpected
incident rather than of hazardous activity.  That had
been a settled thing between us for a long time.  We
had no craving for excitement, but turned to plans for
uneventful wanderings which we had sketched in
broad outlines months before.  They had been left,
of necessity, vague; but now that any of them might
be made realities, now that we had leisure and a
reasonable hope for the fulfillment of plans—well, we
had cause for a contentment which was something
deeper than happiness.

The best of it was that the close of the war found us
with nothing to prevent our doing pretty much as we
chose.  We might have had houses or lands to anchor
us, or promising careers to drag us back into the
bewilderments of modern civilization; but, fortunately or
unfortunately, there were none of these things.  The
chance of war had given us a freedom far beyond
anyone's desert.  We had some misgivings about
accepting so splendid a gift, which the event sometimes
proves to be the most doubtful of benefits.  Viewed in
the light of our longings, however, our capacity for it
seemed incalculable, and so, by degrees, we allowed our
minds to turn to an old allurement—the South Pacific.
It became irresistible the more we talked of it, longing
as we then were for the solitude of islands.  The
objection to this choice was that the groups of islands
which we meant to visit have been endowed with
an atmosphere of pseudoromance displeasing to the
fastidious mind.

But there was not the slightest chance of our being
pioneers wherever we might go.  We could not hope
to see with the eyes of the old explorers who first came
upon those far-off places.  We must expect great
changes.  But much as we might regret for the
purposes of this adventure that we had not been born two
hundred years earlier, comfort was not wanting to our
situation.  Had we been contemporaries and
fellow-explorers with De Quiros, or Cook, or Bougainville
we should have missed the Great War.

We came within view of Tahiti one windless February
morning—such a view as Pedro Fernandez de Quiros
himself must have had more than three hundred
years before.  The sky to the west was still bright with
stars and but barely touched with the very ghost of
light, giving it the appearance of a great water, with a
few clouds, like islands, immeasurably distant.  Half
an hour later the islands themselves lay in full sunlight,
jagged peaks falling away in steep ridges to the sea.
Against sheer walls still in shadow in upland valleys
one could see a few terns; but there was no other movement,
no sound, nor any sign of a human habitation—nothing
to shatter the illusion of primitive loveliness.
It was illusion, of course, but the reality was nothing
like so disappointing as I had feared it would be.
Outwardly, two hundred years of progress have wrought
no great amount of havoc.  There is a little port, a
busy place on boat days.  But when the steamer has
emptied the town of her passengers, the silence flows
down again from the hills.  Off the main harbor-front
thoroughfare streets lie empty to the eye for half hours
at a time.  Chinese merchants sit at the doorways of
their shops, waiting for trade.  Now and then broad
pools of sunlight flow over the gayly flowered dresses
of a group of native women, scarcely to be seen
otherwise as they move slowly through tunnels of moist
green gloom; or a small schooner, like a detail gifted
with sudden mobility in a picture, will back away from
shore, cross the harbor, bright with the reflections of
clouds, and stand out to sea.  In the stillness of the
noon siesta one hears at infrequent intervals the
resounding thud of ripe fruits as they tear their way to
the ground through barriers of foliage; and at night
the melancholy thunder of the surf on the reef outside
the harbor, and the slithering of bare feet in the moonlit
streets.

Coming from a populous exile, doubly attracted for
that reason by the lure of unpeopled places, Nordhoff
and I sought here an indication of what we might find
later elsewhere.  The few thousands of natives, whites,
Orientals, half-castes, live in a charmed circle of low
land fronting the sea, conscious of their mountains, no
doubt, but the whites without curiosity, the Orientals
without desire, the natives without remembrance.
There must have been a maze of trails in the old days,
leading down from the rich valleys.  Now they are
overgrown, untraveled, lost.  Since the old life is no
more than a memory, one is glad for the desolation, and
grateful to the French lack of enterprise which surely
is the only way to account for it.

No, we couldn't have chosen a better jumping-off
place for our unpremeditated wanderings.  We had the
whole expanse of the Pacific before us, or, better,
around us, and there was, as I have said, a harbor full
of shipping.  Boats with pleasing names, like the
*Curieuse*, the *Avarua*, the *Potii Ravarava*, the *Kaeo*, the
*Liane*—and self-confident, seagoing aspect.  Some tidy
and smart with new paint and rigging; others with
decks warped and sides blistered, bottoms foul with the
accumulation of a six months' cruise, reeking with the
warm odor of copra.  Boats newly arrived from remote
islands, with crowds of bare-legged natives on their
decks, their eyes beaming with pleasure in anticipation
of the delights of the great capital; outward-bound to
the Marquesas, the Australs, the Cooks, the Low
Archipelago, despite the fact that it was the middle of
the hurricane season.  Among these latter there was
one whose name was like a friendly hail from Gloucester,
or Portland, Maine.  But it was not this which
attracted me to her, for all its assurance of Yankee
hospitality.  She was off to the Paumotus, the Cloud
of Islands, and a longing to go there persisted in the
face of a number of vague discouragements.  There
were no practical difficulties.  Easy enough to get
passage by one schooner or another.  Paumotu copra
is famous throughout the Southern Pacific.  There is a
good deal of competition for it, boats racing one another
for cargo to the richer islands.  The discouragements
weren't so vague, either, now that I think of them.
They came from men kindly disposed, interested in the
islands in their own way.  But their concerns were
purely commercial.  I heard a deal of talk about
copra—in kilos, in tons, in shiploads; its market value
in Papeete, in San Francisco, in Marseilles, until the
stately trees which gave it lost for a time their old
significance.  Talk, too, of coconut oil and its richness
in butter-fat.  Butter-fat!  There was a word to bring
one back to a workaday world.  To meet it at the
outset of a long-dreamed-of journey was disheartening.
It followed me with the shrill insistence of a creamery
whistle, and I came very near giving up my plans
altogether.  Nordhoff did change his.  He said that
it was silly, no doubt, but he didn't like the idea of
wandering, however lonely, in a cloud of butter-fat
islands.  Therefore we said good-by, having arranged
for a rendezvous at a distant date, and set out on
diverging paths.

I ought to leave Crichton, the English planter, out
of this story altogether.  He doesn't belong in a
commonplace record of travel such as this one set out
to be.  He had very little to do with the voyage of the
*Caleb S. Winship* among the atolls.  But when I
think of that vessel he comes inevitably into mind.  I
see him sitting on the cabin deck with his freckled
brown hands clasped about his knees, looking across
a solitude of waters; and in my mental concept of the
Low Archipelago he is always somewhere in the background,
standing on the sun-stricken reef of a tiny atoll,
his back to the sea, almost as much a part of the lonely
picture as the sea itself.

But one can't be wholly matter of fact in writing
of these islands.  They are not real in the ordinary
sense, but belong, rather, to the realm of the
imagination.  And it is only in the imagination that you can
conceive of your ever having been there, once you are
back again in a well-plowed sea track.  As for the
people, whether native or alien, in order to focus them
in a world of reality it is necessary to remember what
they said or did; what they ate; what sort of clothing
they wore.  Otherwise they elude you just as the
islands do.

This point of view isn't, perhaps, commonly held
among the few white men who know them—captains of
small schooners, managers of trading companies,
resident agents, whose interest, as I have said, is in
what they produce rather than in what they are.  As one
old skipper of my acquaintance put it, in speaking of
the atolls, "Take them by and large, they are as much
alike as the reef-points on that sail."  Findlay's *South
Pacific Directory*, a supposedly competent authority,
bears him out in this: "They are all of similar
character," adding, for emphasis, no doubt, "and they exhibit
very great sameness in their features."  He does,
however, make certain slight concessions to what may
be his own private conception of their peculiar
fascination, "This vast collection of coral islands; one of
the wonders of the Pacific," and later, in his account
of them, "The native name, 'Paumotu,' signifies a
Cloud of Islands, an expressive term."  But he doesn't
forget that he is writing for practical-minded mariners
who want facts and not fancies, however truthful these
may be to reality.

"Now, there's Tikehau," one of them said to me
before I had been out there.  "That's a round atoll;
and Rahiroa is sort o' square like, an' so on.  Some
with passes and a good anchorage inside the lagoon.
Others you got to lay outside an' take your cargo off
the reef in a small boat."

But, to go back to Crichton, no one knew who he
was or where he came from.  The manager of the
Inter-Island Trading Company had lived in Papeete
for years and had never seen him until the day when
he turned up at the water front trundling a wheelbarrow
loaded with four crates of chickens and an odd
lot of plantation tools and fishing tackle.  Following
him were two native boys carrying a weather-blackened
sea chest, and an old woman with an enormous roll of
bedding tied loosely in a pandanus mat.  That was
about an hour before the schooner weighed anchor.  He
stacked his gear neatly on the beach and then went on
board, asking for passage to Tanao.

"No, sir," the manager said, in telling about it
afterward, "I never laid eyes on him until that moment,
and I don't know anyone who had.  Where's he been
hiding himself?  And why in the name of common sense
does he want to go to Tanao?  There's no copra or
pearl shell there—not enough, anyway, to make it worth
a man's while going after it."

Tino, the supercargo, was equally puzzled.

"I know Tanao from the sea," he said.  "Passed
it once coming down from the Marquesas when I was
supercargo of the *Tiare Tahiti*.  We were blown out
of our course by a young hurricane.  Didn't land.
There's no one on the God-forsaken place.  Now here's
this Englishman, or Dane, or Norwegian—whatever
he is—asking to be set down there with four crates
of chickens and an old Kanaka woman for company!"  He
shook his head with a give-it-up expression, adding
a moment later: "Well, you meet some queer people
down in this part of the world.  I don't believe in
asking them their business, but it beats me sometimes,
trying to figure out what their business is."

He was not able to figure it out in this case.  The old
woman was talkative; but the information he gathered
from her only stimulated his curiosity the more.  She
owned Tanao, an atom of an atoll miles out of the
beaten track even of the Paumotu schooners.  There
had never been more than a score of people living on it,
she said, and now there was no one.  Crichton had
taken a long lease on it, and was going out there—as
he told me afterward—"to do my writing and thinking
undisturbed."

I didn't know this until later, however.  When I
first heard him spoken of we were only a few hours
out from Papeete.  We had left the harbor with a
light breeze, but at four in the afternoon the schooner
was lying about fifteen miles offshore, lazy jacks
flapping against idle sails with a mellow, crusty sound.
After a good deal of fretting at the fickleness of land
breezes, talk had turned to Crichton, who was up
forward somewhere looking after his chickens.  I didn't
pay much attention then to what was being said, for
I had just had one of those moments which come rarely
enough in a lifetime, but which make up for all the arid
stretches of experience.  They give no forewarning.
There comes a flood of happiness which brings tears to
the eyes, the sense of it is so keen.  The sad part of it
is that one refuses to accept it as a moment.  You
say, "By Jove!  I'm not going to let this pass!" and
it has gone as unaccountably as it came, half lost
through foreboding of its end.  One prepares for it
unknowingly, I suppose, through months, sometimes
years, of longing for something remote and beautiful—such
as these islands, for example.  And when you
have your islands, the moment comes, sooner or later,
and you see them in the light which never was, as the
saying goes, but which is the light of truth for all that.
Brief as it is, no one can say that the reward isn't
ample.  And it leaves an afterglow in the memory,
tempering regret, fading very slowly; which one never
wholly loses since it takes on the color of memory itself,
becoming a part of that dim world of worth-while
illusions.

All of which has very little to do with what was
passing aboard the *Caleb S. Winship*, except that I
was prevented from taking an immediate interest in
my fellow passengers; but this being my first near
view of a Polynesian trading schooner, the scene on
deck had all the charm of the unusual.  Our skipper
was a Paumotuan, a former pearl diver, and the
sailors—six of them, including the mate—Tahitian
boys.  In addition to these there were Crichton, the
planter; the supercargo, master of three major
languages and half a dozen Polynesian dialects; the
manager of the Inter-Island Trading Company;
William, the engineer; Oro, the cabin boy; a Chinese cook
and two Chinese storekeepers—evidence of the leisurely,
persistent Oriental invasion of French Polynesia;
thirty native passengers; a horse in an improvised
stall amidships; a monkey perched in the mainmast
rigging; Crichton's four crates of chickens, and five
pigs.  In addition to the passengers and live stock,
we were carrying out a cargo of lumber, corrugated
iron, flour, rice, sugar, canned goods, clothing, and
dry goods.  Each of the native passengers brought
with him as much dunnage as an Englishman carries
when he goes traveling, and his food for the voyage—limes,
oranges, bananas, breadfruit, mangoes, canned
meat.  With all of this, a two months' supply of
gasoline for the engines, and fresh water and green
coconuts for both passengers and crew, we made a
snug fit.  Even the space under the patient little
native horse was used to stow his fodder for the long
journey.

The women, with one exception, were barefooted,
bareheaded, but otherwise conventionally dressed
according to European or American standards.  This, I
suppose, is an outrageous betrayal of a trade secret,
if one may say that writers of South Sea narratives
belong to a trade.  Those seriously interested in the
islands have, of course, known the truth about them
for years; but I believe it is still a popular
misconception that the women who inhabit them—no one
seems to be interested in the men—are even to this
day half-savage, unself-conscious creatures who display
their charms to the general gaze with naïve indifference.
Half-savage they may still be, but not unself-conscious
in the old sense.  There are a few, to be sure,
who, by means of the bribes or the entreaties of itinerant
journalists and photographers, may be persuaded to
disrobe before the camera for a moment's space;
and in this way the primitive legend is preserved to the
outside world.  But, as I told Nordhoff, although we
are itinerant, we may as well be occasionally truthful
and so gain, perhaps, a certain amount of begrudged
credit.

The one exception was a girl of about nineteen.
She came on board balancing unsteadily on high French
heels, her brown legs darkening the sheen of her
white-cotton stockings.  I had seen her the day before
as she passed below the veranda of Le Cercle Bougainville,
the everyman's club of the port.  She walked
with the same air of precarious balance, and her
broad-brimmed straw hat was set at the jaunty angle
American women affect.

"*Voilà!  L'indigène d'aujourd'hui*," my French
companion said.  Then, breaking into English: "The
old Polynesia is dead.  Yes, one may say that it is
quite, quite dead."  A memory he called it.  "*Maintenant
je vous assure, monsieur, ce n'est rien que ça*."  He
rang changes on the word, in a soft voice, with an
air of enforced liveliness.

I was rather saddened at the time, picturing in my
mind the scene on the shore of that bright lagoon two
hundred years ago, before any of these people had been
forced to accept the blessings of an alien civilization.
But the girl with the French heels wasn't a good
illustration of *l'indigène d'aujourd'hui*, even in the
matter of surface changes.  Most of the women dress
much more simply and sensibly, and it was amusing
as well as comforting to see how quickly she got
rid of her unaccustomed clothing once we had left
the harbor.  She disappeared behind a row of water
casks and came out a moment later in a dress of bright-red
material, barefooted and bareheaded like the rest
of them.  She had a single hibiscus flower in her hair,
which hung in a loose braid.  I don't believe she had
ever worn shoes before.  At any rate, as she sat on a
box, husking a coconut with her teeth, I could see her
ankle calluses glinting in the sun like disks of polished
metal.

There was another girl sitting on the deck not far
from me, with an illustrated supplement of an American
paper spread out before her.  It was an ancient copy.
There were pictures of battlefields in France; of
soldiers marching down Fifth Avenue; a tennis
tournament at Longwood; aeroplanes in flight; motor races
at Indianapolis; actresses, society women, dressmakers'
models making a display of corsets and other women's
equipment—pictures out of the welter of modern life.
The little Paumotuan girl appeared to be deeply
interested.  With her chin resting on her hands and her
elbows braced against her knees, she went from picture
to picture, but looked longest at those of the women
who smiled or posed self-consciously, or looked
disdainfully at her from the pages.  I would have given
a good deal to know what, if anything, was passing
in her mind.  All at once she gave a little sigh,
crumpled the paper into a ball, and threw it at the monkey,
who caught it and began tearing it in pieces.  She
laughed and clapped her hands at this, called the
attention of the others, and in a moment men, women,
and children had gathered round, laughing and
shouting, throwing bits of coconut shell, mango seeds,
banana skins, faster than the monkey could catch them.

The spontaneity of the merriment did one's heart
good.  Even the old men and women laughed, not in
the indulgent manner of parents or grandparents, but
as heartily as the children themselves.  Unconscious
of the uproar, one of the Chinese merchants was lying
on a thin mattress against the cabin skylight.  Although
he was sound asleep, his teeth were bare in a grin of
ghastly suavity, and his left eye was partly open,
giving him an air of constant watchfulness.  He was
dreaming, I suppose, of copra, of pearl shell—in kilos,
tons, shiploads; of its market value in Papeete, in
San Francisco, in Marseilles, etc.  Well, the whites get
their share of these commodities and the Chinamen
theirs; but the natives have a commodity of laughter
which is vastly more precious, and as long as they do
have it one need not feel very sorry for them.

Dusk gathered rapidly while I was thinking of these
things.  Heavy clouds hung over Tahiti and Moorea,
clinging about the shoulders of the mountains whose
peaks, rising above them, were still faintly visible
against the somber glory of the sky.  They seemed
islands of sheer fancy, looked at from the sea.  It
would have been worth all that one could give to have
seen them then as De Quiros saw them, or Cook, or
the early missionaries; to have added to one's own
sense of their majesty, the solemn and more childlike
awe of the old explorers, born of their feeling of utter
isolation from their kind with the presence of the
unknown on every hand.  It is this feeling of awe
rarely to be known by travelers in these modern days,
which pervades many of the old tales of wanderings in
remote places; which one senses in looking at old
sketches made from the decks of ships, of the shores of
heathen lands.

The wind freshened, then came a deluge of cool
water, blotting out the rugged outlines against the sky.
When it had passed it was deep night.  The forward
deck was a huddle of shelters made of mats and bits
of canvas, but these were being taken down now
that the rain had stopped.  I saw an old woman sitting
near the companionway, her head in clear relief against
a shaft of yellow light.  She was wet through and the
mild misfortune broke the ice between us, if one may
use a metaphor very inapt for the tropics.  With her
face half in shadow she reminded me of the typical,
Anglo-Saxon grandmother, although no grandmother
of my acquaintance would have sat unperturbed
through that squall and indifferent to her wet clothing
afterward.  She didn't appear to mind it in the least,
and now that it was over fished a paper of tobacco and
a strip of pandanus leaf out of the bundle on which
she was sitting.  She rolled a pinch of tobacco in the
leaf, twisting it into a tight corkscrew, and lit it at the
first attempt.  Then she began talking in a deep,
resonant voice, and by a simplicity and an extraordinary
lucidity of gesture conveyed the greater part of her
meaning even to an alien like myself.  It was not,
alas! a typical accomplishment.  I have not since found
others similarly gifted.

She was Crichton's landlady, the owner of Tanao.
"Pupure" she called him, because of his fair hair.  I
couldn't make out what she was driving at for a
little while.  I understood at last that she wanted to
know about his family—where his father was, and his
mother.  I suppose she thought I must know him,
being a white man.  They have queer ideas of the size
of our world.  He was young.  He must have people
somewhere.  She, too, couldn't understand his
wanting to go to Tanao; and I gathered from her
perplexity that he hadn't confided his purposes to her to
any extent.  I couldn't enlighten her, of course, and
at length, realizing this, she wrapped herself in her
mat to preserve the damp warmth of her body, and
dozed off to sleep.

I went below for a blanket and some dry clothing,
for the night air was uncomfortably cool after the rain.
The cabin floor was strewn with sleeping forms.  Three
children were curled up in a corner like puppies in a
box of sawdust.  Little brown babies lay snugly bedded
on bundles of clothing, the mothers themselves sleeping
in the careless, trustful attitudes of children.  The
light from a swinging lamp threw leaping shadows
on the walls; flowed smoothly over brown arms and
legs; was caught in faint gleams in masses of loose
black hair.  And to complete the picture and make it
wholly true to fact, cockroaches of the enormous winged
variety ran with incredible speed over the oilcloth of
the cabin table, or made sudden flying sallies out of
dark corners to the food lockers and back again.

On deck no one was awake except Maui at the wheel.
There was very little unoccupied space, but I found a
strip against the engine-room ventilator where I
could stretch out at full length.  By that time the
moon was up and it was almost as light as day.  I
was not at all sleepy, and my thoughts went forward
to the Paumotus, the Cloud of Islands.  We ought to
be making our first landfall within thirty-six hours.
I didn't go beyond that in anticipation, although in
the mind's eye I had seen them for months, first one
island and then another.  I had pictured them at
dawn, rising out of the sea against a far horizon;
or at night, under the wan light of stars, lonely beyond
one's happiest dreams of isolation; unspoiled,
unchanged, because of their very remoteness.  Well, I
was soon to know whether or not they fulfilled my
hopeful expectations.

Some one came aft, walking along the rail in his bare
feet.  It was Oro, the cabin boy, who is taken with an
enviable kind of madness at the full of the moon.
He looked carefully around to make sure that everyone
was asleep, then stood clasping and unclasping his
hands in ecstasy, carrying on a one-sided conversation
in a confidential undertone.  Now and then he would
smile and straightway become serious again, gazing
with rapt, listening attention at the world of pure
light; nodding his head at intervals in vigorous
confirmation of some occult confidence.  At length his
figure receded, blurred, took on the quality of the
moonlight, and I saw him no more.

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.. _`In the Cloud of Islands`:

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   CHAPTER II


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   In the Cloud of Islands

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Ruau, the old Paumotuan woman, and
the owner of Tanao, was the last of her
family.  There were relatives by
marriage, but none of them would consent
to live on so poor an atoll; and the
original population, never large, had diminished,
through death and migration, until at last she was left
alone, living in her memories of other days, awed by
the companionship of spirits present to her in strange
and terrible shapes.  At last she felt that she could
endure it no longer; but it was many months before
the smoke of one of her signal fires was seen by a passing
schooner.  She returned with it to Tahiti, and if she
had been lonely before, she was tenfold lonelier there,
so far from the graves of her husband and children.
It was at this time that Crichton met her.  He had
been living at Tahiti for more than a year, on the
lookout for just such an opportunity as Ruau offered
him.  Although only twenty-eight, he was in the tenth
year of his wanderings, and had almost despaired of
finding the place he had so long dreamed of and
searched for.  During that period he had been moving
slowly eastward, through Borneo, New Guinea, the
Solomons, the New Hebrides, the Tongas, the Cook
Group.  In some of these islands the climate was too
powerful an enemy for a white man to contend with;
in others there was no land available, or they lacked
the solitude he wanted.  This latter embarrassment
was the one he had met at Tahiti.  The fact is an
illuminating commentary on his character.  Most men
would find exceptional opportunities for seclusion there;
not on the seaboard but in the mountains; in the
valleys winding deeply among them, where no one goes
from year's end to year's end.  Even those leading
out to the sea are but little frequented in their upward
reaches.  But Crichton was very exacting in his
requirements in this respect.  He was one of those men
who make few or no friends—one of those lonely spirits
without the ties or the kindly human associations
which make life pleasant to most of us.  They wander
the thinly peopled places of the earth, interested in a
large way at what they see from afar or faintly hear,
but looking on with quiet eyes; taking no part, being
blessed or cursed by nature with a love of silence, of
the unchanging peace of great solitudes.  One reads
of them now and then in fiction, and if they live in
fiction it is because of men like Crichton, their
prototypes in reality, seen for a moment as they slip
apprehensively across some by-path leading from the outside
world.

He had a little place at Tahiti, a walk of two hours
and a quarter, he said, from the government offices in
the port.  He had to go there sometimes to attend
to the usual formalities, and I have no doubt that he
knew within ten seconds the length of the journey
which would be a very distasteful one to him.  I can
imagine his uneasiness at what he saw and heard on
those infrequent visits.  An after-the-war renewal of
activity, talk of trade, development, progress, would
startle him into a waiting, listening attitude.
Returning home, maps and charts would be got out and plans
made against the day when it would be necessary for
him to move on.  He told me of his accidental meeting
with Ruau, as he called the old Paumotuan woman.  It
came only a few days after the arrival from San
Francisco of one of the monthly steamers.  A crowd of
tourists—stop-over passengers of a day—had somehow
discovered the dim trail leading to his house.  "They
were much pleased with it," he said, adding, with
restraint: "They took a good many pictures.  I was
rather annoyed at this, although, of course, I said
nothing."  No doubt they made the usual remarks:
"Charming!  So quaint!" etc.

It was the last straw for Crichton.  So he made
another visit to the government offices where he had
his passport viséed.  He meant to go to Maketea, a
high phosphate island which stands like a gateway
at the northwestern approach to the Low Archipelago.
The phosphate would be worked out in time and the
place abandoned, as other islands of that nature had
been, to the seabirds.  But on that same evening,
while he was having dinner at a Chinaman's shop in
town, he overheard Ruau trying to persuade some of her
relatives to return with her to Tanao.  He knew of the
island.  He is one of the few men who would know of
it.  He had often looked at it on his charts, being
attracted by its isolated position.  The very place for
him!  And the old woman, he said, when she learned
that he wanted to go there, that he wanted to stay
always—all his life—gripped his hands in both of hers
and held them, crying softly, without saying anything
more.  The relatives made some objections to the
arrangement at first.  But the island being remote,
poverty-stricken, haunted, they were soon persuaded
to consent to a ten years' lease, with the option of
renewal.  Crichton promised, of course, to take care of
Ruau as long as she lived, and at her death to bury
her decently beside her husband.

He proceeded at once with his altered plans.  There
were government regulations to be complied with and
these had taken some time.  On the day when he
was at last free to start he learned that the *Caleb
S. Winship* was about to sail on a three months' voyage
in the Low Archipelago.  He had no time to ask for
passage beforehand.  He had to chance the
possibility of getting it at the last moment.  It is not to
be supposed that either the manager of the
Inter-Island Trading Company or the supercargo of the
*Winship* would have consented to carry him to such
an out-of-the-way destination had they known his
reason for wanting to be set down there.  It amuses
me now to think of those two hard-headed traders,
men without a trace of sentiment, going one hundred
and fifty miles off their course merely to carry the least
gregarious of wanderers on the last leg of his long
journey to an ideal solitude.  It was their curiosity
which gained him his end.  They believed he had some
secret purpose, some reason of purely material
self-interest in view.  They had both seen Tanao from a
distance and knew that it had never been worth visiting
either for pearl shell or copra.  It is hard to understand
what miracle they believed might have taken place in
the meantime.  During the voyage I often heard them
talking about the atoll, about Crichton—wondering,
conjecturing, and always miles off the track.  It was
plain that he was a good deal disturbed by their hints
and furtive questionings.  He seemed to be afraid
that mere talk about Tanao on the part of an outsider
might sully the purity of its loneliness.  He may have
been a little selfish in his attitude, but if that is a
fault in a man of his temperament it is one easily
forgiven.  And what could he have said to those traders?
It was much better to keep silent and let them believe
what they liked.

It must not be thought that Crichton poured out his
confidences to me like a schoolgirl.  On the contrary,
he had a very likable reserve, although a good half of
it, I should say, was shyness.  Then, too, he had
almost forgotten how to talk except in the native
dialects of several groups of widely scattered islands.
In English he had a tendency to prolong his vowels
and to omit consonants, which gave his speech a peculiar
exotic sound.  He made no advances for some time.
Neither did I.  For more than three weeks we lived
together on shipboard, went ashore together at islands
where we had put in for copra, and all that while we
did not exchange above two hundred words in
conversation.  There was so little talk that I can remember
the whole of it, almost word for word.  Once while
we were walking on the outer beach at Raraka, an
atoll of thirty-five inhabitants, he said to me:

"I wish I had come out here years ago.  They appeal
to the imagination, don't you think, all these
islands?"

His volubility startled me.  It was a shock to the
senses, like the crash of a coconut on a tin roof heard
in the profound stillness of an island night.  There
was my opportunity to throw off reserve and I lost it
through my surprise.  I merely said, "Yes, very
much."  An hour later we saw the captain, no larger
than a penny doll, at the end of a long vista of empty
beach, beckoning us to come back.  We went aboard
without having spoken again.  It was an odd sort of
relationship for two white men thrown into close
contact on a small trading schooner in the loneliest ocean
in the world, as Nordhoff put it.  We were no more
companionable in the ordinary sense than a pair of
hermit crabs.

But the need for talking drops away from men under
such circumstances and neither of us found the long
silences embarrassing.  The spell of the islands was
upon us both.  I can understand Crichton's speaking
of their appeal to the imagination while we were in
the midst of them; for our presence there seemed an
illusion—a dream more radiant than any reality could
be.  In fact, my only hold upon reality during that
voyage was the *Caleb S. Winship*, and sometimes even
that substantial old vessel suffered sea changes; was
metamorphosed in a moment; and it was hard to believe
that she was a boat built by men's hands.  Often as
she lay at anchor in a lagoon of dreamlike beauty I
paddled out from shore in a small canoe, and, making
fast under her stern, spent an afternoon watching the
upward play of the reflections from the water and the
blue shadows underneath, rippling out and vanishing
in the light like flames of fire.  For me her homely,
rugged New England name was a pleasant link with
the past.  I liked to read the print of it.  The word
"Boston," her old home port, was still faintly legible
through a coat of white paint.  It brought to mind old
memories and the faces of old friends, hard to visualize
in those surroundings without such practical help.
Far below lay the floor of the lagoon where all the
rainbows of the world have authentic end.  The water
was so clear, and the sunlight streamed through it with
so little loss in brightness that one seemed to be
suspended in mid-air above the forests of branching
coral, the deep, cool valleys, and the wide, sandy plains
of that strange continent.

Crichton, I believe, was beyond the desire to keep
in touch with the world he had left so many years
before.  His experiences there may have been bitter
ones.  At any rate, he never spoke of them, and I
doubt if he thought of them often.  People had little
interest for him, not even those of the atolls which we
visited.  When on shore I usually found him on the
outer beaches, away from the villages which lie
along the lagoon.  In most of the atolls the distance
from beach to beach is only a few hundred yards, but
the ocean side is unfrequented and solitary.  On calm
days when the tide begins to ebb the silence there is
unearthly.  The wide shore, hot and glaring in the
sun, stretches away as far as the eye can reach, empty
of life except for thousands of small hermit crabs moving
into the shade of the palms.  They snap into their
shells at your approach and make fast the door as their
houses fall, with a sound like the tinkling of hailstones,
among heaps of broken coral.  We waded along the
shallows at low tide.  When the wind was onshore and
a heavy surf breaking over the outer edge of the reef,
we sat as close to it as we could, watching the seas
gathering far out, rising in sheer walls fringed with
wind-whipped spray, which seemed higher than the
island itself as they approached.  It was a fascinating
sight—the reef hidden in many places in a perpetual
smoke of sunlight-filtered mist, through which the
oncoming breakers could be seen dimly as they swept
forward, curled, and fell.  But one could not avoid a
feeling of uneasiness, of insecurity, thinking of what
had happened in those islands—most of them only a
meter or two above sea level—in the hurricanes of the
past; and of what would happen again at the coming
of the next great storm.

We made landfalls at dawn, in midafternoon, late
at night—saw the islands in aspects of beauty exceeding
one's strangest imaginings.  We penetrated farther
and farther into a thousand-mile area of atoll-dotted
ocean, discharging our cargo of lumber and corrugated
iron, rice and flour and canned goods; taking on copra;
carrying native passengers from one place to another.
Sometimes we were out of sight of land for several
days, beating into head winds under a slowly moving
pageantry of clouds which alone gave assurance of the
rotundity of the earth.  When at last land appeared
it seemed inaccessibly remote, at the summit of a long
slope of water which we would never be able to climb.
Sometimes for as long a period we skirted the shore
line of a single atoll, the water deepening and shoaling
under our keel in splotches of vague or vivid coloring.
From a vantage point in the rigging one could see a
segment of a vast circle of islands strung at haphazard
on a thread of reef which showed a thin, clear line of
changing red and white under the incessant battering
of the surf.  Several times upon going ashore we
found the villages deserted, the inhabitants having
gone to distant parts of the atoll for the copra-making
season.  In one village we came upon an old man too
feeble to go with the others, apparently, sitting in the
shade playing a phonograph.  He had but three
records: "Away to the Forest," "The Dance of the
Nymphs Schottische," and "Just a Song at Twilight."  The
disks were as old as the instrument itself, no doubt,
and the needles so badly worn that one could barely
hear the music above the rasping of the mechanism.
There was a groove on the vocal record where the
needle caught, and the singer, a woman with a high,
quavery voice, repeated the same phrase, "when the
lights are low," over and over again.  I can still hear
it, even at this distance of time and place, and recall
vividly to mind the silent houses, the wide, vacant
street bright with fugitive sunshine, the lagoon at the
end of it mottled with the shadows of clouds.

The sense of our remoteness grew upon me as the
weeks and months passed.  Once, rounding a point
of land, we came upon two schooners lying inside the
reef of a small atoll.  One of them had left Papeete
only a short while before.  Her skipper gave us a
bundle of old newspapers.  Glancing through them that
evening, I heard as in a dream the far-off clamor of the
outside world—the shrieking of whistles, the roar of
trains, the strident warnings of motors; but there was
no reality, no allurement in the sound.  I saw men
carrying trivial burdens with an air of immense effort,
of grotesque self-importance; scurrying in breathless
haste on useless errands; gorging food without relish;
sleeping without refreshment; taking their leisure
without enjoyment; living without the knowledge of
content; dying without ever having lived.  The
pictures which came to mind as I read were distorted,
untrue, no doubt; for by that time I was almost as
much attracted by the lonely life of the islands as
my friend Crichton.  My old feeling of restlessness
was gone.  In its place had come a certitude of
happiness, a sense of well-being for which I can find no
parallel this side of boyhood.

It was largely the result of living among people who
are as permanently happy, I believe, as it is possible
for humankind to be.  And the more remote the island,
the more slender the thread of communication with
civilization as we know it, the happier they were.
It was not in my imagination that I found this true,
or that I had determined beforehand to see only so
much of their life as might be agreeable and pleasant
to me.  On the contrary, if I had any bias at first, it
was on the other side.  Disillusionment is a sad
experience and I had no desire to lay myself open to it.
Therefore I listened willingly to the less favorable
stories of native character which the traders, and
others who know them, had to tell.  But summed up
dispassionately later, in the light of my own observations,
it seemed to me that the faults of character of
which they were accused were more like the natural
shortcomings of children.  In many respects the
Paumotuans, like other divisions of the Polynesian
family, are children who have never grown up, and one
can't blame them for a lack of the artificial virtues
which come only with maturity.  They are without
guile.  They have little of the shrewdness or craftiness
of some primitive peoples.  At least so it appeared to
me, making as careful a judgment of them as I could.
I have often noticed how like children they are in their
amazing trustfulness, their impulsive generosity, and
in the intensity and briefness of their emotions.

The more I saw of their life, the more desirable it
seemed that they might continue to escape any serious
encroachments of European or American civilization.
They have no doctors, because illness is almost
unknown in their islands.  Crime, insanity,
feeble-mindedness, evils all too common with us, are of such
rare occurrence that one may say they do not exist.
It may be said, too, without overstatement, that their
community life very nearly approaches perfection.
Every atoll is a little world to itself with a population
varying from twenty-five to perhaps three hundred
inhabitants.  The chief, who is chosen informally by
the men, serves for a period of four years under the
sanction of the French government.  He has very little
to do in the exercise of his authority, for the people
govern themselves, are law-abiding without law.

When I first learned that there are no schools
throughout the islands I thought the French guilty
of criminal neglect, but later I reversed this opinion.
Alter all, why should they have schools?  No education
of ours could make them more generous, more kindly
disposed to one another, more hospitable and courteous
toward strangers, happier than they are now.
Certainly it could not make them less selfish, covetous,
rapacious, for most of them are as innocent of those
vices as their own children.  In a few of the richer,
more accessible islands they are slowly changing in
these respects, owing to the example set them by men
of our own race.  In another fifty years, perhaps,
they may have learned to believe that material wealth
is the only thing worth striving for.  Then will come
pride in their possessions, envy of those who have
greater, contempt and suspicion for those who have
less, and so an end to their happiness.

I had never before seen children growing up in a state
of nature and I made full use of the rare opportunity.
I spent most of my time with them; played on shore
with them; went fishing and swimming with them; and
found in the experience something better than a renewal
of boyhood because of a keener sense of beauty, a more
conscious, mature appreciation of the happiness one
has in the simplest kinds of pleasures.  Sometimes we
started on our excursions at dawn; sometimes we made
them by moonlight.  I became a collector of shells
in order to give some purpose to our expeditions along
the reef.  I couldn't have chosen a better interest,
for they knew all about shells, where and when to
find the best ones, and they could indulge their
love of giving to a limitless extent.  In the afternoons
we went swimming in the lagoon.  There I saw them
at their best and happiest, in an element as necessary
and familiar to them as it is to their parents.  It is
always a pleasure to watch children at play in the
water, but those Paumotuan youngsters with their
natural grace at swimming and diving put one under
an enchantment.  Many of the boys had water glasses
and small spears of their own and went far from shore,
catching fish.  They lay face down on the surface of
the water, swimming easily, with a great economy of
motion, turning their heads now and then for a breath
of air; and when they saw their prey they dived after
it as skillfully as their fathers do and with nearly as
much success.  Seen against the bright floor of the
lagoon, with swarms of brilliantly colored fish scattering
before them, they seemed doubtfully human, the
children of some forsaken merman rather than creatures
who have need of air to breathe and solid earth to
stand on.  If education is the suitable preparation for
life, the children of the atolls have it at its best and
happiest without knowing that it is education.  They
are skillful in the pursuits and learned in the interests
which touch their lives, and one can wish them no
better fortune than that they may remain in ignorance
of those which do not.

Their parents, as I have said, are but children of
mature stature, with the same gift of frank, generous
laughter, the same delight in the new and strange.
Very little is required to amuse them.  I had a mandolin
which I used to take ashore with me at various atolls,
after I had become convinced that their enjoyment
of my music was not feigned.  At first I was suspicious,
for I had no illusions about my virtuosity, and even
when I thought of it in the most flattering way their
pleasure seemed out of all proportion to the quality
of the performance.  But there was no doubting the
genuineness of it.  The whole village would assemble
to hear me play.  I had a limited repertoire, but that
seemed to matter very little.  They liked to hear the
same tunes played over and over again.  I learned
some of the old missionary hymns which they knew:
"From Greenland's Icy Mountains," "Oh, Happy
Day," "We're Marching to Zion," and others.

It was strange to find those songs, belonging,
fortunately, to a bygone period in English and American
life, living still in that remote part of the world, not
because of anything universal in their appeal, but
merely because they had been carried there years ago
by representatives of the missionary societies.  Many
eccentric changes had been made in both the rhythm
and melody, greatly to the improvement of both, but
no amount of changing could make them other than
what they are—the uncouth expression of a narrow
and ugly kind of religious sentiment.  I don't think
the Paumotuans care much for them, either.  They
always seemed glad to turn from them to their own
songs, which have nothing either of modern or
old-time missionary feeling.  A woman usually began the
singing, in a high-pitched, nasal, or throaty voice,
which she modulated in an extraordinary way.
Immediately other women joined in, then several men
whose voices were of tenor quality, followed by other
men in basses and barytones, chanting in two or
three tones which, for rhythm and tone, quality, were
like the beating of kettledrums.  The weird blending
of harmonics was unlike anything I had ever heard
before.  There is nothing in our music which even
remotely resembles theirs, so that it is impossible to
describe the effect of the full chorus.  Some of the
songs make a strong appeal to savage instincts.  The
less resolute of the early missionaries, hearing them,
must have thrown up their hands in despair at the
thought of the long, difficult task of conversion awaiting
them.  But if there were any irresolute missionaries,
they were evidently overruled by their sterner brothers
and sisters.

On nearly every island there is now a church, either
Protestant or Catholic.  In the Protestant ones the
native population practice the only true faith, largely
to the accompaniment of this old barbaric music.
Those unsightly little structures rock to the sound
of exultant choruses which ought never to be sung
withindoors.  The Paumotuans themselves know best
the natural setting for their songs—the lagoon beach
with a great fire of coconut husks blazing in the center
of the group of singers.  I liked to hear them from a
distance where I could get their full effect; to look on
from the schooner lying a few hundred yards offshore.
All the inhabitants of the village would be gathered
within the circle of the firelight, which brought their
figures and the white, straight stems of the coconut
palms into clear relief against a background of deep
shadow.  The singing continued far into the night,
so that I often fell asleep while listening, and heard
the music dying away, mingling at last with the
interminable booming of the surf.

By degrees we worked slowly through the heart of
the archipelago, pursuing a general southeasterly
course, the islands becoming more and more scattered,
until we had before us an expanse of ocean almost
unbroken to the coast of South America.  But Tanao
lay at the edge of it, and at length, on a lowering April
day, we set out on that last leg of our outward journey.
The *Caleb S. Winship* lay very low in the water.  By
that time she had a full cargo of copra, one hundred
tons in the hold and twelve, sacked, on deck.  A
portion of the deck cargo was lost that same afternoon,
during a gale of wind and rain which burst upon us
with fury and followed us with a seeming malignity
of intent.  We ran before it, far out of our course,
for three hours.  To me the weight of air was something
incredible, an unusually vigorous flourish of the
departing hurricane season.  Water spouted out of the
scuppers in a continuous stream, and loose articles
were swept clear of the ship, disappearing at once in a
cloud of blinding rain.  There was a fearful racket in
the cabin of rolling biscuit tins and smashing crockery.
Then an eight-hundred-pound safe broke loose and
started to imitate Victor Hugo's cannon.  Luckily it
hadn't much scope and no smooth runway, so that it
was soon brought to a halt by Ruau, the old Paumotuan
woman, who was the only one below at the time.
She made an effective barricade of copra sacks and
bedding, dodging the plunging monster with an agility
surprising in a woman of sixty.  But what I remember
best was Tané, a monkey belonging to one of the sailors,
skidding along the cabin deck until he was blown
against the engine-room whistle, which rose just clear
of the forward end of it.  He wrapped arms and legs
around it in his terror, opening the valve in some
way, and the shrill blast rose high above the mighty
roar of wind, like the voice of man lifted with
awe-inspiring impudence in defiance of the mindless anger
of nature.

The storm blew itself out toward sundown and the
night fell clear—a night for stars to make one wary
of thought; but the moon rose about nine, softening
the pitiless distances, throwing a veil of mild light
across the black voids in the Milky Way, seen so clearly
in those latitudes.  The schooner was riding a heavy
swell, and, burdened as she was, rose clumsily to it,
sticking her nose into the slope of every sea.  Ruau
was at her accustomed place against the cabin
ventilator, unmindful of the showers of spray, maintaining
her position on the slanting deck with the skill of three
months' practice.  The thought that I must soon
bid her good-by saddened me, for I knew there was
small chance that I should ever meet her again.  I
envied Crichton his opportunity for friendship with
that noble old woman, so proud of her race, so true
to her own beliefs, to her own way of living.  Her type
is none too common among Polynesians in these days.
One gets all too frequently an impression of a
consciousness of inferiority on their part, a sense of shame
because of their simple way of living as compared with
ours.  Ruau was not guilty of it.  She never could
be, I think, under any circumstances.  I learned
afterward of an attempt which had been made to
convert her to Christianity during her stay at Tahiti.
Evidently she had not been at all convinced by the
priest's arguments, and when he made some slighting
remark about the ghosts and spirits which were so real
to her, she refused to listen any longer.  Frightened
though she was of spirits, she was not willing that
they should be ridiculed.

We sighted her atoll at dawn, such a dawn as one
rarely sees outside the tropics.  The sky was overcast
at a great height with a film of luminous mist through
which the sun shone wanly, throwing a sheen like a
dust of gold on the sea.  Masses of slate-colored cloud
billowed out from the high canopy, overhanging a
black fringe of land which lay just below the line of the
horizon.  The atoll was elliptical in shape, about eight
miles long by five broad.  There were seven widely
separated islands on the circle of reef and one small
motu in the lagoon.  We came into the wind about a
half mile offshore and put off in the whaleboat.  The
sea was still running fairly high, and the roar of the
surf came across the water with a sound as soothing
as the fall of spring rain; but it increased in volume
as we drew in until the ears were stunned by the
crash of tremendous combers which toppled and fell
sheer, over the ledge of the reef.  It was by far the
most dangerous-looking landing place we had seen on
the journey.  There was no break in the reef; only a
few narrow indentations where the surf spouted up in
clouds of spray.  Between the breaking of one sea and
the gathering of the next, the water poured back
over a jagged wall of rock bared for an instant to an
appalling depth.  Only a native crew could have
managed that landing.  We rode comber after comber,
the sailors backing on their oars, awaiting the word
of the boat steerer, who stood with his feet braced on
the gunwales, his head turned over his shoulder,
watching the following seas.  All at once he began shouting
at the top of his voice.  I looked back in time to see a
wall of water, on the point of breaking, rising high
above us.  It fell just after it passed under us, and
we were carried forward across the edge of the reef,
through the inner shallows to the beach.

The two traders started off at once on a tour of
inspection and we saw nothing more of them until
late in the evening.  Meanwhile I went with Ruau
and Crichton across the island to the lagoon beach
where her house was.  As in most of the atolls, the
ground was nearly free from undergrowth, the soil
affording nourishment only to the trees and a few
hardy shrubs.  Coconuts and dead fronds were scattered
everywhere.  A few half-wild pigs, feeding on the
shoots of sprouted nuts, gazed up with an odd air of
incredulity, of amazement as we approached, then
galloped off at top speed and disappeared far in the
distance.  Ruau stopped when we were about halfway
across and held up her hand for silence.  A bird was
singing somewhere, a melodious varied song like that
of the hermit thrush.  I had heard it before and had
once seen the bird, a shy, solitary little thing, one of
the few species of land birds found on the atolls.

While we were standing there, listening to the faint
music, Crichton took me by the arm.  He said nothing,
and in a moment withdrew his hand.  I was deeply
moved by that manifestation of friendliness, an unusual
one for him to make.  He had some unaccountable
defect in his character which kept him aloof from any
relationship approaching real intimacy.  I believe he
was constantly aware of it, that he had made many
futile attempts to overcome it.  It may have been that
which first set him on his wanderings, now happily
at an end.  It was plain to me the moment we set foot
on shore that he would have to seek no farther for
asylum.  Tanao is one of the undoubted ends of the
earth.  No one would ever disturb him there.  He
himself was not so sure of this.  Once, I remember, when
we were looking at the place on the chart, he spoke
of the island of Pitcairn, the old-time refuge of the
Bounty mutineers.  Before the opening of the Panama
Canal it had been as far removed from contact with the
outside world as an island could be.  Now it lies not
far off the route through the Canal to New Zealand
and is visited from time to time by the crews of tramp
steamers and schooners.  Tanao, however, is much
farther to the north, and there is very slight possibility
that its empty horizons will ever be stained by a
smudge of smoke.  As for an actual visit, one glance
at the reef through the binoculars would convince any
skipper of the folly of the attempt.

Even our own crew of natives, skilled at such
hazardous work, came to grief in their second passage
over it.  They had gone out to the schooner for supplies
Crichton had ordered—a few sacks of flour, some
canned goods, and kerosene oil; in coming back the
boat had been swept, broadside, against a ledge of rock.
It stuck there, just at the edge of the reef, and the
sailors jumped out with the line before the next wave
came, capsizing the boat and carrying it inshore,
bottom up.  All the supplies were swept into deep water
by the backwash and lost.  There had been a similar
accident at the other atoll—flour and rice brought so
many thousands of miles having been spoiled within
a few yards of their destination.  I remember the
natives plunging into the water at great risk to
themselves to save a few sacks of soggy paste in the hope
that a little of the flour in the center might still be dry;
and a Chinese storekeeper, to whom it was consigned,
standing on the shore, wringing his hands in dumb
grief.  It was the first time I had ever seen a
Chinaman make any display of emotion, and the sight
brought home to me a conception of the tragic nature of
such accidents to the inhabitants of those distant
islands.

Crichton took his own loss calmly, concealing
whatever disappointment he may have felt.  Ruau was not
at all concerned about it, and, while we were making
an examination of the house, went out on the lagoon
in a canoe and caught more than enough fish for supper.
Then we found that all of our matches had been
spoiled by sea water, so we could make no fire.  Judging
by the way Crichton brightened up at his discovery,
one would have thought the loss a piece of luck.  He
set to work at once to make an apparatus for kindling
fire, but before it was finished Ruau had the fish cleaned
and spread out on a coverlet of green leaves.  We ate
them raw, dipping them first into a sauce of coconut
milk, and for dessert had a salad made of the heart
of a tree.  I don't remember ever having eaten with
heartier appetite, but at the same time I couldn't
imagine myself enjoying an unrelieved diet of coconuts
and fish for a period of ten years—not for so long as a
year, in fact.  Crichton, however, was used to it, and
Ruau had never known any other except during her
three months' stay at Tahiti, where she had eaten
strange hot food which had not agreed with her at all,
she said.

Dusk came on as we sat over our meal.  Ruau
sat with her hands on her knees, leaning back against
a tree, talking to Crichton.  I understood nothing of
what she was saying, but it was a pleasure merely to
listen to the music of her voice.  It was a little below
the usual register of women's voices, strong and clear,
but softer even than those of the Tahitians, and so
flexible that I could follow every change in mood.
She was telling Crichton of the tupapaku of her atoll
which she dreaded most, although she knew that it
was the spirit of one of her own sons.  It appeared in
the form of a dog with legs as long and thick as the
stem of a full-grown coconut tree, and a body
proportionally huge.  It could have picked up her house as
an ordinary dog would a basket.  Once it had stepped
lightly over it without offering to harm her in any
way.  Her last son had been drowned while fishing by
moonlight on the reef outside the next island, which
lay about two miles distant across the eastern end of
the lagoon.  She had seen the dog three times since his
death, and always at the same phase of the moon.
Twice she had come upon it lying at full length on the
lagoon beach, its enormous head resting on its paws.
She was so badly frightened, she said, that she fell to
the ground, incapable of further movement; sick at
heart, too, at the thought that the spirit of the bravest
and strongest of all her sons must appear to her in that
shape.  It was clear that she was recognized, for each
time the dog began beating its tail on the ground as
soon as it saw her.  Then it got up, yawned and
stretched, took a long drink of salt water, and started
at a lope up the beach.  She could see it very plainly
in the bright moonlight.  Soon it broke into a run,
going faster and faster, gathering tremendous speed
by the time it reached the other end of the island.
From there it made a flying spring, and she last saw
it as it passed, high in air, across the face of the moon,
its head outstretched, its legs doubled close under its
body.  She believed that it crossed the two-mile gap of
water which separated the islands in one gigantic leap.

That is the whole of the story as Crichton translated
it for me, although there must have been other details,
for Ruau gave her account of it at great length.  Her
earnestness of manner was very convincing; and left
no doubt in my mind of the realness to her of the
apparition.  As for myself, if I could have seen ghosts
anywhere it would have been at Tanao.  Late that
night, walking alone on the lagoon beach, I found that
I was keeping an uneasy watch behind me.  The
distant thunder of the surf sounded at times like a wild
galloping on the hard sand, and the gentle slapping of
little waves near by like the lapping tongue of the
ghostly dog having its fill of sea water.

We left Tanao with a fair wind the following
afternoon, having been delayed in getting away because
of the damaged whaleboat, which had to be repaired
on shore.  Tino, the supercargo, insisted on pushing
off at once, the moment the work was finished.
Crichton and Ruau were on the other beach at the time, so
that I had no opportunity to say good-by; but as
we were getting under way I saw him emerge from the
deep shadow and stand for a moment, his hand shading
his eyes, looking out toward the schooner.  I waved,
but evidently he didn't see me, for there was no
response.  Then he turned, walked slowly up the
beach, and disappeared among the trees.  For three
hours I watched the atoll dwindling and blurring until
at sunset it was lost to view under the rim of the
southern horizon.  Looking back across that space of
empty ocean, I imagined that I could still see it
dropping farther and farther away, down the reverse slope
of a smooth curve of water, as though it were vanishing
for all time beyond the knowledge and the concern of men.


My first packet of letters from Nordhoff was brought
by the skipper of the schooner *Alouette*.  He had been
carrying it about for many weeks, and had it in the
first place from the supercargo of another vessel, met
at Rurutu, in the Austral group.  The envelope,
tattered and weather-stained, spoke of its long journey
in search of me.

Before separating at Papeete we had arranged for a
rendezvous, but at that time we still possessed American
ideas of punctuality and well-ordered travel.  Now we
know something of the casual movements of trading
schooners and have learned to regard the timely
arrival of a letter as an event touching on the
miraculous—the keeping of a rendezvous, a possibility too
remote for consideration.  One hears curious tales, in
this part of the world, of the outcome of such temporary
leave-takings as ours was meant to be—husbands
seeking their wives and wives their husbands; families
scattered among these fragments of land and striving
for many months to reunite.

I witnessed, not long ago, the sequel of one of these
unsuccessful quests.  A native from a distant group
of islands set out for one of the atolls of the Low
Archipelago, the home of his sweetheart.  Arrangements
for the marriage had been made long before,
but letters had gone astray, and upon his arrival the
young man found that the family of his prospective
father-in-law had gone to another atoll for the diving
season.  With no means of following, he submitted
to the inevitable, and married another girl.  Months
later, the woman of his first choice returned with her
second choice of a husband; and the former lovers met,
for the young man had not yet been able to return to
his own island.  Neither made any question of the
other's decision—life is too short; and from the native
point of view, it is foolish to spend it in wanderings
which, at the last, may never fulfill their purpose.

Nevertheless, I shall make a search for Nordhoff—a
leisurely search, with some expectation of finding
him.  Our islands, like those of Mr. Conrad's
enchanted Heyst, are bounded by a circle two thousand
or more miles across, and it is likely that neither of us
will ever succeed in breaking through to the outside
world—if, indeed, there is an outside world.  I am
beginning to doubt this, for the enchantment is at
work.  As for Nordhoff, his letters, which follow, may
speak for themselves.





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.. _`Marooned on Mataora`:

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   Eaters of the Lotos

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   CHAPTER III

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   Marooned on Mataora

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The sun was low when the *Faaite* steamed
out through the pass and headed for the
Cook group, six hundred miles west and
south.  Dark clouds hung over Raiatea—Rangi
Atea of Maori tradition, the
Land of the Bright Heavens—but the level sunlight
still illuminated the hillsides of Tahaa, the lovely sister
island, protected by the same great oval reef.  Far
off to the north, the peak of Bora Bora towered abruptly
from the sea.

It was not yet the season of the Trades, and the
northeast breeze which followed us brought a sweltering
heat, intolerable anywhere but on deck.  Worthington
was sitting beside me—a lean man, darkly-tanned,
with very bright blue eyes.  His feet were bare;
he wore a singlet, trousers of white drill, and a Manihiki
hat—beautifully plaited of bleached pandanus leaf—a
hat not to be bought with money.  The dinner gong
sounded.

"I'm not going down," he remarked; "too hot below.
I had something to eat at Uturoa.  How about
you?"

I shook my head—it needed more than a normal
appetite to drive one to the dining saloon.  Banks of
squall cloud, shading from gray to an unwholesome
violet, were gathering along the horizon, and the air
was so heavy that one inhaled it with an effort.

"This is the worst month of the hurricane season,"
Worthington went on; "it was just such an evening
as this, last year, that the waterspout nearly got
us—the night we sighted Mataora.  I was five months
up there, you know—marooned when Johnson lost the
old *Hatutu*.

"I was pretty well done up last year, and when I
heard that the *Hatutu* was at Avarua I decided to take
a vacation and go for a six weeks' cruise with Johnson.
Ordinarily he would have been laid up in Papeete
until after the equinox, but the company had sent for
him to make a special trip to Penrhyn.  We had a
wretched passage north—a succession of squalls and
broiling calms.  The schooner was in bad shape,
anyway: rotten sails, rigging falling to pieces, and six
inches of grass on her bottom.  On a hot day she had
a bouquet all her own—the sun distilled from her a
blend of cockroaches and mildewed copra that didn't
smell like a rose garden.  On the thirtieth day the
skipper told me we were two hundred miles from
Penrhyn and so close to Mataora that we might sight
the palm tops.  I'd heard a lot about the place (it
has an English name on the chart)—how isolated it
was, what a pleasant crowd the natives were, and how
it was the best place in the Pacific to see old-fashioned
island life.

"We had been working to windward against a light,
northerly breeze, but the wind began to drop at noon,
and by three o'clock it was glassy calm.  There was a
wicked-looking mass of clouds moving toward us from
the west, but the glass was high and Johnson said we
were in for nothing worse than a squall.  As the clouds
drew near I could see that they had a sort of purplish-black
heart, broad at the top, pointed at the bottom,
and dropping gradually toward the water.  There was
something queer about it; the mate was pointing,
and Johnson's Kanakas were all standing up.
Suddenly I heard a rushing sound, like a heavy squall
passing through the bush; the point of the funnel had
touched the sea three or four hundred yards away
from us—a waterspout!  There wasn't a breath of
air, and the *Hatutu* had no engine.  It was moving
straight for us, so slowly that I could watch every
detail of its formation.  The boys slid our boat
overboard; the mate sang out something about all hands
being ready to leave the schooner.

"I've heard of waterspouts ever since I was a
youngster, but I never expected to see one as close as
we did that day.  As the point of cloud dropped toward
the sea it was ragged and ill defined; but when it
touched the water and the noise began I saw its shape
change and its outlines grow hard.  It was now a
thin column, four or five feet in diameter, rising a
couple of hundred feet before it swelled in the form of
a flat cone, to join the clouds above.  Curiously
enough, it was not perpendicular, but had a decided
sagging curve.  Nearer and nearer it came, until I
could make out the great swirling hole at its base,
and see the vitreous look of this column of solid water,
revolving at amazing speed.  It hadn't the misty
edges of a waterfall.  The outside was sharply
defined as the walls of a tumbler.  I wondered what
would happen when it struck the *Hatutu*.  The mate
was shouting again, but just then the skipper pushed
a rifle into my hands.  'Damned if I leave the old
hooker,' he swore.  'Shoot into the thing—maybe
we can break it up.'  And, believe me or not, we did
break it up.

"It didn't come down with a crash, as one might
have expected.  When we had pumped about twenty
shots into it, and it was not more than fifty yards away,
it began to dwindle.  The column of water became
smaller and drew itself out to nothing; the rushing
noise ceased; the hole in the sea disappeared in a lazy
eddy; the dark funnel rose and blended with the clouds
above.

"A fine southeast breeze sprang up as the clouds
dispersed, and we were reaching away for Penrhyn
when a boy up forward gave a shout and pointed to the
northwest.  Sure enough there was a faint line on the
horizon—the palms of Mataora.  A sudden idea came
to me.  I was fed up with the schooner.  Why not ask
to be put ashore and picked up on the *Hatutu's* return
from Penrhyn?  She would be back in a fortnight,
and it was only a few miles out of her way to drop me
and pick me up.

"Johnson is a good fellow; his answer to my
proposition was to change his course at once and slack
away for the land twelve miles to leeward.  'You'll
have a great time,' he said; 'I wish I were going
with you.  Old Tari will put you up—I'll give you a
word to him.  Take along two or three bags of flour
and a few presents for the women.'

"At five o'clock we were off the principal village,
with canoes all about us and more coming out through
the surf.  The men were a fine, brawny lot, joking
with the crew, and eager for news and small trade.
I lowered my box, some flour, tobacco, and a few bolts
of calico, into the largest canoe, and said good-by to
Johnson.

"It was nearly a year before I saw him again;
as you know, he lost the *Hatutu* on Flying Venus Shoal.
They made Penrhyn in the boat and got a passage to
Tahiti two months later.  Everyone knew I was on
Mataora, but it was five months before a schooner
could come to take me off.

"There is no pass into the lagoon.  As we drew
near the shore I saw that the easy, deceptive swell
reared up to form an ugly surf ahead of us.  At one
point, where a crowd of people was gathered, there
was a large irregular fissure in the coral, broad and
deep enough to admit the passage of a small boat,
and filled with rushing water each time a breaker
crashed on the reef.  My two paddlers stopped opposite
this fissure and just outside the surf, watching over
their shoulders for the right wave.  They let four or
five good-sized ones pass, backing water gently with
their paddles; but at last a proper one came, rearing
and tossing its crest till I thought it would break
before it reached us.  My men dug their paddles into
the water, shouting exultantly as we darted forward.
The shouts were echoed on shore.  By Jove! it was a
thriller!  Tilting just on the break of the wave, we
flew in between jagged walls of coral, up the fissure,
around a turn—and before the water began to rush
back, a dozen men and women had plunged in waist
deep to seize the canoe.

"Mataora is made up of a chain of low islands—all
densely covered with coconut palms—strung
together in a rough oval to inclose a lagoon five miles by
three.  Though there is no pass, the surf at high tide
breaches over the gaps between the islands.  The
largest island is only a mile and a half long, and none
of them are more than half a mile across.  Dotted
about the surface of the lagoon are a number of motu—tiny
islets—each with its flock of sea fowl, its clump
of palms, and shining beach of coral sand.  Set in a
lonely stretch of the Pacific, the place is almost cut off
from communication with the outside world; twice or
three times in the course of a year a trading schooner
calls to leave supplies and take off copra.  Undisturbed
by contact with civilization, the life of Mataora
flows on—simple, placid, and agreeably monotonous—very
little changed, I fancy, since the old days.  It is
true that they have a native missionary, and use
calico, flour, and tobacco when they can get them;
but these are minor things.  The great events in their
annals are the outrage of the Peruvian slavers in
eighteen sixty-two, when many of the people were
carried off to labor and die in the Chinchas Islands,
and the hurricane of nineteen thirteen.

"After presenting myself to the missionary and the
chief I was escorted by a crowd of youngsters to the
lagoon side of the island, where Tairi lived, in a spot
cooled by the trade wind and pleasantly shaded by
coconuts.  The old chap was a warm friend of
Johnson's and made me welcome; I soon arranged to
put up with him during my stay on the island.  His
house, like all the Mataora houses, was worth a bit
of study.

"Pandanus logs, five or six inches in diameter and
set four feet apart, made the uprights.  On each side
of these logs, and extending from top to bottom
a groove was cut.  Thin laths, split from the aerial
roots of the pandanus, were set horizontally into the
grooves, making a wall which permitted the free
circulation of air.  At the windward end of the house, a
large shutter of the same material was hung on hinges
of bark; on warm days it could be opened to admit
the breeze.  The plates and rafters were made of the
trunks of old coconut palms—a beautiful hard wood
which blackens with age and can be polished like
mahogany.  The roof was thatched with kakao—strips
of wood over which were doubled selected leaves
of pandanus, six feet long and four inches across.
The kakao are laid on like shingles, so deeply overlapped
that only six inches of each is exposed, and the result
is a cool and perfectly water-tight roof which lasts
for years.

"The floor of Tari's house was of fine white gravel,
covered with mats.  A bed of mats, a few odds and
ends of fishing gear, and a Bible in the Rarotongan
language made up the furniture.  The old man had
been a pearl diver for many years; he knew all the
lagoons of this part of the Pacific, and could give the
history of every large pearl discovered in these waters.
Twenty fathoms he considered an ordinary depth
for the naked divers—twenty-five, the limit.  One
day he went too deep, and since then he had been a
cripple with paralyzed legs, dependent for care on the
kindly people of his island.  He busied himself in
carving out models of the ancient Polynesian sailing
canoes, beautifully shaped and polished, inlaid with
shell, and provided with sails of mother-of-pearl.
Now and then he presented a canoe to the captain of a
trading schooner visiting the island, and received in
return a bag of flour or a few sticks of tobacco.

"I had some interesting yarns with Tari—I speak
Rarotongan, and the Mataora language is a good deal
the same.  They have three extra consonants, by the
way—the f, l, and h.  What a puzzle these island
dialects are!

"Tairi told me a lot about pearl fishing.  The people
had divided their lagoon into three sections, one of
which was fished each year.  In this way each section
got a two years' rest.  The shell is the object of the
diving—pearls are a secondary issue.  The divers are
not much afraid of sharks, but dread the tonu and the
big conger eel.  Some years before, when Tari was
resting in a boat after a spell under water, one of his
companions failed to return to the surface.  Looking
through his water glass, he saw a great tonu lying on
the bottom, sixty feet beneath him—the legs of his
comrade hanging from its jaws.  Fancy the ugly
brute, ten feet long and all head, like an overgrown
rock cod, with a man in his mouth.  Tairi and several
others seized their spears and were over the side next
moment; they killed the tonu, but too late to save the
life of their companion.

"Conger eels grow to enormous size in the pearl
lagoons, and the divers keep a close watch for them.
They lie in holes and crevices of the coral and dart
out their heads to seize a passing fish, or the wrist of
a diver stooping and intent on his task.  When the
conger's jaws close on wrist or ankle, the diver needs
a cool head; no amount of struggling will pull the eel
from his hole.  One must wait quietly, Tairi told me,
until the conger relaxes his jaws preparatory to taking
a better grip.  Then a quick wrench, and one is free.

"On an atoll like Mataora, where the food supply
is limited to fish and coconuts, with a chicken or a
piece of pork as an occasional treat, fishing plays a
large part in the life of the people.  The men were all
expert fishermen, and used a variety of ingenious
methods to catch the different kinds of fish.  Tairi,
of course, was no longer able to go out; but a friend of
his—an old fellow named Tamatoa—used to take me
with him.  He was a fine specimen—six feet tall,
muscular and active as a boy, with clear eyes
and thick gray hair.  One day he proposed trying for
koperu, a small variety of mackerel.

"The settlement is on the lee side of the island,
where a coral shoal runs out half a mile to sea, covered
with twenty to forty fathoms of water.  It was early
in the morning—a dead calm—when we launched the
big canoe and slipped out through the surf.  About a
quarter of a mile offshore Tamatoa asked me to hold
the canoe stationary while he went about his fishing.
Fastening a twenty-foot rope to the thwart, he made
a noose at the other end and passed it under his arms.
Then he took a ripe coconut, split it, and gouged out
the meat with his knife.  With the white pulp in one
hand, he slipped overboard and swam down as far as
the rope would let him.  Through my water glass I
watched him put pieces of coconut into his mouth and
blow out clouds of the finely chewed stuff, which drifted
and eddied about him in the gentle current.  He
seemed to stay under indefinitely—the lungs of a pearl
diver are wonderful things!  Now and then he came to
the surface for a fresh supply of chum, and
finally—at first in twos and threes, and then in shoals—the
koperu began to appear from the depths.  Little by
little he enticed them close to the surface, until they
swam all about him fearlessly, gobbling the morsels of
coconut.  At last the old man reached up for his
fishing tackle—an eighteen-inch twig, with a bit of
doubled sewing cotton and a tiny barbless hook.  He
baited the hook with a particle of coconut and dangled
it under the nose of the nearest koperu.  While he
hung on the shortened rope, just beneath the surface,
his right arm broke water in a series of jerks, and
each time it rose a fish tumbled into the canoe until
they lay in the bottom by dozens.

"Though the people of Mataora made sport of their
work, they had plenty of leisure for other things.
In the evening, when the tasks of the day had been
completed by lighting the lamps in the roofed-over
sleeping places of the dead, the young people loved
to gather for a session of *akatu talanga*—story telling.
They met in some one's house or brought mats to
spread in the bright moonlight outside; and while the
others lay about, intent on the tale, one after another
related the adventures of some Polynesian hero or the
loves of some legendary island princess—strange
fragments from the old days, full of specters and devils
and monstrous heathen gods.  There was a girl
named Porima who told her stories marvelously well—a
tall youngster of seventeen, with a dash of off-island
blood; Hawaiian, I think.  She was an artist in her
way; one could imagine in her the pioneer of a literature
to come.  Her broad forehead, the masses of black hair
which from time to time, with an impatient gesture,
she shook back over her shoulders, and the slumberous
eyes, with a suggestion of hypnotic power, made her a
person not easily forgotten.  Although she had told
them many times, Porima's stories never failed to
hold her audience; the whispering ceased when she
began, and every head turned toward where she sat,
her hands continually in motion, her voice rising in
excitement, or dying away to a murmur, while the
listeners held their breath.  As the hours passed, both
audience and performers used to grow weary and drop
off to sleep, one by one; finally a rooster crowed and
one awoke with a start to realize that it was day.

"One evening, at a story telling, I heard a shout
from the beach and remembered that I had been
invited to go after flying fish.  A dozen canoes were
putting out through the surf, each manned by four
paddlers.  I made a fourth in the last canoe; we shot
out of the opening with a receding wave, paddled
desperately through the surf, and a moment later
were rocking gently beyond the breakers.  The canoes
were formed into a rough line; each stern-man lit
a torch of coconut leaves bound with bark, and a man
forward took his place standing—net in hand.  The
net is like a shallow landing net, set on a haft of stiff
bamboo, and can be handled only after years of
unconscious training.  My position, paddling
amidships, enabled me to watch how the net was managed—one
doesn't often see such an exhibition of dexterity
and strength.  The art consists in clapping the net
over the fish just at the moment when he is lying at the
surface, hesitating before taking flight; at any instant
the netter may see a fish to port, to starboard, or
directly ahead.  Our man swung his net continually,
and each time it passed over the canoe he flipped it
upside-down to drop a fish.  Think of the muscles
needed for this sort of thing; the quickness of eye and
hand, where a delicate balance must be maintained,
and one is constantly alert to guard one's face against
the fish, which whizz past at all angles.  Then
remember that it is a pretty serious matter to capsize
in this torch-lit water, swarming with sharks, where it is
imprudent even to trail one's hand overboard.

"In the bend of a bow-shaped islet at the north
end of the lagoon, under the palms behind a shore of
blue water and dazzling sand, lived an old chap named
Ruri, who introduced me to another kind of fishing.
Ruri was close to seventy, but a strong man still; his
only complaint was lack of teeth, which compelled
him to live on *varuvaru*—the grated-up meat of the
young coconut, mixed with its own milk.  The ambition
of his life was a trip to Tahiti to get a set of false
teeth.  He was not a native of Mataora—his mother
was a Gilbert-Islander and his father a Samoan.  For
many years Ruri had followed the sea—cabin boy under
Bully Hayes; deserter (to keep a whole skin) from the
famous *Leonora*; blackbirder in the New Hebrides
and Solomon Islands; pearl fisher in Penrhyn and the
lagoons of the Paumotu.  At last, on a black night of
storm, his vessel struck and went to pieces on the
coral of Mataora, and Ruri's days of wandering were
over.  He married a woman of the island, but now she
was dead and the old man lived alone, a mile from the
settlement, occupied with his simple wants and
immersed in dreams of the past.  Close beside his house
was the grave of his wife—a tomb of cement inclosed
in a neat building of octagonal shape, with a door and
a small curtained window.  A fine lamp, carefully
tended and lit every evening at sunset, hung above
the grave, and a few stunted gardenias and frangipanis,
brought from enormous distances, were planted about
the door.  Ruri's little plantation of coconuts and
coarse taro was free from weeds, and the neatness of
his house, shipshape and scrupulously clean, betrayed
the old sailor.

"After a spell of calm weather, when the breaching
surf had ceased to cloud the waters of the lagoon, and
the suspended particles of coral sand had settled to
the bottom, Ruri offered to show me how to catch
tenu—a fine fish, inhabiting the lagoon in ten to
twenty fathoms of water—speckled like a trout on a
ground of brown and gold, and reaching a weight of
twenty pounds.

"In the absurdly complicated process of obtaining
bait, tenu-fishing is typical of the South Pacific.  The
night before, Ruri had spent two hours with a torch,
catching hermit crabs; now, using these crabs for bait
we had to catch some ku ta—a small, prickly fish which
alone has power to interest the tenu.  We set out in
Ruri's leaky canoe and paddled to a big, coral
mushroom, which rose to within a yard of the surface.
Here the old man smashed the shells of his hermit
crabs with a stone, broke off the claws, set the soft
bodies to one side, and mashed the claws to a paste,
which he dropped overboard and allowed to drift
into a dark hole in the coral.  Then he produced a
short line, baited the hook with a body of a crab, and
let it sink out of sight into the darkness of the hole.
In ten minutes a dozen ku ta were gasping in the
bottom of the canoe—fantastic little fish, colored
scarlet and vermilion, with enormous black eyes and
a dorsal fin which seemed to be carved out of red
sealing wax.  We put them in a basket, trailed
overboard to keep them alive, and began the real fishing of
the day.  I paddled slowly, while Ruri—who did not
believe in fishing till the fish was in sight—leaned
over the side, scrutinizing the bottom through his
water glass.  Finally he signaled me to stop—his eye
had caught the movement of a tenu among the masses
of live coral, forty feet below us.  The rest was simple:
one hooked a ku ta under the dorsal fin, tossed him
overboard, and allowed the weight of the hook and
line to carry him to the bottom.  By means of the
water glass, one could watch the approach of the tenu,
see him seize the bait, and judge the proper moment
to strike.

"The bonito, which they call atu, is the most
important of all fish to the people of Mataora.  Almost
any fine day one could see a fleet of canoes working
offshore, busy at bonito catching, surrounded by a
cloud of the sea birds which guide one to the schools.
They use a pretty lure for this fishing—a sort of jig
cut out of mother-of-pearl, equipped with a tuft of
red-dyed coconut husk and a barbless hook of shell.
Each fisherman carries a stiff bamboo rod and half a
dozen of these lures—ranging in color from pale green
to black—attached to ten-foot lengths of line.  The
islanders have discovered that the condition of the
water and the variations of light make certain colors
more attractive than others at a given time; and
when a school is found they try one shade after another
till they discover which the bonito prefer.  Then
the jigs not in use are hooked to a ring at the base of
the pole, and the fisherman begins to pull bonito from
the water, heaving them out by main strength, without
a moment's play.  The barbless hook releases itself the
moment the fish is in the canoe, and the lure goes
overboard without the loss of an instant.

"One day, after a period of low tides, I saw another
method of fishing—rarely practised nowadays—an
ora, or fish-poisoning picnic.  You know the barringtonia,
probably—the big tree from which they make
their drums; it grows on all the high islands, and
sometimes one finds it on the richer atolls.  There were
a few on Mataora.  Ever notice the flower?  It is a
lovely thing—a tassel of silky cream-colored stamens,
shading to old rose at the ends, and tipped with
golden beads.  The fruit is odd-looking, like a squarish
pomegranate, and it has odd properties, for when
pounded up and put into shallow water it seems to
stupefy the fish.

"I was sitting in the shade beside Tari's house
when a boy came through the settlement, blowing
melancholy blasts on a conch shell and announcing
that the chief wanted everyone to be on hand that
afternoon at a certain part of the lagoon, where an ora
was to be held.  We set out at noon, the women
carrying the crushed seeds of the barringtonia in hastily
woven baskets of green coconut frond.  A crowd from
the other settlements was awaiting our arrival; and
when the babies had been put to sleep in the shade,
with small children stationed beside them to fan away
the flies, the fun began.  A shallow stretch of lagoon
lay before us, half a mile long by a quarter wide, and
into this plunged the women and girls, wading and
swimming in all directions, trailing behind them their
baskets of poison.  As time went on, a faint and
curious odor began to rise from the water—a smell
which reminded me vaguely of potassium cyanide.
Soon the spearmen were busy—wild brown figures,
naked except for scarlet loin cloths—pursuing the
half-stupefied fish among the crevices of the coral.  Before
the effect of the poison wore off and the reviving fish
began to make their escape to deeper water the men
were returning to the beach, the strings of hibiscus
bark at their belts loaded and dragging.

"On another day I joined a party of young people
for a picnic across the lagoon.  It was glassy calm;
the water was like a mirror in which the palms of the
wooded islets were reflected with motionless perfection.
The beaches on the far side, invisible on an ordinary
day, seemed to rise far out of water in the mirage.
We landed on an uninhabited island, hauled up our
canoes, and set out on a hunt for coconut crabs.

"They are extraordinary creatures, these crabs,
enormous, and delicious to eat.  You will not find
many on the high islands; but in a place like Mataora
there are hundreds of them, and they do a lot of
damage to the coconuts.  During the day they hide
in their holes, deep among the roots of some big trees;
at night they come out, climb the palms, nip off the
nuts with their powerful claws, descend to the ground,
tear off the husks, break open the shells, and devour
the meat.  To catch them, one can either dig them
out or build a fire at the mouth of the hole, which
never fails to draw them.  Fire simply fascinates the
brutes.  They must be handled warily, for their claws
can grip like a pair of pipe tongs and shear off a
man's finger without an effort.

"We lit a fire under the shade of a puka tree and
liberated the crabs we had captured.  It sounds
incredible, but they walked into the fire, and sat down
quietly on the embers to roast!  One of the boys
climbed a palm and brought us some coconuts of a
variety called nu mangaro, with an edible husk, sweet
and fibrous, like sugar cane.  After lunch we had a
swim in the deep water close inshore and lay about
smoking while the girls wove us wreaths of sweet fern.
It was an idyllic sort of a day.

"I spent five months on Mataora.  At first, when
the schooner did not appear, I was worried and used
to fret a little; but as time went on I grew to like the
easy-going, dreamy life, and when at last a schooner
came to take me off I didn't know whether to be glad
or sorry—there were moments when I almost decided
to send for a few things and follow the example of old
Ruri.

"During those five months I knew more disinterested
kindliness than I had supposed existed in the world;
my heart warmed to the people of Mataora.

"Finally the day came when the schooner dropped
anchor in the lee of the village—Whitmore's *Tureia*.
Canoe after canoe shot out through the surf; the
women gathered in the shade of the canoe houses on the
beach, awaiting the landing of the boatmen, who
would bring news of husbands diving for shell in distant
lagoons, or relatives scattered among far-off groups of
islands.  As I shook hands with Whitmore I heard a
prolonged wailing from the village—the tangi of a new
widow.

"When I went to the house to get my things together
Tari informed me that, as the schooner would not
leave till next day, the people were preparing a farewell
feast in my honor.  It was held in the assembly house
of the village, decorated with arches of palm frond,
garlands of scented fern, and the scarlet flowers of the
hibiscus.  Everyone brought a gift for the departing
stranger—a fan, a hat, a pearl fishhook, a drinking cup
of ornamented coconut shell, a carved paddle of
porcupine wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl.  I
distributed what little I had to offer, wishing it were a
dozen times as much.

"On the beach next morning the people of Mataora
gathered for a last handclasp; smile cynically if you
will—there were tears shed; I wasn't too happy myself
when I heard their plaintive song of farewell floating
out across the water."

Worthington ceased speaking and leaned forward to
scratch a match.  The squall had passed long since;
the immense arch of the Milky Way stretched overhead,
and low in the south—beyond Hull Island and Rimatara,
over the loneliest ocean in the world—the Southern
Cross was rising.  Lying on mats behind us, a party of
Cook-Islanders spoke in soft tones, their faces
illuminated fitfully by the glow of their cigarettes.  My
companion was lighting his pipe, and in the flare of the
match I could see that he was smiling to himself.

"Some day," he said, "you will hear that I have
closed up my affairs and disappeared.  Don't worry
when that happens; you'll know I have gone to
Mataora—this time to stop for good."





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.. _`The Land of Ahu Ahu`:

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   CHAPTER IV


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   The Land of Ahu Ahu

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I might attempt to set down a matter-of-fact
description of this place if only
the subject permitted one to be matter-of-fact.
Strange and remote, set in a
lonely space of the sea and isolated from
the world for the seven or eight centuries following the
decline of Polynesian navigation, there is no other land
like this hollow island of Ahu Ahu.  Week after week,
month after month, the watcher on its cliffs may gaze
out toward the horizon and see never a sail nor a distant
trail of smoke to liven the dark-blue desert of the
Pacific.  The cliffs themselves are strange—the reef
of an ancient atoll, upraised in some convulsion of the
earth to form a ring of coral limestone—sheer precipices
facing the sea, half a mile of level barren summit, and
an inner wall of cliffs, overlooking the rich lowlands
of the interior.  During the unnumbered years of their
occupation, the land has set a stamp upon its people—so
long on Ahu Ahu that they have forgotten whence
they came.  Hardy, hospitable, and turbulent, they
are true children of the islands, and yet a family
apart—ruder and less languid than the people of Samoa or
Tahiti, and speaking a harsher tongue.  And, more
than any other island folk, they live in the past, for
ghosts walk on Ahu Ahu, and the living commune
nightly with the old dead who lie in the *marae*.

It was an hour before sunset when we sighted the
land—the merest blue irregularity on the horizon,
visible from one's perch in the shrouds each time the
schooner rose to the crest of a sea.  The mellow
shout of landfall brought a score of native passengers
to their feet; at such a moment one realizes the
passionate devotion of the islander to his land.  Men
sprang into the rigging to gaze ahead with eager
exclamations; mothers held up their babies—born on
distant plantations—for a first glimpse of Ahu Ahu;
seasick old women, emerging from disordered heaps of
matting, tottered to the bulwarks with eyes alight.
The island had not been visited for six months, and
we carried a cargo of extraordinary variety—hardware,
bolts of calico, soap, lumber, jewelry, iron roofing,
cement, groceries, phonograph records, an unfortunate
horse, and several pigs, those inevitable deck-passengers
in the island trade.  There were scores of cases of
bully beef and ship's biscuit—the staple luxuries of
modern Polynesia, and, most important of all, six
heavy bags of mail.

As we drew near the land, toward midnight, I gave
up the attempt to sleep in my berth and went on
deck to spread a mat beside Tari, our supercargo, who
lay aft of the mainmast, talking in low tones with
his wife.  It was calm, here in the lee of the island;
the schooner slipped through the water with scarcely
a sound, rising and falling on the long gentle swell.
Faint puffs of air came off the land, bringing a scent
of flowers and wood smoke and moist earth.  We had
been sighted, for lights were beginning to appear in the
village; now and then, on a flaw of the breeze, one
heard a sigh, long drawn and half inaudible—the voice
of the reef.  A party of natives, seated on the forward
hatch, began to sing.  The words were modern and
religious, I believe, but the music—indescribably sad,
wild, and stirring—carried one back through the
centuries to the days when man expressed the dim
yearnings of his spirit in communal song.  It was a
species of chant, with responses; four girls did most
of the singing, their voices mingling in barbaric
harmonies, each verse ending in a prolonged melodious
wail.  Precisely as the last note died away, in time
with the cadence of the chant, the deep voices of the
men took up the response, "*Karé, aué!*" ("No,
alas!")  Tari turned to me.

"They sing well," he said, "these Ahu Ahu people;
I like to listen to them.  That is a hymn, but a stranger
would never suspect it—the music is pure heathen.
Look at the torchlights in the village; smell the land
breeze—it would tell you you were in the islands if
you were set down here blindfold from a place ten
thousand miles away.  With that singing in one's ears, it
is not difficult to fancy oneself in a long canoe, at the
end of an old-time voyage, chanting a song of thanksgiving
to the gods who have brought us safely home."

He is by no means the traditional supercargo of a
trading schooner, this Tari; I have wasted a good deal
of time speculating as to his origin and the reasons
for his choosing this mode of life.  An Englishman
with a hint of Oxford in his voice—quite obviously
what we call a gentleman—a reader of reviews, the
possessor (at his charming place on Nukutere) of an
enviable collection of books on the natural history and
ethnology of the South Seas, he seldom speaks of
himself or of his people at home.  For twenty years he has
been known in this part of the world—trading on
Penrhyn, Rakahanga, Tupuai, the atolls of the
Paumotu.  He speaks a dozen of the island dialects, can
join in the singing of *Utes*, or bring a roar of applause
by his skill in the dances of widely separated groups.
When the war broke out he enlisted as a private in a
New Zealand battalion, and the close of hostilities
found him with decorations for gallantry, the rank of
captain, and the scars of honorable wounds.  As a
subject for conversation, the war interests him as little
as his own life, but this evening he had emptied a full
bottle of rum, and was in the mildly mellow state which
is his nearest approach to intoxication.

"I never thought I'd see the old country again,"
he said, "but the war changed all that.  I got a nasty
wound in Gallipoli, you see, and they sent me home to
convalesce.  The family wasn't meant to know I was
hurt, but they saw a bit of a thing in the paper [an
account of the exploit which won Tari his D.C.M.],
and there they were at the dock when the transport
off-loaded.  I hadn't laid eyes on them for fifteen
years....  The old governor—by Jove! he was decent.
It was all arranged that I should stop in England when
the war was over; I thought myself it was a go.  When
the job was finished, and I'd got a special dispensation
to be demobbed at home, I stood it for a fortnight and
then gave up....

"Home is all very well for a week or two, but for a
steady thing I seem to fit in better down here.  What
is it that makes a chap stop in the islands?  You
must have felt it yourself, and yet it is hard to put
into words.  This sort of thing, perhaps [he swept his
hand through the soft darkness] ... the beauty, the
sense of remoteness, the vague and agreeable melancholy
of these places.  Then I like the way the years
slip past—the pleasant monotony of life.  My friends
at home put up with a kind of dullness which would
drive me mad; but here, where there is even less to
distinguish one day from another, one seems never to
grow fretful or impatient of time.  One's horizon
narrows, of course; I scarcely look at the newspaper
any more.  If you stop here you will find yourself
unconsciously drifting into the native state of mind,
readjusting your sense of values until the great events
of the world seem far off and unreal, and your interests
are limited to your own business, the vital statistics
of your island, and the odd kinks of human nature
about you.  Perhaps this is the way we are meant to
live; at any rate, it brings serenity.

"I've been here too long to sentimentalize about
the natives—they have their weak points, and plenty
of them.  Allowing for these, you'll find the Kanakas
a good sort to have about—often amusing, always
interesting; at once deep, artful, gay, simple, and
childish.  At bottom they are not very different from
ourselves; it is chiefly a matter of environment.
Consider any of the traders who came here as boys—old
fellows who will buttonhole you and spend hours
abusing the people—the truth is that they have become
more native than the men they abuse.

"There are places, like Africa, where one can live
among a primitive people and absorb nothing from
them; their point of view is too alien, their position
in the scale of humanity too widely separated from
our own.  It is different in the islands.  If one could
discover the truth, it wouldn't surprise me to learn
that these people were distant cousins of ours.  The
scholars—in whose conclusions I haven't much faith—trace
them back, along the paths of successive migrations,
through Indonesia to northern India or the land
of the Cushites.  In any case, I believe that the blood
we term Caucasian flows in their veins, the legacy of
ancestors separated from the parent stock so long ago
that mankind had not yet learned the use of iron.
And they are old, these island tribes who were
discovering new lands in the Pacific in the days when
our forefathers wore the horns of bulls upon their heads.
Don't judge them in the present, or even in the time of
Cook; they were a dying people then, whose decline
had begun five or six hundred years before.  It seems
to me that a race, like an individual, grows old, loses
heart, and fades away.  On nearly every island they are
dying to-day—a tragedy, an inevitable one, which the
coming of the European has hastened, but not caused.

"Whether or not it may be accounted for on grounds
of a distant kinship, it is impossible to stop long in the
islands without absorbing, to a certain extent, the
native point of view.  Things which seemed rubbish
at first slowly acquire significance; one begins to
wonder if, after all, there may not be varieties of knowledge
lost to us in the complexities of civilization....  I've
seen some queer things myself.

"My wife's mother lives on Ahu Ahu, where her
ancestors have been hereditary rulers since Maui
fished the island out of the sea.  I've known the
family a good many years, and long before I married
Apakura the old lady was kind enough to take a
motherly interest in me.  I always put up with her
when we touched at Ahu Ahu.  Once, after I had been
away for several months, I sat down to have a yarn
with her, and was beginning to tell about where I'd
been and what I'd done when she stopped me.  'No,
let me tell you,' she said, with an odd smile; and, upon
my honor, she did—down to the details!  I got the
secret out of her the same evening.  She is very friendly,
it seems, with an ancestor of hers—a woman named
Rakamoana, who lived twenty-eight generations—seven
hundred years—ago, and is buried in the big
*marae* behind the village.  When one of the family
is off on a trip, and my mother-in-law suspects that he
is in trouble or not behaving himself, she puts herself
into a kind of trance, calls up old Rakamoana, and
gets all the facts.  I hope the habit won't come into
general use—might prove jolly awkward, eh?  Seriously,
though, I can't account for the things she told
me without accepting her own explanation.  Strange
if there were a germ of truth in the legends of how
the old sea-going canoes were navigated—the priests,
in a state of trance, directing the helmsmen which
way to steer for land....

"There is another old woman on Ahu Ahu whose
yarns are worth hearing.  Many years ago a Yankee
whaling vessel called at the island, and a Portuguese
harpooner, who had had trouble with the captain,
deserted and hid himself in the bush.  The people
had taken a fancy to him and refused to give him up,
so finally the captain was obliged to sail away without
his man.  From all accounts this harpooner must have
been a good chap; when he proved that he was no
common white waster, the chief gave him a bit of land
and a girl of good family for a wife—now the old lady
of whom I spoke.  I think it was tools he needed, or
some sort of gear for a house he was building; at any
rate, when another whaler touched he told his wife
that he was going on a voyage to earn some money
and that he might be gone a year.  There was a kind
of agreement, current in the Pacific in those days,
whereby a whaling captain promised to land a man
at the point where he had signed him on.

"Well, the harpooner sailed away, and, as might
have been expected, his wife never saw him again;
but here comes the odd part of the story.  The deserted
wife, like so many of the Ahu Ahu women, had an
ancestor who kept her in touch with current events.
Being particularly fond of her husband, she indulged
in a trance from time to time, to keep herself informed
as to his welfare.  Several months after his departure
the tragedy occurred—described in detail by the
obliging and sympathetic dweller in the *marae*.  It was
a kind of vision, as told to me, singularly vivid for an
effort of pure imagination—the open Pacific, heaving
gently and ruffled by a light air; two boats from rival
vessels pursuing the same whale; the Portuguese
harpooner standing in the bows of one, erect and intent
upon the chase, his iron the first, by a second of time,
to strike.  Then came a glimpse of the two boats
foaming side by side in the wake of the whale; the
beginning of the dispute; the lancing and death flurry
of an old bull sperm; the rising anger of the two
harpooners, as the boats rocked gently beside the
floating carcass; the treacherous thrust; the long red
blade of the lance standing out between the shoulders
of the Portuguese.

"The woman awoke from her trance with a cry of
anguish; her husband was dead—she set up the widow's
*tangi*.  One might have thought it an excellent tale,
concocted to save the face of a deserted wife, if the
same vessel had not called at Ahu Ahu within a year,
to bring news of the husband's death under the exact
circumstances of the vision.

"What is one to believe?  If seeing is believing, then
count me a believer, for my own eyes have seen an
incredible thing.  It was on Aitutaki, in the Cook
group.  An old chief, the descendant of a very ancient
family, lay ill in the village.  I had turned in early,
as I'd promised to go fishing on the reef when the tide
served, an hour after midnight.  You know how the
spirits of the dead were believed to flee westward, to
Hawaiki, and how their voices might be heard at night,
calling to one another in the sky, as they drove past,
high overhead.  Early in the evening, as I lay in bed,
a boy came into the next room, panting with excitement.
He had been to a plantation in the hills, it
seemed, and as he returned, just after dusk, had heard
the voices of a shouting multitude passing in the air
above him.  I was tired and paid little attention to his
story, but for some reason I found it impossible to sleep.
It was a hot night, very still and sultry, with something
in the air that made one's nerves twitch every time a
coconut frond dropped in the distance.  I was still
lying awake when my fishing companions came to
get me; a little ahead of time, for, like me, they had
been unable to sleep.  We would wait on the reef, they
suggested, where it was sure to be cool, until the tide
was right.

"We were sitting on the dry coral, smoking.  I had
just looked at my watch, I remember; it lacked a few
minutes to one o'clock.  Our canoes were hauled up
on one side of the Arutunga Passage—the western
pass, by the way.  There was no moon.  Suddenly
one of the boys touched me.  'What is that?' he
exclaimed, in a startled voice.  I looked up; the others
were rising to their feet.  Two flaring lights were
moving across the lagoon toward us—together and very
swiftly.  Nearer and nearer they came, until they
revealed the outlines of a canoe larger than any built
in the islands nowadays—a canoe of the old time, with
a flaming torch set at prow and stern.  While we stood
there, staring in silence, it drew abreast of us, moving
with the rush of a swift motor boat, and passed on—out
to sea.  I was too amazed to think clearly until
I heard one of the boys whisper to another, '*Kua mate
te ariki*—the chief is dead; the great canoe bears him
out to the west.'  We launched our canoes and crossed
the lagoon to the village.  Women were wailing; yes,
the old man was dead—he had drawn his last breath
a little before one o'clock.  Remember that I saw this
thing myself....  Perhaps it was a dream—if so, we all
dreamed alike."

.. vspace:: 2

It was late.  The singing died away; the lights in
the village went out one by one.  The passage in the
Ahu Ahu reef is a bad place by daylight—the chances
were that no canoes would risk it till dawn.  Tari
struck a match for an instant and lay down on the mat
beside his wife.  In the little flare of light I saw her
sleeping in the unconscious manner of a child.

I know their story—a pretty one, in pleasant contrast
to the usual ignoble and transitory loves of white and
brown.  Apakura is the daughter of the principal
family of this island—her mother and father for many
years the warm friend of Tari.  He had petted the
child from the time she was three; she was always
on the beach to meet the canoe that brought him
ashore, and he, for his part, never forgot the small
gifts for which she waited with sparkling eyes.  On
his rambles about the island the little girl followed
Tari with the devotion of a dog; many a time, clambering
along the base of the cliffs at dawn, his first knowledge
of her presence came with the shrill cry of, "*Tiaké
mai, Tari!*" and he waited while his small follower
managed some difficult pile of coral in the rear.  Their
friendship had only Tari's two or three visits a year
to feed on, but neither forgot, and in the course of time,
as the child learned to read and write, a correspondence
began—very serious on her side, pleased and amused
on his.  When he went away to the war she was eleven—a
slim, dark-eyed child; when he returned she was
sixteen, and a woman, though he did not know it.

On this occasion, in the evening, when the rest of
the family had gone to bed, he sat talking with
Apakura's mother—or, rather, listening while the old
woman told one of her stories of life on Ahu Ahu,
equally fascinating and long drawn out.  It is not
difficult to reconstruct the scene in imagination—Tari
comfortable in bare feet and a *pareu*, half reclining
against the wall as he smoked his pipe in absent-minded
puffs; the woman cross-legged on the floor,
leaning forward in earnest speech—her voice rising,
falling, and dying to a whisper in the extraordinary
manner of the Polynesian teller of tales; her hands
from time to time falling simultaneously with a loud
slap to her knees, in emphasis of some point in the
narrative.  The story ended, little by little the mother
led the conversation to the subject of her daughter.
Tari began to praise the girl.

"What do you think of her," asked the old woman,
"now that you have been away these five years?"

"There is no other girl like her," said Tari.

"Since that is so, take her with you; we shall be
pleased, all of us—I in particular, who look on you
as a son.  She is a good girl; she can sew, she can
cook, and the young men say that she is beautiful."

"You propose that I take her as a wife?" exclaimed
the astonished Tari, to whom, in truth, the idea had
not occurred.

"Yes.  Why not?  You need a wife, now that the
little affair of Tukonini has blown over."

"But think, mamma—I am forty and the child is
sixteen; it is not fitting."

"Young wives are best if they are faithful; Apakura
will never look at another man."

"I will think it over," said Tari; "let us leave it so.
Not this year, at any rate—she is too young."

As he bade her good night and turned to go to his
sleeping place the old woman spoke again.

"Bear one thing in mind," she said, with a smile;
"it will help you to decide.  Consider, now and then,
the thought of my daughter married to another."

In the end, as is often the case, it was Apakura who
settled the matter.  Next morning Tari was busy with
some stock taking and did not board the schooner
till the last moment, or notice—in his preoccupation—the
mysterious smiles with which the crew greeted
him.  They were a dozen miles offshore before he
folded the last of his papers, lit a pipe, and went on
deck for a breath of air.  The old woman's last words
stuck unpleasantly in his mind, I fancy, as he stood
there smoking, with his back to the companionway.
All at once he saw the helmsman—an Ahu Ahu boy
he had known since childhood—lift his eyes from the
binnacle and grin from ear to ear; at the same moment
Tari felt a hand slip into his own, and heard a small,
familiar voice say, "I am here."  It was Apakura—more
serious than usual and a little frightened, but not
to be put off longer.  They were married in Tahiti a
fortnight later.

It was Apakura's voice that awakened me.  She
was leaning over the bulwark in eager conversation with
her mother, who had come off in the first canoe.  The
air was fresh with the cool of dawn; in the east the sky
was flushing behind scattered banks of trade-wind
clouds, tinted in wonderfully delicate shades of terra
cotta.  A dozen big outrigger canoes, of the type
peculiar to this island, were coming out through the
passage, each paddled by four men, who shouted as
their heavy craft dashed through the breakers.

Little by little, not at all after the manner of
traditional dawn in the tropics, the light increased, until
Ahu Ahu lay fully revealed before us—the smoking
reef, the shallow lagoon, and the cliffs, their summits
plumed with coconut palms.  A crowd of islanders was
already gathering on the reef, and I could see others
making their way down the steep path from the
settlement.  As the sun rose the colors of the scene
grew stronger—green palms, gray cliffs, white walls of
the village, pale blue of the sky, azure of the sea water.
There is no color in the world—that I have seen—like
the blue of the water off the Ahu Ahu reef; so vivid,
so intense, one felt that a tumbler of it, held up to the
sun, would be a mass of sapphire, or that a handkerchief
dipped in it would emerge strongly dyed.

Apakura was going ashore with her mother.  Standing
in the narrow canoe, she directed the stowing of her
luggage—a mat, a bright patchwork quilt, a box of
cedar wood.  Tari was awaiting the coming of the
traders, for the schooner was stocked with good Tahiti
rum, and the rites of welcome would take place on
board.

"There they are," he said, pointing to two white
figures wading gingerly across the shallow lagoon to the
reef; "you're going to meet a pair of rare
ones—they've been hard doers in their time!"

The distant figures reached the edge of the boat
passage and I could see a boy beckoning them into a
waiting canoe, but now they stopped and seemed to
argue, with many gestures.  Tari chuckled.

"No use trying to hurry them," he told me; "they
are discussing the loss of the *Esperanza*.  She went
ashore here in the late 'nineties—a full-rigged ship.
Peter was one of her crew; Charley had just come
here to trade, and saw the whole thing.  They've spent
twenty years thrashing out the question of whether
or not the wreck might have been avoided.  Every
morning, after breakfast, Charley strolls across to
Peter's house to smoke a pipe and discuss some of the
fine points; every evening, after tea, Peter returns the
visit, and the argument goes on till bedtime.  Charley's
an American—an old man now, close to seventy.
He put in thirty years on Hiva Oa, in the Marquesas,
before he came to Ahu Ahu; I'd like to have some of
his memories.  Notice his arms if he pulls his sleeves
up.  He has sixteen children on Hiva Oa and fourteen
here—all numbered; he says he never can remember
their heathen names.  When his wife died in the north
he gave all his land to the children and left on the
first schooner.  She touched at Papeete, but he didn't
go ashore.  Then she made Ahu Ahu, where he landed
and established himself a second time.  He has never
seen a motor car, a telephone, or an electric light."

Presently the canoe came dancing alongside, and
the two old men clambered painfully over the rail—Peter
thin, hatchet faced, and stooping; Charley the
ruin of a magnificent man.  He towered above any
of us on the deck—this ancient dweller among cannibals—still
erect, his head still carried proudly, but the
flesh hanging loose and withered on his bones.  It was
easy to fancy the admiration he must have inspired
forty years ago among the wild people, in whose eyes
physical strength and perfection were the great
qualities of a man.  In the cabin, while the cook squeezed
limes for the first of many rum punches, Charley took
off his tunic of white drill, and as he sat there in his
singlet I saw that his arms and chest, like his face,
were tanned to an indelible dull brown, and that
patterns in tattooing ran from wrist to
shoulder—greenish blue and barbaric.

I never learned his history—it must have been a
thing to stir the imagination.  Once, as we sat drinking,
Tari mentioned Stevenson, and the old man's face
brightened.

"*É*," he said, slowly, in native fashion, "I remember
him well; he came to Hiva Oa with the *Casco*.  A
funny fellow he was ... thin!  There was nothing to
him but skin and bones.  And questions—he'd ask
you a hundred in a minute!  I didn't take to him at
first, but he was all right.  He didn't care how he
dressed; one day I saw him walking on the beach
with nothing on but a pair of drawers."

The cook plied back and forth, removing empty
glasses and bringing full ones.  As each tray was set
on the table, Peter—typical of a lively and garrulous
old age—seized his glass and held it up.

"Hurrah!" he exclaimed.  "Down she goes," drawled
Charley, and Tari murmured, "Cheerio!"  At the end
of two hours Charley's eyes were beginning to glaze,
and Peter was mumbling vaguely of the *Esperanza*.
Tari rose and beckoned to me.

"Make yourselves at home," he said to the old men;
"I've got to go ashore.  Akatara will give you lunch
whenever you want it."

As our canoe made for the reef my companion told
me there was to be a feast in his honor, and that his
wife wished me to be present.  We shot into the
passage without a wetting; the people crowded about
Tari, laughing, shaking his hand, speaking all at
once—an unmistakable warmth of welcome.

The settlement, reached by a short, steep trail, lies
at the base of a break in the cliffs.  At the door of
her mother's house Apakura met us—turned out, as
becomes a supercargo's wife, in the choicest of trade
finery.  She wore heavy golden earrings; bands of
gold were on her fingers, and her loose frock was of
pale embroidered silk.  Her mother—the keen-eyed
old woman I had seen in the canoe—made me welcome.

In the afternoon, when the feast was over and we
rose stiffly, crammed with fish and taro and baked
pig, I asked Tari if he knew a youngster who would
show me the best path to the interior of the island.
A boy of ten was soon at the door—a dark-skinned
child with a great shock of hair, and legs disfigured by
the scars of old coral cuts.

A twisting path, cobbled, and wide enough to walk
two abreast, led us to the summit.  The stones were
worn smooth by the passage of bare feet, for, excepting
fish, all the food of the village is brought over this road
from the plantations to the sea.  There could be no
doubt that the ring of cliffs on which we stood was an
ancient reef; in places one could recognize the forms
of coral, imbedded, with shells of many varieties,
in the metamorphosed rock.  Here and there one
found pockets of a material resembling marble, veined
and crystalline—formed from the coral by processes
impossible to surmise.  The bulk of the rock is the
fine-grained white limestone called *makatea* in the
eastern Pacific.  The level summit of the cliffs, over
which, in centuries gone by, the sea had washed and
thundered, forms a narrow plain, sparsely wooded and
cultivated in spots where a thin soil has gathered in
the hollows.

We halted under the palms crowning the inner
brink.  The trail wound down giddily ahead—so steep
in places that ladders had been fastened to the rock.
To right and left of us the cliffs were sheer walls of
limestone, rising from a level little above that of the
sea.  The low hills of the interior, volcanic and fern
covered, draining in every direction toward the foot
of the *makatea*, have formed a circling belt of swamp
land, on which all the taro of the island was grown.
One could look down on the beds from where we stood,
a mosaic of pale green, laid out by heathen engineers
in days beyond the traditions of men.

Another time, perhaps, I will tell you of that
afternoon—how we climbed down the trail and walked the
dikes among the taro; how my escort increased to a
merry company as the people began to come after
food for the evening meal; of a boisterous swim in
a pool beneath a waterfall; of how I found the remains
of an ancient house, built of squared stone so long ago
that over one end of it the wooded earth lay two yards
deep.

Toward evening, in the bush at the edge of the taro
swamps, I came upon a large house, built of bamboo
and pandanus in the native fashion.  A man was
standing framed in the doorway—a tall, white man,
dressed in pajamas of silk.  His gold-rimmed spectacles,
gray beard, and expression of intelligent kindliness
were vaguely academic—out of place as the
cultivated voice which invited me to stop.  The boys
and girls escorting me squatted on their heels outside; a
brace of pretty children, shy and half naked, scurried
past as I entered the house.  My host waved his
hand toward a mat.  There was only one chair in the
room, standing before a table on which I saw a small
typewriter and a disordered heap of manuscript.
Otherwise the place was unfurnished except for books,
ranged in crude bookcases, tier upon tier, stacked here
and there in precarious piles, standing in rows along
the floor.

"I am glad to see you," he said, as he offered me a
cigarette from a case of basketwork silver; "it is not
often that a European passes my house."

I shall not give his name, or attempt to disguise
him with a fictitious one; it is enough to say that he is
one of the handful of real scholars who have devoted
their lives to Polynesian research.  I had read his
books, published long before, and wondered—more
than once—whether he still lived and where he hid
himself.  The years of silence had been spent (he told
me) in a comparative study of the ocean dialects
through which he hoped to solve the riddle of the
Pacific—to determine whence came the brown and
straight-haired people of the islands.  Now, with the
material in hand, he had chosen Ahu Ahu as a place
of solitude, where he might complete his task of
compilation undisturbed.

"On the whole," he said, with agreeable readiness to
speak of his work, "I am convinced that they came
from the west.  The Frenchman's theory that the
race originated in New Zealand, like the belief that
they migrated westward from the shores of America,
is more picturesque, more stirring to the imagination;
but the evidence is too vague.  If one investigates the
possibilities of an eastward migration, on the other
hand, one finds everywhere in the western islands the
traces of their passage.  Far out in the Orient, in isolated
groups, off the coast of Sumatra, about Java and
Celebes, and in the Arafura Sea, I can show you people
of the true Polynesian type.  Even in such places,
where the last migration must have passed nearly
two thousand years ago, scraps of evidence remain—a
word, a curious custom, the manner of carrying a
basket.  These things might seem coincidences if the
trail did not grow warmer as one travels east.

"Though no trace of their blood is left, New Guinea
must at one time have been a halting place in the
migration.  Papua it is called, and one finds the word
current in Polynesia, meaning a garden, a rich land.
The natives of New Guinea are as unlike the people
of the eastern Pacific, I should say, as the average
American or Englishman, and yet throughout New
Guinea there is a most curious cropping out of
Polynesian words, pointing to a very ancient intercourse
between the races.  Consider the word for woman
among the Polynesians.  In Rarotonga, it is *vaine*; in
Tahiti, *vahine*; in the Marquesas, *vehine*; in Hawaii,
*wahine*; in Samoa, *fafine*.  The same root runs through
the dialects of Papua.  In Motu, woman is *habine*;
in Kerepunu, *vavine*; in Aroma, *babine*; and in Motumotu
it is *ua*, which in this part of the Pacific means,
variously, female, seed, and rain.  I could cite you
dozens of similar examples.  Now and then one comes
across something that sets one's imagination to work
... as you must know, the word for sun in the islands
is *ra*, but in Tahiti they have another word, *mahana*.
In New Guinea, thirty-five hundred miles away, and
with all Melanesia between, the tribes of the South
Cape call the sun *mahana*.  What a puzzle it is!

"Though it may be the merest coincidence, that *ra*
has a flavor of Egypt.  I wonder if there could be a
connection?  I used to know a girl in Tahiti whose
strange and rather beautiful name—hereditary as far
back as the records of her family went—was that of a
queen of Egypt who ruled many hundreds of years
before Christ.  But I mustn't ride my hobby too fast.

"It is a pity you can't stop on Ahu Ahu for a time—there
are not many islands so unspoiled.  I've grown
very fond of the place; I doubt if I ever leave it
permanently.  If you are interested in ghosts, you had
better change your mind.  I have a fine collection
here; the house is built on the site of a tumble-down
*marae*.  There is our white rooster, the spirit of an
old chief, which appears during the new moon—perfectly
harmless and friendly, but the people rather
dread him.  Then we have a ghostly pig, very bad
indeed; and a pair of malignant women, who walk
about at night with arms and long hair entwined, and
are suspected of ghastly appetites.  I shall not say
whether or not I have seen any of these; perhaps it is
living too much alone, but I am not so skeptical as I
was...."

It was not easy to part with such a host, but the sun
was low over the *makatea*, and the prospect of crossing
the dikes among the taro and scaling the cliff by dark
drove me at last to take reluctant leave.

Lamps were shining in the village when I returned;
in some of the houses I heard the voice of the father,
reading aloud solemnly from the Bible in the native
tongue; in others, the people were assembled to chant
their savage and melancholy hymns.  Tari was alone
on the veranda, smoking in his absent-minded fashion,
and motioned me to sit down beside him.  I told him
how I had spent the afternoon.  When I had finished
he puffed on in silence for a time.

"It is a strange place, Ahu Ahu," he said at last
"My mother-in-law has finished her prayers, sung her
*himines*, and put away the family Bible.  Now she
has gone to the house of one of her pals for a session
with old Rakamoana.  Like the land itself, the people
are relics of an elder time—pure heathen at heart."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`A Memory of Mauké`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER V


.. class:: center medium bold

   A Memory of Mauké

.. vspace:: 2

We sighted Mauké at dawn.  The cabin
lamp was still burning when the boy
brought my coffee; I drank it, lit a
cigarette, and went on deck in a *pareu*.
The skipper himself was at the wheel;
half a dozen men were in the shrouds; the native
passengers were sitting forward, cross-legged in little
groups, munching ship's biscuit and gazing ahead for
the expected land.

The day broke wild and gray, with clouds scudding
low over the sea, and squalls of rain.  Since we had
left Mangaia, the day before, it had blown heavily from
the southeast; a big sea was running, but in spite of
sixty tons of copra the schooner was reeling off the
knots in racing style, running almost free, with the
wind well aft of the beam, rising interminably on the
back of each passing sea, and taking the following
slope with a swoop and a rush.  We had no log; it
was difficult to guess our position within a dozen miles;
the low driving clouds, surrounding us like a curtain,
made it impossible to see more than a few hundred
yards.  Until an observation could be obtained, the
landfall was a matter of luck and guesswork.  Our
course had been laid almost due north-northeast—to
pass a little to the west of Mauké—which gave us the
chance of raising Mitiaro or Atiu if we missed the first
island; but ocean currents are uncertain things, and
with a horizon limited to less than half a mile, nothing
would be easier than to slip past the trio of low islands
and into the stretch of lonely ocean beyond.  Every
trading skipper is accustomed to face such situations;
one can only maintain a sharp lookout and hold on
one's course until there is an opportunity to use the
sextant, or until it becomes obvious that the land has
been passed.

A squall of rain drove down on us; for five minutes,
while we shivered and the scuppers ran fresh water, our
narrow circle of vision was blotted out.  Then
suddenly, with the effect of a curtain drawn aside, the
clouds broke to the east, flooding the sea with light.
A shout went up.  Close ahead and to starboard, so
near that we could see the white of breakers on the reef,
was Mauké—densely wooded to the water's edge, a
palm top rising here and there above the thick bush of
iron woods.  Next moment the curtain descended;
gray clouds and rearing seas surrounded us; it was as
though we had seen a vision of the land, unreal as the
blue lakes seen at midday on the desert.  But the
skipper was shouting orders in harsh Mangaian; the
schooner was swinging up into the wind, the blocks
were clicking and purring as half a dozen boys swayed
on the mainsheet.

Presently the land took vague form through the mist
of squalls; we were skirting the reef obliquely, drawing
nearer the breakers as the settlement came in view.
A narrow boat passage, into which an ugly surf was
breaching, had been blasted through the hard coral
of the reef; a path led up the sloping land beyond,
between a double row of canoe houses to the bush.
A few people were gathering by the canoe houses; it
was evident that we had just been sighted, and that it
would be some time before a boat could put out, if,
indeed, the boatmen were willing to risk the surf.
Meanwhile we could only stand off and on until they
came out to us, for the skipper had no intention of
risking his ship's boat and the lives of his men on such
a forbidding shore.  "*Arari!*" he sang out, dwelling
long on the last syllable of this Cook Island version
of "hard alee."  The schooner rounded in to the wind
with a ponderous deliberation calculated to make the
nerves of a fair-weather sailor twitch; she seemed to
hesitate, like a fat and fluttering grandmother; at last,
after an age of bobbing and ducking into the head sea,
while boom tackles were made fast and headsails
backed, she made up her mind, and filled away on the
port tack.

Riley, the American coconut planter, who was
recruiting labor for the season on his island, turned to
me with a wink.  "If this old hooker was mine," he
remarked in a voice meant to reach the skipper's ears,
"I'd start the engine every time I came about; she
can't sail fast enough to keep steerageway!"

The skipper sniffed a British sniff; they are old
friends.  "If this damn fine schooner was yours," he
observed, without turning his head, "she'd have been
piled up long ago—like as not in broad daylight, on an
island a thousand feet high."

Riley chuckled.  "Too early for an argument," he
said.  "Let's go below and have a drink."

I have not often run across a more interesting man
than Riley.  Thrown together, as he and I have been,
in circumstances which make for an unusual exchange
of confidence, I have learned more of him in two
months than one knows of many an old acquaintance
at home.  At thirty-five years of age he is a living
object lesson for those who bewail the old days of
adventure and romance, and wish that their lives had
been cast in other times.  His blood is undiluted Irish;
he has the humor, the imagination, the quick sympathy
of the race, without the Irish heritage of instability.
Born in South Boston and reared with only the
sketchiest of educations, he set out to make his way
in the world at an age when most boys are playing
marbles and looking forward with dread to the study
of algebra.  For fifteen years he wandered, gathering
a varied background of experience.  He worked in
mills; he drifted west and shipped as cabin boy on
vessels plying the Great Lakes; he drifted farther west
to become a rider of the range.  Finally he reached
San Francisco and took to the sea.  He has been a
sealer, an Alaska fisherman, an able-bodied seaman on
square-riggers sailing strange seas.  He has seen Cape
Horn and the Cape of Good Hope; he speaks of the
ports of India, China, Africa, the Java Sea, as you
would speak of Boston or New York.

In the days when a line of schooners ran from San
Francisco to Tahiti, touching at the Marquesas on the
way, he felt a call to the South Seas, and shipped for a
round trip before the mast.  When he returned to San
Francisco a change seemed to have come over him;
the old, wandering life had lost its charm—had gone
flat and stale.  Like many another, he had eaten of the
wild plantain unaware.  The evenings of carousal
ashore no longer tempted him; even the long afternoons
of reading (for reading has always been this
curious fellow's chief delight), stretched on his bed in a
sailor's boarding house, had lost their flavor—the
print blurred before his eyes, and in its place he saw
lands of savage loveliness rising from a warm blue sea;
shadowy and mysterious valleys, strewn with the relics
of a forgotten race; the dark eyes of a girl in Tai-o-Hae.

Remember that Riley was both a sailor and an
Irishman—a rough idealist, keenly susceptible to
beauty and the sense of romance.  It is stated that the
men who live romance are seldom aware of it; this
may be true, though I doubt it—certainly in Riley's
case the theory does not work out.  He is the most
modest of men, untainted by a trace of egoism; in
his stories, superbly told with the Irish gift for
circumstantial detail and dramatic effect, the teller's part
is always small.  And yet as one listens, thrilled by the
color and artistry of the tale, one is all the while aware
that this man appraises his memories at their full
value—reviews them with a ripened gusto, an ever-fresh
appreciation.  In short, he is one of those fortunate,
or unfortunate, men for whom realities, as most of us
know them, do not exist; men whose eyes are incapable
of seeing drab or gray, who find mystery and fresh
beauty in what we call the commonplace.

It is scarcely necessary to say that Riley was aboard
the next schooner bound south for the islands.
Nukuhiva knew him for a time, but the gloom and tragedy
of that land—together with an episode of domestic
infelicity—were overpowering to a man of his
temperament.  From the Marquesas he went to Tahiti, and
his wanderings ended in the Cook group, six hundred
miles to the West.  Perhaps the finding of his journey's
end wrought the change, perhaps it was due to his rather
practical Tahitian wife—in any case, the wanderer
ceased to rove, the spendthrift began to save and plan.
In the groups to the eastward he had picked up a
smattering of coconut lore; it was not long before he got a
berth as superintendent of a small plantation.  With a
native wife and the Irishman's knack for languages, he
soon mastered the dialect of his group; he is one of a
very few men who speak it with all the finer shadings.
This accounts in part for his success with labor—the
chief difficulty of the planter throughout Polynesia.
To one interested as I am in the variations of this
oceanic tongue, it is a genuine pleasure to talk with
Riley.  In school he learned to read and write; beyond
that he is entirely self-educated.  A good half of his
earnings, I should say, in the days when he followed
the sea, were spent on books; a native intelligence
enabled him to criticize and select; he has read
enormously, and what he has read he has remembered.
Each time a new subject attracted him he hastened to
the book shops of San Francisco, or Liverpool, or
Singapore, and gathered a little forecastle library of
reference.  Like most intelligent men in this part of
the world, he has grown interested in the subject of
Polynesian research; it is odd to hear him discuss—with
a strong accent of South Boston and the manner
of a professor of ethnology—some question of Maori
chronology, or the variations in a causative prefix.
Once he made clear to me a matter often referred to in
print, but which I had never properly understood.
He was speaking of the language of Tahiti.

"When you hear a Tahitian talk," he said, "it
sounds different, but really it's the same as Hawaiian,
or Marquesan, or Rarotongan, or New Zealand Maori.
Tahiti is the oldest settled place, and the language
has kind of rotted away there.  Nowadays the Tahitian
has lost the strong, harsh sounds of the old lingo,
the *k* and *ng*; in place of them there is simply a catch
between two vowels.  If you know Rarotongan and
understand the system of change, you can get on all
right in Tahiti.  Take our word *akatangi*—to play a
musical instrument.  *Tangi* means 'wail' or 'weep';
*aka* is the old causative prefix; the combination means
'cause to weep.'  Now let's figure that word out in
Tahitian.  First we've got to take out the *k* and *ng*;
that leaves a bad start—it doesn't sound good, so the
Tahitians stick on an *f* at the beginning.  That's
all there is to it; *fa'ata'i* is the word.  It makes me
laugh to think of when I first came down here.  I was
working in Tahiti, and when I came home in the
evening my girl would look up from her sewing and
sing out, 'O Riley!'  'For the love of Mike,' I'd tell
her, 'don't you know my name yet?  It's Riley, not
O'Riley!'  Finally I caught on; I'd been fooled on the
same proposition as Cook and all the rest of them.
You remember they called the island Otahiti.  That O
is simply a special form of the verb used before
personal pronouns and proper nouns.  The old navigators,
when the canoes came out to meet them, pointed to the
land and asked its name.  'O Tahiti' said the natives
('It is Tahiti').  My girl didn't mean to call me
O'Riley at all; she was simply saying, 'It's Riley.'"

A serious white man, particularly when he is able to
recruit and handle native labor, is always in demand
in the islands; it was not long before Riley's talents
were recognized; now he is manager and part owner
of an entire atoll.  I have listened with a great deal of
interest to his accounts of the life there.  Every year,
at about Christmas time, a schooner comes to load
his copra and take his boys back to their respective
islands.  Not a soul is left on the atoll; Riley boards
the schooner with his wife and takes passage to Papeete
for a couple of months of civilization.  When the time
is up he makes a tour of the Cook group to recruit
twenty or thirty boys for the new season, and is landed
on his island with a nine months' supply of medicine,
provisions, and reading matter.  He is the only white
man on the atoll; one would suppose such a life deadly
monotonous and lonely, but just now he is pining to get
back.  It is really the pleasantest of lives, he says;
enough routine in keeping the men properly at work,
superb fishing when one desires a touch of sport,
plenty of time to read and think, the healthiest climate
in the world, and a bit of trouble now and then to give
the spice a true Irishman needs.

Riley is a man of medium size, with thick brown hair
and eyes of Celtic dark blue, perpetually sparkling with
humor.  I have never seen a stronger or more active
man of his weight; on his atoll he spends an hour every
day in exercise, running, jumping, working with
dumbbells and Indian clubs.  From head to foot he is
burnt a deep, ruddy brown—a full shade darker than
the tint of his native wife.  Sometimes, he says, he
works himself into such a pink of condition that he
aches to pick a fight with the first comer, but I fancy
he finds trouble enough to satisfy another man.  Once
a huge, sullen fellow from the Gambier group attempted
to spear him, and Riley called all of his men in from
their work, appointed the foreman referee, and beat
the two-hundred-and-twenty-pound native fierce and
lithe and strong as a tiger—slowly and scientifically,
to a pulp.  On another occasion, a half-savage boy,
from a far-off island of the southern Paumotus, took a
grudge against the manager and bided his time with
the cunning of a wild animal.  The chance came one
afternoon when Riley was asleep in the shade behind
his house.  The Paumotan stole up with a club and
put him still sounder asleep with a blow on the head
that laid his scalp open and nearly fractured his skull.
Half a dozen kicks from the ball of a toughened foot
stove in the ribs on one side of his chest; with that,
the native left his victim, very likely thinking him dead.
Riley's wife, from whom I got the story, was asleep
in the house at the time; toward evening she went to
look for her husband, and found him stretched out,
bloody and unconscious, on the sand.  In spite of her
agitation—her kind are not much use in a crisis—she
managed to get him to the house and revive him.
Riley's first act was to drink half a tumbler of whisky;
his second, to send for the foreman.  The Paumotan
boy had disappeared; overcome by forebodings of
evil, he had taken a canoe and paddled off to hide
himself on an uncleared islet across the lagoon.  Riley
gave the foreman careful instructions; early in the
morning he was to take all the boys and spend the day,
if necessary, in running down the fugitive, who under
no circumstances was to be injured or roughly handled.

They brought the boy in at noon—deadly afraid at
first, sullen and relieved when he learned his
punishment was no worse than to stand up to the manager
before the assembled plantation hands.  It must have
been a grievous affair; Tetua could scarcely describe
it without tears.  Riley was still sick and dizzy; his
ribs were taped so tightly that he could breathe with
only half his lungs, and a two-inch strip of plaster
covered the wound on his head.  The Paumotan was
fresh and unhurt; he outweighed his antagonist by
twenty pounds, and fought with confidence and
bitterness.  The Kanaka is certainly among the strongest
men of the world, a formidable adversary in a
rough-and-tumble fight.  It went badly with Riley for a time;
the boy nearly threw him, and a blow on his broken
ribs almost made him faint, but in the end—maddened
by pain and the thought of the treacherous attack—he
got his man down and might have killed him if the
foreman and half a dozen others had not intervened.

Riley's island is a true atoll—a broad lagoon
inclosed by an oval sweep of reef along which are
scattered islets of varying size.  Many people must have
lived on it in the past; everywhere there are traces of
man's occupation.  A dozen inhabitants were there
within the memory of living men, but the dead
outnumbered the living too heavily—the place became
unbearable to them, and in the end a schooner took
them away.

The outlying Cook Islands are places full of interest.
I determined, when I began this letter, to give you a
real account of Mauké—the island itself, its people, the
number of tons of copra produced annually, and other
enlightening information.  But somehow, when one
begins to write of this part of the world it seems a
hopeless task to stick to a train of facts—there are too
many diverging lines of fancy; too many intangible
stimuli to thought, stirring to the imagination.

Our landing on Mauké was a ticklish business, Like
Mangaia, Mitiaro, and Atiu, this island is of mixed
volcanic and raised-coral origin—the pinnacle of a
submerged peak, ringed with millions of tons of coral,
and without any lagoon worthy of the name.  The
polyps have built a sort of platform around the land,
low inshore and highest—as seems usually the case—just
before it drops off into the sea.  Breaching across
the outer ridge, the surf fills a narrow belt of shallows
between it and the shore; the result is a miniature
edition of a lagoon—a place of rocky pools where
children wade knee-deep, on the lookout for crayfish and
baby octopus.  On the outer edge the reef is steep,
too, dropping off almost at the perpendicular.  It is
difficult to realize, when one has been brought up on the
friendly coasts of America, that if a boat capsizes off
these reefs one must swim offshore and wait to be
picked up—that it is wiser to chance the sharks than
to attempt a landing in the surf, for the sea is breaking
along the summit of a sunken cliff—jagged and sharp
as broken glass, poisonous as the venom of a snake.

They came out to us in a whaleboat; Riley, the
supercargo, and I were the first to go ashore.  As we
pulled away from the schooner a high-pitched
argument began.  One of the principal men of the island
had come out as a passenger and was sitting beside
me.  He insisted that as they had got off safely from
the boat passage it was best to return the same way.
The boat steerer disagreed; it was all very well to
put out from the passage, with a score of men to hold
the boat until the moment came, and launch her out
head-on to the breakers, but now the situation was
different; the passage was narrow; it must be entered
just so, and a mishap might have unpleasant
consequences in such a surf.  The steersman had the best
of it; he took us a quarter of a mile beyond the
passage, and let his men rest on their oars off a place where
the reef seemed a little lower than elsewhere.

Each time we swung up to the crest of a swell I got
a look at the surf, and the prospect was not reassuring.
Once or twice, as the backwash poured off in a frothy
cascade, I caught a glimpse of the coral—reddish-black,
jagged and forbidding.  Little by little we drew
near the land until the boat lay just where the waves
began to tower for the final rush; the oarsmen backed
water gently—the boat steerer turned his head
nervously this way and that, glancing at the reef ahead
and at the rearing water behind.  I thought of a day,
many years before, when my father had taken me for a
first experience of the "chutes," and our little boat
seemed to pause for an instant at the summit of the
tower before it tilted forward and flew down the steep
slope to the water—infinitely far off and below.  The
feeling was the same—fear mingling with delight, an
almost painful exhilaration.

All of us, saving the watchful figure in the stern,
were waiting for a signal which would make the
oarsmen leap into activity, the passengers clench their
teeth and grip the rail.  Suddenly it came—a harsh
shout.  Six oars struck the water at once; the
whaleboat gathered way; a big sea rose behind us, lifted us
gently on its back, and swept us toward the reef.
Next moment I saw that we had started a breath too
late.  We were going like the wind, it was true, but not
tilted forward on the crest as we should have been;
the wave was gradually passing beneath us.  Riley
glanced at me and shook his head with a humorous
turndown of the mouth.  It was too late to stop—the
men were pulling desperately, their long oars bending
at every stroke.  When the sea broke we were slipping
down into the trough behind; as we passed over the
edge of the reef the wave was beginning its backward
wash.  There were shouts; I found myself up to my
waist in a foaming rush of water, struggling with might
and main to keep my footing and to hold the boat from
slipping off into the sea.  We stopped her just on the
brink; her keel grated on the coral; another sea was
coming at us, towering high above our heads.  Riley,
the supercargo, and I leaped aboard in response to a
sharp command.  The boys held her stern-on to the
last; as they scrambled over the sides the sea caught
us, half swamping the boat and lifting her stern high
in the air.  She tilted wildly as her bow crashed on the
coral, but a rare piece of luck saved her from turning
broadside on.  Next moment we were over the reef
and gliding smoothly into the shallow water beyond.
As I drew a long, satisfying breath I heard Riley
chuckle.  "I think I'll get a job diving for shell,"
he remarked.  "I'll swear I haven't breathed for a
good three minutes!"

When we stood on the beach a dozen men came
forward, smiling, to greet their friend Rairi.  With a
decently pronounceable name—from the native
standpoint—Riley has got off easily; I never tire of
wondering what these people will call a white man.  They
seem to prefer the surname if it can be pronounced;
if not, they try the given name, and Charley becomes
Teari, or Johnny, Tioni.  If this fails, or if they take
a dislike to one, the fun begins.  I have a friend who,
unless he leaves the islands, will be called Salt Pork
all his life; and I know another man—a second-rate
colonial of the intolerant kind—who goes blissfully
about his business all unaware that hundreds of people
know him by no other name than Pig Dung.  No
doubt you have noticed another thing down here—the
deceptive simplicity of address.  In these eastern
islands the humblest speaks to the most powerful
without any title of respect, with nothing corresponding
to our "mister" or "sir."  At first one is inclined to
believe that here is the beautiful and ideal democracy—the
realization of the communist's dream—and there
are other things which lead to the same conclusion.
Servants, for one example, are treated with extraordinary
consideration and kindliness; when the feast is
over the mistress of the household is apt as not to
dance with the man who feeds her pigs, or the head
of the family to take the arm of the girl who has been
waiting on his guests.  The truth is that this
impression of equality is false; there are not many places
in the world where a more rigid social order exists—not
of caste, but of classes.  In the thousand or
fifteen hundred years that they have inhabited the
islands the Polynesians have worked out a system of
human relationships nearer the ultimate, perhaps,
than our own idealists would have us believe.  Wealth
counts for little, birth for everything; it is useless for an
islander to think of raising himself in a social way—where
he is born he dies, and his children after him.
On the other hand, except for the abstract pleasure of
position, there is little to make the small man envious
of the great; he eats the same food, his dress is the
same, he works as little or as much, and the relations
between the two are of the pleasantest.  There is a
really charming lack of ostentation in these islands,
where everything is known about everyone, and it is
useless to pretend to be what one is not.  That is at
the root of it all—here is one place in the world, at
least, where every man is sure of himself.

We were strolling up the path between the canoe
houses when Riley stopped me.  "Come and have a
look," he said; "this is the only island I know of where
you can see an old-fashioned double canoe."

There were two of them in the shed we entered,
under a roof of battered galvanized iron—long, graceful
hulls fashioned from the trunks of trees, joined in
pairs by timbers of ironwood laid across the gunwales
and lashed down with sinnet.  They were beautifully
finished—scraped smooth and decorated with carving.
In these craft, my companion told me, the men of
Mauké still voyage to Atiu and Mitiaro, as they had
done for generations before Cook sailed through the
group.  There is an ancient feud between Mauké
and Atiu; it is curious how hard such grudges die.
The men of Atiu were the most warlike of all the
Cook Islanders; even in these times of traders and
schools and missionaries no firearms are allowed on
the island.  Time after time, in the old days, they
raided Mauké, stealing by night upon the sleeping
villages, entering each house to feel the heads of the
sleepers.  When they felt the large head of a warrior
they seized his throat and killed him without noise;
the children and women—the small heads and the
heads with long hair—were taken back alive to Atiu.
Terrible scenes have been enacted under the old
ironwoods of Mauké, when the raiders, maddened with the
heat of killing, danced in the firelight about the opened
ovens and gorged on the bodies of the slain; for the
Cook-Islanders, excepting perhaps the people of
Aitutaki, were cannibals as fierce as the Maoris of New
Zealand or the tawny savages of the Marquesas.  Why
should Aitutaki have bred a gentler and finer people?
The group is not widely scattered as islands go; there
must have been fighting and intermarriage for ages past.
Yet any man who has been here long can tell you at a
glance from which island a native hails; even after my
few weeks I am beginning to have an eye for the
differences.  The Mangaian is certainly the most distinct,
recognizable at once by his dark skin, his wide, ugly
mouth, his uncouth and savage manner.  The full-blooded
Rarotongan, who will soon be a rarity, is
another type—handsome in a square-cut leonine way,
with less energy and far more dignity of presence.
The people of Aitutaki are different still—fair as the
average Tahitian, and pleasing in features and manner;
I have seen girls from that island who would be called
beautiful in any country.  These differences are not
easy to account for, it seems to me, when one considers
that the islanders are all of one race, tracing their
ancestry back to common sources and speaking a
common tongue.

The trader, a friend of Riley's, took us to his house
for lunch.  The day was Sunday and a feast was
already preparing, so we were spared the vocal agonies
of the pig.  Times must be changing—I have seen very
few traders of the gin-drinking type one expects to
find in the South Seas; nowadays they seem to be
rather quiet, reflective men, who like to read and play
their phonographs in the evening, and drink excellent
whisky with soda from a sparklet bottle.  This one
was no exception; I found him full of intelligence and
a dreamy philosophy which kept him content in this
forgotten corner of the world.  He was young and
English; there were cricket bats and blazers in his
living room, and shelves filled with the kind of books
one can read over and over again.  He was pessimistic
over Riley's chances of getting men—the people of
Mauké were growing lazier each year, he said, and
seemed to get along with less and less of the European
things for which, at one time, they had worked.  As
for copra, they no longer bothered much with it; the
nuts were left to sprout under the palms.  The taro
patches were running down; the coffee and breadfruit
dropped off the trees unpicked; the oranges, which
brought a good price when a vessel came to take them
off, were allowed to drop and rot.

As we sat smoking after lunch, a native boy came
in, with a vague air of conspiracy, to hold a whispered
conversation with Riley.  When he had gone the
American winked at our host and turned to me.

"There's a beer tub going full blast out in the bush,"
he said.  "I think I'll drop in on them and see if I
can pick up a man or two.  You'd better come along."

Liquor is prohibited to the natives throughout the
Cook Islands; even the white man must buy it from
the government in quantities regulated by the
judgment of the official in charge.  The manufacture of
anything alcoholic is forbidden, but this latter law is
administered with a certain degree of tolerance.
Fortunately for everyone concerned, the art of making
palm toddy has never been introduced; when the Cook-Islander
feels the need of mild exhilaration he takes
to the bush and brews a beverage known as orange beer.
The ingredients are sugar, orange juice, and yeast—the
recipe would prove popular, I fancy, in our own
orange-growing states.  The story goes that when the
Cook Island boys went overseas to war they found a
great drought prevailing in their eastern field of
action—Palestine, I think it was.  But there were oranges
in plenty, and these untutored islanders soon showed
the Tommies a trick that brought them together like
brothers.  I have tasted orange beer at all stages
(even the rare old vintage stuff, bottled two or three
months before) and found it not at all difficult to take;
there are worse varieties of tipple, though this one is
apt to lead to fighting, and leaves its too-enthusiastic
devotee with a headache of unusual severity.

We found fifteen or twenty men assembled under an
old utu tree; a dance ended as we drew near, and the
cup was being passed.  Two five-gallon kerosene tins,
with the tops cut off and filled with the bright-yellow
beer, stood in the center of the group.  Women are
never present on these occasions, which correspond, in
a way, to Saturday evenings in a club at home.  A sort
of rude ceremonial—a relic, perhaps, of kava-drinking
days—is observed around the beer tub.  The oldest
man present, armed with a heavy stick, is appointed
guardian of the peace, to see that decency and order are
preserved; the natives realize, no doubt, that any
serious disturbance might put an end to their fun.
The single cup is filled and passed to each guest in
turn; he must empty it without taking breath.  After
every round one of the drinkers is expected to rise and
entertain the company with a dance or a song.

Riley was welcomed with shouts; he was in a gay
mood and when we had had our turns at the cup he
stripped off his tunic for a dance.  He is a famous
dancer; unhampered by the native conventions, he
went through the figures of *heiva*, *otea*, and *ura*—first
the man's part, then the woman's—while the men of
Mauké clapped their hands rhythmically and choked
with laughter.  No wonder Riley gets on with the
people; there is not an ounce of self-consciousness in
him—he enters into a bit of fun with the good-natured
abandon of a child.  As for dancing, he is wonderful;
every posture was there, every twist and wriggle and
flutter of the hands—what old Bligh called, with
delightful, righteous gusto, the "wanton gestures" of the
*heiva*.

Riley had told his friends on the beach that he was
on the lookout for labor; by this time, probably, the
whole island knew he was on his way to the atoll and
that he needed men.  Before we took leave of the
drinkers three of them had agreed to go with my
companion.  The sea was calmer now, and, since
Riley's wife was on the schooner, we decided to go
aboard for dinner.  Four more recruits were waiting
by the canoe houses to sign on—it was odd to see their
response to the Irishman's casual offer when half the
planters of the group declare that labor is unobtainable.

The whaleboat was waiting in the passage.  It was
evening.  The wind had dropped; the sky overhead
was darkening; out to the west the sun had set behind
banks of white cloud rimmed with gold.  The oarsmen
took their places; friendly hands shot us out in a lull
between two breakers; we passed the surf and pulled
offshore toward where the schooner was riding an easy
swell, her lights beginning to twinkle in the dusk.





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   Rutiaro

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   CHAPTER VI

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   Rutiaro

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Chance began to move of set purpose
in Papeete, on the day I was to sail with
the one-hundred-and-ten-ton schooner,
*Caleb S. Winship*, for the Cloud of
Islands.  I was on my way to the water
front, and, having plenty of time, walked leisurely,
thinking of the long journey so nearly at hand, of the
strange and lonely islands I was to see, and wondering,
as an Anglo-Saxon must when presented with a piece of
good fortune, what I had done to merit it.  Oro, the
cabin boy of the *Winship*, was following with my luggage.
He kept at some distance, a mark of respect, as I
thought, until I saw him sublet his contract to a smaller
boy.  Then he retired to spend the unearned increment
in watermelon and a variety of cakes sold at the
Chinese stalls along the street.  Not wanting him to
think that I begrudged him his last little fling on shore,
I became interested of a sudden in the contents of a
shop window, and there I saw a boxful of marbles.
In a moment Oro was forgotten.  Papeete faded from
view, and the warm air, fragrant with the odors of
vanilla and roasting coffee, became more bracing.
There was a tang in it, like that of early April, in
Iowa, for example, at the beginning of the
marble-playing season.  Fifteen years dropped lightly from my
shoulders and I was back at the old rendezvous in the
imagination, almost as really as I had ever been in the
flesh.  The lumber yard of S. M. Brown & Son lay
on the right hand and the Rock Island Railroad tracks
on the left.  Between, on a stretch of smooth cinder
right of way, a dozen games were in full swing.  There
were cries of, "Picks and vents!" "Bunchers!"
"Sneakers!" "Knucks down!" the sharp crack of
expert shots; the crunch of cinders under bare and yet
tender feet.  Meadow larks were singing in a nearby
pasture, and from afar I heard the deep whistle of
the Rocky Mountain Limited as it came down the
Mitchellville grade.

I bought the marbles—the whole box of them.
They cost fifty francs, about four dollars American,
as the exchange was then, but I considered the
investment a good one.  I knew that, no matter where I
might be, to lift the lid of my box was to make an
immediate and inexpensive journey back to one of the
pleasantest periods of boyhood.  Oro was awaiting
me at the quay, and carried my small sea chest on
board with an air of spurious fatigue.  I gave him my
purchase and told him to stow it away for me in the
cabin, which he did with such care that I did not find
it again until we were within view of Rutiaro.  The
*Caleb S. Winship* was homeward bound then, from
Tanao, where we had left Crichton, the English planter.
Rutiaro lying on our course, it was decided to put in
there in the hope that we might be able to replace our
lost deck cargo of copra, washed overboard in a squall
a few days previously.

Neither Findlay's *South Pacific Directory* nor the
*British Admiralty Sailing Directions* had much to say
about the atoll.  Both agreed that the lagoon is nine
miles long by five broad, and that on June 29, 1887,
the French surveying vessel, *St. Etienne*, found the
tide running through a narrow pass at two knots per
hour, the flood as swift as the ebb.  It was further
stated that in 1889 Her Majesty's ship, *Prince Edward*,
anchored in eight fathoms, three hundred yards from
shore in front of the village, which is situated on the
most westerly island; and that a few pigs and chickens
were purchased at a nominal price from the inhabitants.
With this information I had to be content in so far as
my reading was concerned.  There was nothing of a
later date in either volume, and the impression I had
was that the atoll, having been charted and briefly
described, had remained unvisited, almost forgotten,
for a period of thirty-one years.

This, of course, was not the case.  Tinned beef and
kerosene oil had followed the flag there as elsewhere
in the world.  Religion, in fact, had preceded it,
leaving a broad wake of Bibles and black mother-hubbards
still in evidence among the older generation.
But skippers of small trading schooners are rarely
correspondents of the hydrographic associations, and
the "reports from the field" of itinerant missionaries
are buried in the dusty files of the religious journals,
so that Rutiaro is as little known to the world at large
as it has always been.  Findlay's general remarks about
it were confined to a single sentence, "A lonely atoll,
numbering a population of between seventy-five and
one hundred inhabitants."  It certainly looked lonely
enough on the chart, far out on the westerly fringe of the
archipelago, more than six hundred miles from the
nearest steamship route, and that one infrequently
traveled.  I sought further information from
Tino-a-Tino, the supercargo, a three-quarters American
despite his Tahitian name.  He had been trading in
the Low Islands for twenty years, and during that time
had created a voluminous literature with reference to
their inhabitants.  But it was all of an occupational
nature and confined to the ledgers of the Inter-Island
Trading Company.  I found him at his usual task in
the cabin, where he gave me some specimen compositions
for criticism.

"I wish you'd look them over," he said.  "These
copra bugs drive a man wild.  They get in your eyes,
in your liquor, in your mouth—Lord!  What a life!"

The cabin was filled with unsacked copra to the
level of the upper tier of bunks.  One had to crawl
in on hands and knees.  The copra bugs were something
of a nuisance, and the smell and heat oppressive.
I had traveled on more comfortable vessels, with
tennis courts on the boat decks and Roman swimming
baths below—but they didn't touch at Rutiaro.

I went through his accounts, verifying long lists of
items, such as:

.. vspace:: 2

::

   To Terii Tuahu, Dr.,
       1 dozen beacon lanterns............at 480 frs....Frs. 480
   To Ohiti Poene, Dr.,
       12 sacks Lily-Dust flour...........at 300 frs....Frs. 3600
   To Low Hung Chin, Dr.,
       1 gross Night-King flash lamps.....at 3600 frs...Frs. 3600

.. vspace:: 2

The work of checking up finished, we went out for a
breath of air.  The atoll lay abeam and still far distant;
a faint bluish haze lifted a bare eighth of an inch above
the circle of the horizon.  Behind us, rain fell in a
straight wall of water from a single black cloud which
cast a deep shadow over the path we had come.  Elsewhere
the sky was clear and the sea the incredible blue
of the tropics.  Tino broke a long silence.

"Look here," he said.  "What is it that interests
you in these islands?  I've never known anyone
to visit them for pleasure before.  Is it the women, or
what?"

Under pressure, I admitted that Nature seemed to
have spent her best effort among the Paumotuans in
fashioning the men.

"You're right," said Tino.  "The women are
healthy enough, of course, but they don't set your
heart beating a hundred to the minute.  They have fine
hands and white teeth, and you won't find such black
hair in all the world as you find in these atolls.  But
that's the size of it.  You can't praise them any
further for looks.  Maybe you haven't noticed their
ears, because they always cover them up with their
hair; but they're large, and their feet and ankles—tough
as sole leather and all scarred over with coral
cuts.  That is well enough for the men, but with the
women it's different.  Makes you lose your enthusiasm,
don't it?"

I had seen a good many striking exceptions in our
wanderings, but I agreed that, in the main, what he
said was true.

"Well, if it isn't the women, what else is there to be
interested in?  Not the islands themselves?  Lord!
When you've seen one you've seen the lot.  Living
on one of them is like living aboard ship.  Not room to
stretch your legs.  They're solid enough, and they
don't sink; but in a hurricane I'd a heap rather take
my chances out to sea with the *Winship* than to be
lashed to the stoutest coconut tree in the whole group.
Now you take Rutiaro.  It was washed over seventeen
years ago and all but twenty of the people killed.
They are back to seventy-five now, but wait till the
next bad blow down that way.  They'll drown like
rats just as they did before.

"Well, we won't have to stop long," he added,
grouchily.  "I'll take what copra they have and get
out.  It's a God-forsaken hole.  They only make
about twenty-five tons a year.  The island could
produce three times that amount under decent management.
They're a lazy, independent lot, at Rutiaro.
You can't get 'em to stir themselves."

I asked him what they had to gain by stirring themselves.

"Gain?" he said.  "They have everything to gain.
There are only two frame houses on the place.  The
rest of them are miserable little shelters of coconut
thatch.  I haven't sold them enough corrugated iron
in ten years to cover this cockpit.  You remember
Takaroa and Niau and Fakahina?  Well, there's my
idea of islands.  Nice European furniture—iron beds,
center tables, phonographs, bicycles—"

A further catalogue of the comforts and conveniences
of civilization which the inhabitants of Rutiaro might
have and didn't convinced me that this was the atoll
I had been looking for, and I regretted that our stay
there was to be so brief.  I did not begrudge the
inhabitants of richer atolls their phonographs and
bicycles.  They got an incredible amount of amusement
out of them; listened with delight to the strange
music, and spent entire evenings taking turns with the
bicycles, riding them back and forth from the lagoon
beach to the ocean shore.  But the frame houses were
blots on the landscape, crude, barnlike structures, most
of them, which offend the eye like factory chimneys
in a green valley.  Rutiaro had none of these things,
and, having no interest in it from the commercial point
of view, I awaited impatiently our arrival there.

At ten o'clock we were three miles to windward of
the village island.  It lay at the narrower end of the
lagoon, the inner shore line curving around a broad
indentation where the village was.  The land
narrowed in one direction to a ledge of reef.  At the
farther end there was a small *motu* not more than
three hundred yards in length by one hundred broad,
separated from the main island by a strip of shallow
water.  Seen from aloft, the two islands resembled,
roughly, in outline, an old-fashioned, high-pooped
vessel with a small boat in tow.  I could see the whole
of the atoll from the mainmast crosstrees, the lagoon,
shimmering into green over the shoals, darkening to
an intense blue over unlit valleys of ocean floor; a
solitude of sunlit water, placid as a lake buried in the
depths of inaccessible mountains.  I followed the shore
line with my glasses.  Distant islands, ledges of barren
reef, leaped forward with an effect of magic, as though
our atom of a vessel, the only sail which relieved the
emptiness of the sea, had been swept in an instant to
within a few yards of the surf.  Great combers, green
and ominous looking in the sunlight, broke at one
rapidly advancing point, toppled and fell in segments,
filling the inner shallows with a smother of foam.
Beyond it lay the broad fringe of white, deserted beach,
the narrow forest of shrub and palm, the empty lagoon,
a border of misty islands on the farther side.  I had
seen the same sort of a picture twenty times before,
always with the same keen sense of its desolate beauty,
its allurement, its romantic loveliness.  Tino had said,
"When you've seen one you've seen them all," and an
old skipper once told me that "the atolls are as much
alike as the reef points on that sail."  It is true.  They
are as monotonous as the sea itself and as fresh with
varying interest.

The village was hidden among the trees, but I saw
the French flag flying near a break in the reef which
marked the landing place for small boats.  Farther
back, a little knot of people were gathered, some of
them sitting in the full glare of the sun, others in the
deep shade, leaning against the trees in attitudes of
dreamy meditation.  Three girls were combing their
hair, talking and laughing in an animated way.  They
were dressed in all their European finery, gowns of
flowered muslin pulled up around their bare legs to
prevent soilure.  A matronly woman in a red wrapper
had thrown the upper covering aside and sat, naked
to the waist, nursing a baby.  I put down my glasses,
feeling rather ashamed of my scrutiny, as though I
had been peeping through a window at some intimate
domestic scene.  The island leaped into the distance;
the broad circle of foam and jagged reef narrowed to a
thread of white, and the *Caleb S. Winship* crept
landward again under a light breeze, an atom of a ship
on a vast and empty sea.  Eight bells struck, a tinkling
sound, deadened, scarcely audible in the wide air.  I
heard Tino's voice as though coming from an immense
distance: "Hello, up there!  *Kai-kai's* ready!"  I said:
"All right!  I'm coming," and was surprised at the
loudness of my own shout.  But I waited for a moment
to indulge myself in a last reflection: "It is thirty-one
years since the *Prince Edward* put in here.  Excepting
a few traders and missionaries, there isn't probably
one man in one hundred thousand who has ever heard
of this atoll; not one in a million who has ever seen it
or ever will see it.  What a piece of luck for me!"  Then
I saw Oro at the galley door with a huge platter
of boiled beef and sweet potatoes.  The sight of it
reminded me that I was very hungry.  As I climbed
down to the deck I was conscious of the fact that a
healthy appetite and a good digestion were a piece of
luck, too, and that as long as one could hold it the lure
of islands would remain, and one's love of living burn
with a clear flame.  Jack, the monkey, seemed to
divine my thought, to agree with it.  As Oro, the food
bearer, passed him, he reached down from his perch in
the rigging, seized the largest sweet potato on the
platter, and clambered out of reach.  Assured of his
safety, he fell to greedily, looking out wistfully toward
the land.

The pass was at the farther end of the lagoon, and
in order to save time in getting the work ashore under
way, the supercargo and I, with three of the sailors,
put off in the whaleboat, to land on the ocean side
of the village.  Half a dozen men rushed into the surf,
seized and held the boat as the backwash poured down
the steep incline at the edge of the reef.  Among them
was the chief, a man of huge frame, six feet two or three
in height.  Like the others who assisted at the landing,
he was clad only in a *pareu*, but he lost none of his
dignity through his nakedness.  He was fifty-five
years old, as I afterward learned, and as he stood
bidding us welcome I thought of the strange appearance
certain of the chief men in America or France or
England would make under similar circumstances,
deprived of the kindly concealment of clothing.  What
a revelation it would be of skinniness or pudginess!
What an exhibition of scrawny necks, fat stomachs,
flat chests, flabby arms!  To be strictly accurate, I
had seen some fat stomachs among elderly Paumotuans,
but they were exceptions, and always remarkable for
that reason.  And those who carried them had sturdy
legs.  They did not give one the uneasy feeling,
common at home, at the sight of the great paunches
of sedentary men toppling unsteadily along a strip of
crimson carpet, from curb to club doorway.

Wherever one goes in Polynesia one is reminded,
by contrast, of the cost physically to men of our own
race of our sheltered way of living.  There on every
hand are men well past middle life, with compact,
symmetrical bodies and the natural grace of healthy
children.  One sees them carrying immense burdens
without exertion, swimming in the open sea for an
hour or two at a time while spearing fish, loafing
ashore with no greater apparent effort for yet longer
periods.  Sometimes, when they have it, they eat
enormous quantities of food at one sitting, and at
others, under necessity, as sparingly as so many
dyspeptics.  It would be impossible to formulate from
their example any rules for rational living in more
civilized communities.  The daily quest for food under
primitive conditions keeps them alert and sound of
body, so that, whether they work or loaf, feast or fast,
they seem always to acquire health by it.

There had been no boats at Rutiaro in five months
and the crowd on the beach was unfeignedly glad to
see us.  The arrival of a schooner at that remote island
was an event of great importance; the sight of new
faces lighted their own with pleasure, which warmed
the heart toward them at once.  We had brought
ashore a consignment of goods for Moy Ling, the
Chinese storekeeper, and when the handshaking was
over they gathered around it as eagerly as a group of
American children at a Christmas tree.  Even the
village constable seemed unconscious of any need for
a show of dignity or authority.  The only badge of his
office was a cigarette-card picture of President Poincaré,
fastened with a safety pin to his old felt hat.  He
neglected his duties as a keeper of order, and was one
of the most excited of Moy Ling's helpers with the
cargo.  He kept patting him affectionately on the
back, saying, "*Maitai! maitai!*" which in that situation
may be freely translated as, "You know me, Moy
Ling!"  And the old Chinaman smiled the pleasant,
noncommittal smile of his countrymen the world over.

Tino's was the only sour face on the beach.  He
moved through the crowd, giving orders, grumbling
and growling half to himself and half to me.  "I told
you they were a lazy lot," he said.  "They've seen us
making in for three hours, and what have they been
doing?  Loafing on the beach, waiting for us instead
of getting their copra together!  Moy Ling is the only
one in the village who is ready to do business.  Five
tons all sacked for weighing.  He's worth a dozen
Kanakas.  Well, I'll set 'em to work in quick time
now.  You watch me!  I'm going to be loaded and
out of here by six o'clock."

But chance, using me as an innocent accomplice,
ordered it otherwise.  It was Sir Thomas Browne who
said, "Those who hold that all things are governed by
fortune had not erred had they not persisted there."  He
may be right, although I don't remember now where
his own nonpersistence lay.  But there are some
things, some events, which chance or fortune—whatever
one wishes to call it—governs from the outset with an
amazing show of omnipotence.  Tracing them back,
one becomes almost convinced of a fixed intent, a
far-sighted, unwavering determination in its apparently
haphazard functioning.  It is clear to me now that,
because I had been fond of playing marbles as a boy,
I was to be marooned, fifteen years later, on a fragment
of land, six thousand miles from the lumber yard of
S. M. Brown & Son.  Tino had no more to do with
that result than I did.  He merely lost his temper
because chance disorganized his plans for an early
departure; tried to quench his anger in rum, and
became more furious still because he was drunk.
Then off he went in the *Caleb S. Winship*, leaving me
stranded ashore.  I can still hear his parting salutation
which he roared at me though a megaphone across the
starlit lagoon, "You can stay—"  But this is anticipating.
The story moves in a more leisurely fashion.

As I have said, my box of marbles came to light
again only a few hours before we reached Rutiaro.
I took them ashore with me, thinking they might
amuse the children.  They had a good knowledge of
the technic of shooting, acquired in a two-handed game
common among the atolls, which is played with bits
of polished coral.  But theirs had always seemed to
me a tame pastime, lacking the interest of stakes to be
won or lost.  I instructed them in the simple rules of
"bull-ring" and "Tom's-dead," which they quickly
mastered.  Then I divided the marbles equally among
them and gave them to understand that the winner
held his gains, although marbles, like trade goods,
might be bartered for.  I emphasized that feature of
the game because of a recollection remaining from
my own marble-playing days, of the contempt in which
boys were held who refused to hazard their marbles
in a test of skill.  They refused to play "for keeps,"
and the rest of us had nothing to do with them.  The
youngsters of Rutiaro were not of that stamp.  They
took their losses in good part.  When I saw that I left
them to themselves and went for a walk through the
village.  I knew—at least I thought I did—that our
stay was to be brief and I wanted to make the most
of it.

I followed the street bordering the lagoon, past the
freshly thatched houses with their entryways wide to
the sun and wind, and came at length to a small burying
ground which lay in an area of green shadow far from
the village.  There were a dozen or more graves within
the inclosure, some of them neatly mounded over with
broken coral and white shell, others incased in a kind
of sarcophagus of native cement to keep more restless
spirits from wandering abroad.  Most of them were
unmarked.  Two or three had wooden headboards,
one of which was covered with a long inscription in
Chinese.  Beneath this the word "Repose" was printed
in English, as though it had some peculiar talismanic
significance for the Chinaman who had placed it there.
It was the grave of a predecessor of Moy Ling's.  I
fell to thinking of him as I sat there, and of all the
Chinamen I had met in the earlier days, lonely,
isolated figures, most of them, without family or friends
or the saving companionship of books.  What was it
that kept them going?  What goal were they striving
toward through lives which held so little of the
comfort or happiness essential to the rest of humankind?
Repose?  A better end than that, surely.  The air
rang with the sound of the word, the garish sunlight
fell pitilessly on the print of it.  To most men, I
believe, with the best of life still before them, there is
something terrible, infamous, in the thought of the
unrelieved blackness of an endless, dreamless sleep.
I turned from the contemplation of it; let my thoughts
wander in a mist of dreams, of half-formed fancies
which glimmered through consciousness like streaks
of sunlight in a dusty attic.  These vanished at length
and for a time I was as dead to thought or feeling as
Moy Ling's predecessor, sleeping beside me.

I was awakened by some one shaking me by the
shoulder.  A voice said, "*Haere i te pai!*" ("Come down
to the boat!") and a dark figure ran on before, turning
from time to time to urge me to greater speed.  It
was almost night, although there was still light enough
to see by.  I remembered that Tino had told me to
be at the copra sheds at five.  The tide would serve
for getting through the pass until eight, but I hurried,
nevertheless, feeling that something unusual had
happened.  Rounding a point of land which cut off the
view from the village and the inner lagoon, I saw the
schooner, about three hundred yards off shore, slim
and black against a streak of orange cloud to the
northward.  She was moving slowly out, under power;
the whaleboat was being hoisted over the side, and at
the wheel I saw the familiar silhouette of the supercargo.

I shouted: "Hi!  Tino!  Wait a minute!  You're not
going to leave me behind, are you?"

A moment of silence followed.  Then came the
answer with the odd deliberation of utterance which
I knew meant Tahiti rum:

"You can stay there and play marbles till hell
freezes over!  I'm through with you!"

What had happened, as nearly as I could make out
afterward, was this: my box of marbles which I had
brought ashore for the amusement of the children,
interested the grown-ups as well, particularly the hazard
of stakes in the games I had shown them.  Paumotuans
have a good deal of Scotch acquisitiveness in their
make-up.  They coveted those marbles—they were
really worth coveting—and it was not long until play
became general, a family affair, the experts in one being
pitted against those in another, regardless of age or
sex.  Tino's threats and entreaties had been to no
purpose.  All work came to an end, and the only copra
which got aboard the *Winship* was Moy Ling's five
tons, carried out by the sailors themselves.
Evidently Puarei, the chief, had been one of the most
enthusiastic players.  He was not a man to be
bulldozed or browbeaten.  He had great dignity and force
of character, for all his boyish delight in simple
amusements.  What right had Tino to say that he should
not play marbles on his own island?  He gave me to
understand, by means of gestures, intonation, and a
mixture of French and Paumotuan, that this was what
the supercargo had done.  At last, apparently, Tino had
sent Oro on an unsuccessful search for me.  He thought,
I suppose, that, having been the cause of the marble-playing
mania, I might be able and willing to check it.
Balked there, he went on board in a fit of violent temper
and had not been seen again, although his voice was
heard for an hour thereafter.  Of a sudden anchor was
weighed and I was left, as he assured me, to play
marbles with the inhabitants of Rutiaro for an
impossibly long time.

Most of these details I gathered afterward.  At the
moment I guessed just enough of the truth not to be
wholly mystified.  The watery sputtering of the
*Winship's* twenty-five horse-power engine grew faint.
Then, with a ghostly gleam of her mainsail in the
starlight, she was gong.  I was thinking, "By Jove!
I wouldn't have missed this experience for all the copra
in the Cloud of Islands!"  I was glad that there were
still adventures of that sort to be had in a humdrum
world.  It was so absurd, so fantastically unreal as to
fit nothing but reality.  And the event of it was
exactly what I had wanted all the time without
knowing it.  There was no reason why I shouldn't stop at
Rutiaro.  To be sure, I was shortly to have met my
friend Nordhoff at Papeete, but our rendezvous was
planned to be broken.  We were wandering in the
South Pacific as opportunity and inclination should
direct, which, I take it, is the only way to wander.

For a few moments I was so deeply occupied with
my own thoughts that I was not conscious of what was
taking place around me.  All the village was gathered
there, watching the departing schooner.  As she
vanished a loud murmur ran through the crowd, like a
sough of wind through trees—a long-drawn-out Polynesian,
"*Aué!*" indicative of astonishment, indignation,
pity.  Paumotuan sympathies are large, and I had been
the victim of treachery, they thought, and was silently
grieving at the prospect of a long exile.  They gathered
around, patting me on the back in their odd way,
expressing their condolences as best they could, but
I soon relieved their minds, on that score.  Then
Huirai, the constable with the cigarette-card insignia,
pushed his way through with the first show of authority
I had seen him make.

"I been Frisco," he said, with an odd accent on the
last syllable.  He had made the journey once as a
stoker on one of the mail boats.  Then he added,
"You go to hell, me," his eyes shining with pride that
he could be of service as a reminder of home to an
exiled American.  He was about to take charge of me,
in view of his knowledge of English, but the chief
waved him away with a gesture of authority.  I was to
be his guest, he said, at any rate for the present.  He
began his duties as host by entertaining me at dinner
at Moy Ling's store.  I was a little surprised that we
did not go to his house for the meal until I remembered
that the Chinaman had received the only consignment
of exotic food left by the *Winship*.  Puarei ordered
the feast with the discrimination of a gourmet and the
generosity of a sailor on shore leave for the first time in
months.  We had smoked herring for *hors-d'oeuvre*,
followed by soup, curried chicken and rice, edible birds'
nests flavored with crab meat, from China, and white
bread.  For dessert we had small Chinese pears
preserved in vinegar, which we ate out of the
tin—"Woman Brand Pears," the label said.  There was a
colored picture on it of a white woman, in old-fashioned
puffed sleeves and a long skirt, seated in a garden,
while a Chinaman served her deferentially with pears
out of the same kind of a container.  Underneath was
printed in English: "These pears will be found highly
stimulating.  We respectfully submit them to our
customers."  That was the first evidence I had seen of
China's bid for export trade in tinned fruit.
"Stimulating" may not have been just the word, but I liked
the touch of Chinese courtesy which followed it.  It
didn't seem out of place, even coming from a canning
factory.

Puarei gave all his attention to his food, and
consumed an enormous quantity.  My own appetite was
a healthy one, but I had not his capacity of stomach;
furthermore, he ate with his fingers, while I was
handicapped from the first with a two-prong fork and a small
tin spoon.  I believe they were the only implements
of the sort on the island, for the village had been
searched for them before they were found.  It was
another evidence to me of the unfrequented nature of
Rutiaro, and of its slender contact, even with the
world of Papeete traders.  At most of the islands we
had visited, knives and forks were common, although
rarely used except in the presence of strangers.  The
onlookers at the feast—about half the village, I should
say—watched with interest my efforts to balance
mouthfuls of rice on a two-prong fork.  I could see
that they regarded it as a ridiculous proceeding.
They must have thought Americans a strange folk,
checking appetite and worrying digestion with such
doubtful aids.  Finally I decided to follow the chief's
example and set to with my fingers.  They laughed at
that, and Puarei looked up from his third plate of
rice and chicken to nod approval.  It was a strange
meal, reminding me of stories I had read as a boy, of
Louis XV dining in public at Versailles, with a roomful
of visitors from foreign courts looking on; whispering
behind fans and lace cuffs; exchanging awestruck
glances at the splendor of the service, the richness of the
food, and the sight of majesty fulfilling a need common
to all humankind.  There was no whispering among
the crowd at the Chinaman's shop, no awestruck
glances other than Moy Ling's, at the majesty of
Puarei's appetite.  I felt sorry for him as he trotted
back and forth from his outdoor kitchen, bringing in
more food, thinking of his depleted stock, smiling
with an expression of wan and worried amiability.
Louis XV would have given something, I'll venture,
for that old Paumotuan chief's zest for food, for the
kingly weight of bone and muscle which demanded
such a store of nourishment.  He pushed back his
chair at length, with a sign of satisfaction, and a
half-caste girl of seventeen or eighteen removed the empty
dishes.

Paumotuan hospitality is an easy, gracious thing,
imposing obligations on neither host nor guest.  Dinner
over, I told Puarei that I wanted to take a walk, and
he believed me.  I was free at once, and I knew that
he would not be worrying meanwhile about my
entertainment.  I would not be searched for presently, and
pounced upon with the dreaded: "See here!  I'm
afraid you are not having a good time," of the uneasy
host.  I was introduced to no one, dragged nowhere
to see anything, free from the necessity of being
amused.  I might do as I liked—rare and glorious
privilege—and I went outside, grateful for it, and for
the cloak of darkness which enabled me to move about
unobserved.  It lifted here and there in the glow of
supper fires, or a streak of yellow lamplight from an
open doorway.  I saw family groups gathered around
their meals of fish and coconuts, heard the loud intake
of breath as they sucked the *miti* sauce from their
fingers.  Dogs were splashing about in the shallows
of the lagoon, seeking their own supper of fish.  They
are a strange breed, the dogs of the atolls, like no
other that I have ever seen, a mixture of all breeds
one would think, a weird blending of good blood and
bad.  The peculiar environment and the strange diet
have altered them so that they hardly seem dogs at all,
but, rather, semiamphibious animals, more at home
in the sea than on land.  They are gentle-mannered
with their masters and with strangers, but fierce
fighters among themselves.  I sat down behind a clump
of bushes, concealed from the light of one of the
smoldering supper fires, and watched a group of Rutiaroan
dogs in their search for food.  They had developed a
sort of team work in the business, leaped toward the
shore all together with a porpoise-like curving of their
bodies, and were as quick as a flock of terns to see and
to seize their prey.

Returning from my walk, I found the village street
deserted and all of the people assembled back of Moy
Ling's shop.  He was mixing bread at a table while
one of the sons of his strange family piled fresh fuel
on the fire under a long brick oven.  It was a great
event, the bread making, after the long months of
dearth, and of interest to everyone.  Mats were spread
within the circle of the firelight.  Puarei was there,
with his wife—a mountain of a woman—seated at his
side.  She was dressed in a red-calico wrapper, and her
long black hair fell in a pool of shadow on the mat
behind her.  She was a fit wife for a chief, in size, in
energy, in the fire and spirit living in the huge bulk
of flesh.  Her laughter came in a clear stream which it
was a delight to hear.  There was no undertone of
foreboding or bitter remembrance, and the flow of it,
as light-hearted as a child's, heightened the merrymaking
mood of the others.  There was a babble of
talk, bursts of song, impromptu dancing to the
accompaniment of an accordion and the clapping of hands.
As I looked on I was minded of an account I had read
of the Paumotuans in which they were described as "a
dour people, silent, brooding, and religious."  Religious
some of them assuredly are, despite a good deal of
evidence to the contrary, and they are often silent in
the dreamy way of remote island people whose moods
are drawn from the sea, whose minds lie fallow to the
peace and the beauty of it.  But "dour and brooding"
is very far from the truth.

I took a place among them as quietly as possible,
for I knew by repeated experience how curious they are
about strangers, and first meetings were usually
embarrassing.  Without long training as a freak with a
circus, it would try any man's courage to sit for an
hour among a group of Paumotuans while he was
being discussed item by item.  There is nothing
consciously brutal or callous in the manner of it, but,
rather an unreflecting frankness like that of children in
the presence of something strange to their experience.
I knew little of the language, although I caught a word
here and there which indicated the trend of the
comment.  It was not general, fortunately, but confined to
those on either side of me.  Two old grandmothers
started a speculation as to whether or not I had any
children, and from this a discussion rose as to which of
the girls of Rutiaro would be best suited as a wife for
me.  I was growing desperate when Chance, the
godfather of all wanderers, intervened again in my favor.

Moy Ling's fire was burning brightly and it occurred
to several of the youngsters to resume their marble
playing.  I saw Puarei's face light with pleasure, and
he was on his feet at once with his stake in the ring.
Others followed, and soon all those who had marbles
were in the sport.  I understood clearly then how
helpless Tino had been.  I could easily picture him
rushing from group to group, furious at the thought of
his interests being neglected through such childish
folly.  Those marbles were more desirable than his
flour and canned goods, which he stood ready to
exchange for copra.  The explanation of this astounding
fact may have been that no one thought he would go
off as he did, and to-morrow would do just as well for
getting down to business.  Since he had gone, there
was an end of that.  It was futile to worry about the
lost food.  Certainly it was forgotten during the great
tournament which took place that evening.  Moy
Ling worked at his bread making unnoticed.  His fire
died down to a heap of coals, but another was built
and the play went on.  Puarei was a splendid shot,
in marble playing as in other respects, the best man of
the village; but there was a slip of a girl who was
even better.  During the evening she accumulated
nearly half of the entire marble supply, and at length
these two met for a test of skill.  It was a long-drawn-out
game.  I had never seen anything to equal the
interest of both players and spectators; not even at
Brown's lumber yard when the stakes were a boy's
most precious possessions, cornelian stone taws.  No
one thought of sleep except a few of the old men and
women, who dozed off at intervals with their heads
between their knees.

The lateness of the hour—the bizarre setting for a
game so linked with memories of boyhood, combined
to give me an impression of unreality.  I had the
feeling that the island and all the people on it might
vanish at any moment, and the roar of the surf resolve
itself into the rumble of street traffic in some gray city.
And, though it were the very city where marbles are
made, where in the length or breadth of it could there
be found anyone who knew the use of them, with
either the time or the inclination to play?  I might
search it, street by street, to the soot-stained suburbs;
I might go on to the green country, perhaps; visit all
the old-time marble-playing rendezvous from one coast
to the other, with no better success.  And, though I
passed through a thousand villages of the size of
Rutiaro, could an evening's amusement be provided
in any one of them, for men, women, and children, at an
outlay of four dollars, American?  The possibility
would not be worth considering.  People at home live
too fast in these days, and they want too much.  I could
imagine Tino, in a sober mood, giving a grudging assent
to this.  "But, man!" he would have added, "I wish
they had more of their marble-making enthusiasm at
Rutiaro.  I would put in here three times a year and
fill the *Winship* with copra to within an inch of the
main boom every trip."

Moy Ling had enough of it for the whole island, it
seemed to me.  His ovens were opened as the
tournament came to an end, and for half an hour he was kept
busy passing out crisp brown loaves and jotting down
the list of creditors in his account book.  It must have
been nearly midnight.  The crowd began to disperse.
Puarei joined me, smiling ruefully, holding out empty
hands.  He had lost all of his marbles to a mite of a
girl whom he could have put in his vest pocket had he
owned one.  His wife teased him about it on the way
home, laughed heartily at his explanations and excuses.
They discussed the events of the day long after the
other members of the household had retired to their
mats on the veranda.  At last I heard their quiet
breathing, and a strip of light from the last quarter
moon revealed them asleep, two massive heads on the
same pillow.  I lay awake for a much longer time,
thinking of one thing and another—of my friend
Crichton at Tanao, the loneliest atoll in the world I
should say; of the *Winship* far out to sea, homeward
bound with one hundred and forty tons of copra in her
hold; of Tino with his fits of temper, and his passion
for trade which blinded him to so much of the beauty
and the joy of life.  But, after all, I thought, it is men
like Tino who keep wheels turning and boats traveling
the seas.  If he were to die, his loss would be felt;
there would be an eddy in the current of life around
him.  But men like Crichton or myself—we should go
down in our time, and the broad stream would flow
over our heads without a ripple to show where we had
been, without a bubble rising to the surface to carry
with it for a moment the memory of our lives.  It was
not a comforting thought, and I tried to evade it;
but I realized that my New England conscience was
playing a part in these reflections and was not to be
soothed in any such childish manner.  "How much
copra have you ever produced or carried to market?"
it appeared to say.  I admitted that the amount was
negligible.  "How do you mean to justify your
presence here?" was the next question, and before I could
think of a satisfactory answer, "What good will come
of this experience, either to yourself or to anyone
else?"  That was a puzzler until I happened to think of
Findlay's *South Pacific Directory*.  I remembered that
his information about Rutiaro was very scant, the
general remarks confined, as I have already said, to a
single sentence, "A lonely atoll, numbering a population
of between seventy-five and one hundred
inhabitants."  As a sop to my conscience, it occurred to
me that I might write to the publishers of that learned
work, suggesting that, in the light of recent investigations,
they add to that description, "Fond of playing marbles."

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.. _`A Debtor of Moy Ling`:

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   CHAPTER VII


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   A Debtor of Moy Ling

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Puarei's house stood halfway down the
village street at Rutiaro, facing a broad
indentation from the lagoon.  The
Catholic church adjoined it on one side, the
Protestant church on the other.  Neither
of them was an imposing structure, but they towered
above the small frame dwelling of the chief with an air
of protection, of jealous watchfulness.  On sunny days
they shaded his roof in turn; and, when it rained,
poured over it streams of water, through lead pipes
projecting from their own ampler roofs—a purely
utilitarian function, since the drainage from the three
buildings furnished the fresh-water supply of the
settlement.  If the showers were light the overflow from
the largess of the rival churches, plashing on the sheets
of corrugated iron, filled the house with a monotonous
murmur, like the drowsy argument of two soft-voiced
missionaries; but during a heavy downpour the
senses were stunned by the incessant thunder, as
though one were inclosed in an immense drum, beaten
with nonsectarian vigor by all the Salvation Armies
in the world.

It was during such a deluge, one day in early spring,
that I lay on the guest bed in Puarei's one-room house,
watching Poura, his wife, who had washed my linen
with her own hands and was then ironing it.  It was
not, strictly speaking, linen.  The articles were three—a
sleeveless gauze singlet, a cotton handkerchief, and a
faded khaki shirt.  A pair of khaki trousers, a pair of
canvas tennis shoes, and a pandanus hat completed my
wardrobe.  Since I needed the whole of it when going
abroad about the island, it was necessary to go to bed on
washing day, and to wait there until the laundering
was finished, and such repairs made as constant wear
had caused and further wear demanded.  How to
replenish it and to meet other simple urgent needs
gave me cause for some concern, and I was going
over the problem as I lay on Puarei's guest bed.  It
was toward the end of my second week at Rutiaro, and
already I was beginning to look decidedly shabby.  My
shoes were rotted out with sea water, and both shirt
and trousers, which were far from new at the time of
my arrival, gave evidence of early dissolution.  Poura
had washed, sewed on buttons, drawn seams together,
but the garments were chronically ailing, as hopeless of
effective repair as an old man far gone in senile decay.
Poura was becoming discouraged about them, and I
knew that she must be wondering why I didn't buy
some fresh ones.  I had a very good reason for not
doing so—I had no money.  I had been left at Rutiaro
without so much as a twenty-five-centime piece, and
the Banque de l'Indo-Chine was six hundred miles away.

It would not occur to either Puarei or his wife that
I was in need of funds.  Theirs was one of the more
primitive atolls of the Low Archipelago, where all white
men are regarded as mysteriously affluent.  If, instead
of being marooned at Rutiaro through Tino's fit of
temper, I had been discovered a mile outside the reef,
making toward the land clad only in a pair of
swimming trunks, upon reaching it my rescuers would have
expected me, as a matter of course, to take a bulky
parcel of thousand-franc notes from beneath that
garment.  I had, in fact, made a secret inventory of
my wealth after the sudden departure of the *Caleb
Winship*, hoping there might be a forgotten bank note
in one of my trousers pockets.  What I found was a
cotton handkerchief, a picture post card of the
Woolworth Building, and a small musical instrument called
an *ocharina*, or, more commonly, a sweet-potato
whistle.  The handkerchief I needed; the post card
seemed of no practical use as a means of barter; and,
while I might have given up the *ocharina*, it had but a
slight monetary value, and Moy Ling, the Chinese
storekeeper of the village, was not interested in it.  I
didn't offer it to him outright.  Instead, I played on it,
in front of his shop, "The March of the Black Watch,"
which I could render with some skill.  Thereafter
every youngster on the island coveted the instrument,
but Moy Ling made no offers and the prospect of a
wardrobe was as far away as ever.

His supply of European clothing was limited, but
ample to supply my wants.  He found for me three
undershirts, size forty-four, two gingham outer shirts
of less ample proportions, a pair of dungaree overalls,
and a pair of rope-sole shoes.  I asked him to put these
articles aside and went off to reflect upon ways and
means of opening a credit account with the canny
Chinaman.  There was one possible method open to
me; I might adopt the *pareu* as a costume.  I could
buy three of them for the price of one undershirt, and
I believed that Moy Ling would trust me to that
extent.  Nearly all of the natives wore *pareus*.  They
had put aside their trousers and shirts and gingham
dresses now that I was no longer a stranger to them,
and were much more comfortable in their simple,
knee-length garments, those of the men reaching from
the waist, those of the women twisted tightly under the
arms.  Simple and convenient though it was, I felt
that it would be absurd for me to assume that style
of dress, since I was not accustomed to it.  Furthermore,
I remembered the ridiculous appearance of
Americans and Europeans I had seen at Tahiti—queer
people from all sorts of queer places, who come and go
through the capital of French Oceania.  They rushed
into *pareus* the moment of their arrival at Papeete,
and before a week had passed were more primitive in a
sophisticated way than the Tahitians themselves.  I
had no desire to join the ranks of the amateur cannibals,
even though there was some excuse for it at Rutiaro;
and I knew that the Paumotuans would have more
respect for me if I dressed after the manner of my
own race.

But how obtain clothing without money—without
divulging to anyone that I had no money?  The
question dinned through my brain with annoying
persistence, like the thunder of falling water on Puarei's
iron roof.  Would it, after all, be best to confide in the
chief?  I could tell him of my bank account at Papeete,
and he knew, of course, that the *Caleb Winship* had
left me without a word of warning, taking my sea chest
with her.  I was tempted to make a confession of my
predicament, but pride or a kind of childish vanity
prevented me.

"No, by Jove!" I said.  "I'll be hanged if I do!
Puarei, his wife—all the rest of them—expect me to
live up to their traditional conceptions of white men.
I am supposed to be mysteriously affluent, and I owe
it to them to preserve that myth in all its romantic
glamour."

I had no feeling of guilt in making this decision;
rather, a sense of virtue, like that of an indulgent father
upon assuring his children that there is a Santa Claus.
I decided to be not only mysteriously, but incredibly,
affluent.  Therefore, when the rain had passed I put on
my mended garments and went to Moy Ling's shop.

I found him splitting coconuts in front of his copra
shed, and beckoned to him in a careless way.  He
came forward, smiling pleasantly as usual, but there
was a shrewd glitter in his eyes which said, quite as
plainly as words, "Honorable sir, I bow before you,
but I expect an adequate monetary return for the
service."  I was not intimidated, however, and when
he brought forth the articles I had selected earlier I
waved them aside—all of them excepting the rope-sole
shoes, the only male footgear of any kind on the
island.  I explained that I had not before seen the
bolt of white drill—the most expensive cloth in his
shop—and that I wanted enough of it to make four
suits.  I saw at once that I had risen in his estimation
about 75 per cent, and, thus encouraged, I went on
buying lavishly—white-cotton cloth for underwear and
shirts; some pencils and his entire supply of notebooks
for my voluminous observations on the life and
character of the Paumotuans; a Night-King flash lamp;
a dozen silk handkerchiefs of Chinese manufacture;
a dozen pairs of earrings and four lockets and chains;
ten kilos of flour and two of coffee; three bottles of
perfume in fancy boxes; four large bolts of ribbon—enough
to reach from one end of the village to the other;
side and back combs for women, superbly ornamented
with bits of colored glass; a bolt of mosquito netting;
a monkey wrench; two Beacon lanterns; a pandanus
mat; and one bow tie already made up, the kind sold at
home in "gents' furnishings" shops.

At the beginning I had no thought of going in so
recklessly.  But as I went from article to article the
conviction grew upon me that the deeper I plunged the
greater the impression I should make upon Moy
Ling, and it was essential that I should convince him
that my mythical wealth was real.  He became more
and more deferential as my heap of purchases increased
in size.  I made no inquiry as to the price of anything,
believing that to be in keeping with the mysteriously
affluent tradition.  At my back I heard a hum of
excited conversation.  The shop was filled with people.
I felt the crush behind me, but took no notice of it
and went on with my passionless orgy of spending:
two bolts of women's dress goods; four pocketknives;
a can of green paint and another of white—but details
are tiresome.  It is enough to say that I bought
lavishly, and selected odds and ends of things because
Moy's shop contained nothing else.  He had a large
supply of food, but in other respects his stock was low,
and when I had finished, some of his shelves were almost
bare.  On one there remained only a box of chewing
gum.  An inscription printed on the side of it read:
"Chew on, MacDuff!  You can't chew out the original
mint-leaf flavor" of somebody's pepsin gum—words
to that effect.  That product of American
epicureanism is to be found, strangely enough, at nearly every
Chinaman's store in the Low Archipelago.  I bought
twenty packages of it, since there were no other
confections to be had, and distributed them among the
children.  The youthful MacDuffs chewed on for some
thirty seconds and then swallowed, believing, in their
unenlightened way, that gum is a sort of food.  I had
read of monkeys dying in zoos because of the same
practice; but, in so far as I know, there were no ill
effects from it at Rutiaro, either then or later.

I succeeded very well in impressing Puarei.  He was
astonished at the number of my purchases; and Poura
said, "Au-e!" shooed out the mint-breathed porters
who carried them to the house, and sat down in the
doorway, her enormous body completely blocking the
entrance.  On the veranda the conversation crackled
and sparkled with conjecture.  I could hear above the
others the voice of Paki, wife of the constable,
enumerating the things I had bought.  It sounded odd
in Paumotuan—a high-pitched recitative of strange
words, most of them adapted from the English since
all of the articles were unknown to the natives before
the coming of the traders—*faraoa* (flour), *ripine*
(ribbon), *peni* (pencil or pen), *taofe* (coffee), etc.

I myself was wondering what use I could make of
some of my wealth.  The flour I would give to Puarei,
and his ten-ton cutter was badly in need of paint.
Poura would be glad to have the dress goods for herself
and her girls, for the Rutiaroans put aside their *pareus*
on Sunday and dressed in European costume.  I
could also give her the mosquito netting as a drapery
for the guest bed.  I had, in fact, bought it with that
end in mind, for on windless nights, particularly after
a rain, the mosquitoes were a fearful nuisance.  Puarei's
household was used to them, but I tossed and tumbled,
and at last would have to paddle out on the lagoon
and stay there till morning.  The coffee, likewise, was
for my own use, Puarei believing that the drinking of
either tea or coffee was forbidden by his variety of the
Christian religion.  Tobacco, too, was a product of
evil, and the use of it made broad the way to hell.  It is
impossible to believe that any missionary would
wander so far to preach such theology.  What had
happened, very likely, was that one of the more austere
churchmen who visit Rutiaro at rare intervals had
condemned those white man's comforts as injurious to
health.  He must have been severe in his denunciation,
for Puarei had got the idea that abstinence from the
enjoyment of them was exacted in a sort of amendment
to the Ten Commandments.  I did my best to corrupt
him, for breakfast at his house was to me a cheerless
meal.  His faith was not to be shaken, however,
although he admitted that coffee drinking might not
damn me, since I had been taught to believe that it
would not.

I was thinking with pleasure of his tolerance and of
the comforting beverage I should have the following
morning when I remembered that mine was green
Tahiti coffee which must be taken to Moy Ling for
roasting.  His shop was deserted.  I could see it at the
end of the sunlit street, steaming with moisture after
the rain.  The open doorway was a square of black
shadow.  It lightened with a misty glimmer as I
watched, and suddenly Moy flashed into view.  He
ran quickly down the steps, halted irresolutely, and
stood for a moment, shading his eyes with his hand,
looking in the direction of Puarei's house.  Then he
turned, mounted the steps again, and vanished slowly
in the gloom.  I was uneasy, knowing what he was
thinking; but an island less than three miles long,
with an average width of four hundred yards, offers
a poor refuge for a faint-hearted debtor.  And so,
having stowed my other purchases under the guest bed,
I took the bag of coffee and returned to Moy's store,
hoping that I might quiet his fears by increasing my
obligation to him.

When one is without them, clothing, coffee, tobacco,
and other such necessities assume a place of exaggerated
importance, which is the reason why the memories of
the earlier part of my stay at Rutiaro are tinged with
the thought of them.  But I had not come to the Low
Islands to spend all of my time and energy in the mere
fight for a comfortable existence.  I could have done
that quite as well at home, with greater results in the
development of a more or less Crusoe-like resourcefulness.
At Rutiaro the life was strange and new to me,
and I found the days too short for observing it and the
nights for reflecting upon it.  My first interest, of
course, was Puarei's household—the chief, his wife,
two sons, and three daughters all housed in that
one-room frame building.  The room was commodious,
however, about twenty-five feet by fifteen, and on the
lagoon side there was a broad veranda where Poura
and her daughters did much of their work and passed
their hours of leisure.  Behind the house was a large
cistern, built of blocks of cemented coral, and a small
outkitchen made of the odds and ends of packing cases
and roofed with thatch.

I wondered at Puarei's preference for a board box
covered with corrugated iron, to the seemly houses of
the other Rutiaroans.  He thought it a palace, and,
being a chief, the richest man of the atoll, it was in
keeping with the later Paumotuan tradition that he
should have a white man's kind of dwelling.  Unsightly
though it was without, the economy of furnishing gave
the interior an air of pleasant spaciousness, like that
of the island itself with its scarcity of plant life and of
trees other than the coconut.  There was no European
furniture with the exception of a sewing machine and
the guest bed, an old-fashioned, slatted affair which
looked strange in that environment.  On it was a
mattress of *kspok* and two immense pillows filled with
the same material.  The linen was immaculate, and
the outer coverlet decorated with hibiscus flowers
worked in silk.  I had no hesitation in accepting the
bed, for it would not have held Puarei and his wife.
The slats would have given away at once under their
weight, and Poura assured me that the children preferred
sleeping on their mats on the veranda.  The rest
of the furnishings were like those of the other houses—two
or three chests for clothing; pandanus mats for the
floor; paddles, fishing spears, and water glasses stacked
in a corner or lying across the rafters.  An open cabinet
of native manufacture held the toilet articles of the
women—a hand mirror, a few combs, and a bottle of
unscented coconut oil, the one cosmetic of the Low
Islands, which was used by all members of the family.
There were also several articles of jewelry such as the
traders sell, some fishing hooks of pearl shell, and, on
a lower shelf, a Tahitian Bible.  The walls were hung
with branches of curiously formed coral, hat wreaths
and necklaces of shell wrought in beautiful and intricate
designs.  There were no pictures other than the open
windows looking out on the lagoon in one direction,
and in the other, across the level, shaded floor of the
island toward the sea.

We spent but little time indoors.  All of the cooking
was done in the open, and we had our food there, sitting
cross-legged around a cloth of green fronds.  The trees
around us furnished the dishes.  I had not used my
tin spoon and the two-pronged fork since the evening of
my arrival, and learned to suck the *miti* sauce from
my fingers with as loud a zest as any of them.  Usually
we had two meals a day at Rutiaro, but there was no
regularity about the time of serving them.  We ate
when we were hungry and food was to be had, sometimes
in the middle of the afternoon, and as late as ten
in the evening.  That is one reason why I remember so
well the feasts prepared by Poura and her daughters,
and served by them, for they never sat down to their
own food until we had finished.  Feasts of a simple
kind, but, by Jove! how good everything tasted after
a day of fishing and swimming in the lagoon or out at
sea.  I didn't tire of coconuts as quickly as I had feared
I should; and the fish were prepared in a variety of
ways—boiled, roasted over hot stones, grilled on the coals,
or we ate them raw with a savor of *miti* sauce.  Puarei's
dog, one of the best fishers of the island, was the only
member of the family discriminating in his requirements.
He often came up while we were at dinner,
with a live fish in his mouth, which he would lay at
Poura's feet, looking at her appealingly until she cooked
it for him.  Sometimes, to tease him, she threw it
away, but he would bring it back, and, no matter how
hungry he might be, refuse to eat it raw.

The sea furnished occasional variety of diet in the
way of turtles and devilfish; and I contributed rice,
tinned meat, and other preserved food which I bought
of Moy Ling whenever I imagined his confidence in me
was beginning to falter.  That was a risky procedure,
only to be undertaken on the days when I was so filled
with animal spirits that I more than half believed in
my wealth, in my power to draw money or anything
else I wanted out of the clear, dry air of Rutiaro.

One thing I had wanted from the first, above all
others—a house.  The idea of imposing indefinitely
upon Puarei's hospitality was distasteful, and no boats
were expected within five or six months.  I had not, in
years, lived for so long a period at any one place.  Here
was an opportunity I had often dreamed of for having
a home of my own.  I should have to ask the chief for
it, and at first thought the request seemed a large one.
Then, too, how could I say to him with any show of
logic: "Puarei, I am not willing to bother you longer
by occupying the guest bed in your house.  Therefore,
will you please give me a house to myself?"  He might
think I had peculiar ideas of delicacy.  But further
reflection convinced me that, while I could not ask
him for a pair of trousers—not even for so trifling a
thing as a shirt button, since he would have to purchase
it at Moy Ling's store—I might legitimately suggest
the gift of a house.  It would cost only the labor of
making it, and that was not great.  At Rutiaro houses
were built in less time than was needed to sail across
the lagoon and back.  The inhabitants might reasonably
have adopted the early Chinese method of roasting
pig by putting the carcasses in their dwellings and
setting fire to the thatch.  It would have been a
sensible procedure, employed at times when the old
thatch needed renewal.  Nothing permanent would
have been destroyed except the framework of poles,
and that could be replaced as easily as firewood could
be cut for a Maori oven.

The upshot of the matter was that I was given not
only a house, but an island of my own to set it on—I
who had lived much of my life up four or five flights of
stairs, in furnished rooms looking out on chimney pots
and brick courts filled with odors and family washings.
The site was a small *motu* lying at the entrance to the
lagoon, four miles from the village island.  It had a
name which meant, "The place where the souls were
eaten."  Once, a man, his wife, and two children went
there to fish on the reef near the pass.  All of them
were taken ill of some mysterious disease, and died
on the same day.  As their souls left their bodies they
were seized and eaten by some vindictive human spirits
in the form of sea birds.  The legend was evidently a
very ancient one, and the events which it described
had happened so long ago that fear of the place had
largely vanished.  Nevertheless, the chief tried to
persuade me to choose another site; and Poura, when
she learned that I wanted to live on the Soul-Eaters'
Island, was deeply concerned.  Neither of them could
understand why I should want to live away from the
village island.  I wince, even now, when I think of the
appalling tactlessness of that request; but the fact is
that the Paumotuans themselves, by their example,
had got me into the vicious habit of truth-telling in
such matters.  There is no word in their language for
tact.  They believe that a man has adequate, although
sometimes hidden, reasons for doing what he wants to
do, and they understand that it explains seemingly
uncourtly behavior.

I had accepted, almost unconsciously, their own
point of view, so that it didn't occur to me to invent
any polite falsehoods.  But my knowledge of
Paumotuan was more limited than Paurei's knowledge of
French, and how was I to explain my desire for so
lonely a place as the Soul-Eaters' Island?  The
Paumotuans, from their scarcity of numbers, the isolation
of their fragments of land, the dangers of the sea
around them, are drawn together naturally, inevitably.
How make clear to them the unnatural gregariousness
of life in great cities?  Suddenly I thought of my
picture post card of the Woolworth Building.  I told
them that in America many people, thousands of them,
were cooped together in houses of that sort.  I had been
compelled to spend several years in one and had got
such a horror of the life that I had come all the way
to the Cloud of Islands, searching for a place where I
might be occasionally alone.

While the post card was passing from hand to hand,
Huirai, the constable, loyal friend in every emergency,
gave color to my explanation by describing—for the
thousand and first time, I suppose—his adventures in
San Francisco.  Dusk deepened, the last ghostly light
faded from the clouds along the northern horizon,
and still he talked on; and the idlers on the chief's
veranda listened with as keen interest as though
they had never heard the story before.  Poura, who
was at work on my new wardrobe, lit a lamp and
placed it on the floor beside her, shading it from her
eyes with a piece of matting.  The light ran smoothly
over her brown hands, and the mountain of shadow
behind her blotted out the forms of the trees.  Now
and then she put down her work and gazed intently in
Huirai's direction.  His voice rose and fell, thrilled
with excitement, died away to a deep whisper of awe
as he told of the wonders he had seen, the street cars,
the lofty buildings, the elevators which rose to an
immense height as swiftly as a coconut would fall, the
trains, the motors, the ships, the pictures which were
alive.  He imitated sounds with amazing fidelity, and
his gestures, vaguely seen in the gloom, were vividly
pictorial of the marvels he had met with in his travels.

The story ended abruptly and Huirai sat down,
conscious of the effect he had produced.  No one spoke
for a long while.  Then the chief, who was sitting
beside me, broke the silence with that strange Polynesian
exclamation of wonder too great for words, "Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah!"
uttered with distinct, rapid precision, like the
staccato of machine-gun fire.  He laid his hand on my
knee affectionately, with an air of possessorship; and
at the contact a feeling of pride rose in me, as though
I were the planner of the cities, the magician whose
brain had given birth to the marvels Huirai had
described.  But conceit of that kind may be measurably
reduced by a moment of reflection, and I remembered
that the extent of my contribution to my native land
was that I had left it.  Small cause for vanity there.
However, I had no mind for another tussle with my
conscience.  I had been the indirect cause of eloquence
in Huirai and of enjoyment in his auditors.  That was
enough for one evening on the credit side.  On the
other side, to Puarei, to Poura, to his children, and to
all the kindly, hospitable people of Rutiaro I was under
an obligation which I could never hope to cancel.
But they didn't expect me to cancel it.  I was not even
under the necessity of showing appreciation.  Just as
there is no word in their language for "tact," there is
none approaching our word "gratitude" in meaning.
To a man in my position, owner of Soul-Eaters' Island,
and of a house to be built there the following day,
that was something to be grateful for.

The Chinese language is richer, I believe, in terms
implying obligation.  I was reminded, less pleasantly,
of another account on the debit side, by the flare of a
match which lit up for a moment the pensive, cadaverous
face of Moy Ling.

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.. _`An Adventure in Solitude`:

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   CHAPTER VIII


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   An Adventure in Solitude

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I awoke sometime during the latter
part of the night with the bemused
presentiment that a longed-for event was
approaching or in the process of happening.
Hands had passed lightly over my
face—either that or I had dreamed it—and I heard
a faint shout coming from the borderland between
sleeping and waking.  Puarei's guest bed, with its
billowy mattress of kapok, seemed strangely hard,
which led to the discovery that I was not lying on a
bed, but on a mat in the corner of an empty room.
The floor was covered with crushed krora shell which
made a faint radiance in the gloom, and a roof of
green thatch was alight with the reflections of moving
water.  I was trying to puzzle out whose house this
could be when I heard the shout again, clearly this time,
in a pause of silence between deafening claps of
thunder.  From nearer at hand came the sound of subdued
laughter.  Something elfish, light-hearted in the
quality of it, stirred a dim memory and there flashed into
mind the lines of an old poem:

   |  Come, dear children, come out and play.
   |  The moon is shining as bright as day,
   |  Up the ladder and over the wall—

Raising my head quickly, I saw through the open
doorway their perfect illustration.  The wall was the
smooth wall of the sea, with a waning moon rising just
clear of it, sending a path of light to the strip of white
beach in front of the house.  The palm trees bordering
the shore swarmed with children who were throwing
down nuts.  One ancient tree, its stem a fantastic
curve, held its foliage far out over the water at a point
where the floor of the narrow outer lagoon shelved
steeply toward the reef some fifty yards distant.
Both boys and girls were shinning up the trunk, one
after the other, diving from the plumed top, dropping
feet foremost, jumping with their hands clasped
around their knees into the foaming water—the
wreckage of huge combers which broke on the reef
pouring across it into the inner shallows.  A second
group had gathered in the moonlit area just before the
doorway.  Several youngsters were peering intently
in my direction.  Others were playing a sort of
handclapping game to the accompaniment of an odd little
singsong.  A small girl, with a baby riding astride
her hip, walked past, and I saw another, of ten or
twelve, standing at the edge of the track of shimmering
light, holding a coconut to her lips with both hands.
Her head was bent far back and her hair hung free
from her shoulders as she drained the cool liquid to the
last drop.

Imagine coming out of the depths of sleep to the
consciousness of such a scene!  I was hardly more sure
of the reality of it than I had been of the shout, the
touch of hands.  It was like a picture out of a book of
fairy tales, but one quick with life, the figures coming
and going against a background of empty sea where the
long swell broke in lines of white fire on a ledge of
coral.  I remembered where I was, of course: in my
own house, which stood on the ocean side of a small
motu known in the Paumotuan legend as "The island
where the souls were eaten."  The house had been
built for me only the day before by the order of Puarei,
chief of the atoll of Rutiaro; and the motu was one of
a dozen uninhabited islands which lay on the
thirty-mile circumference to the lagoons.

It was ordered—by chance, which took me there,
perhaps—that I was never to see the place in the clear
light of usual experience, but rather through a glamour
like that of remembered dreams—a long succession of
dreams in which, night after night, events shape
themselves according to the heart's desire, or even more
fantastically, with an airy disregard for any semblance
to reality.  So it was, waking from sleep on the first
night which I spent under my own roof.  I was almost
ready to believe that my presence there was not the
result of chance.  Waywardness of fancy is one of the
most godlike of the attributes of that divinity, but the
display of it is as likely as not to be unfriendly.  Here
there seemed to be reasoned kindly action.  "Providence,"
I said to myself—"Providence without a doubt;
a little repentant, perhaps, because of questionable
gifts in the past."  A whimsical Providence, too,
which delighted in shocking my sense of probability.
What could those children be doing on Soul-Eaters'
Island in the middle of the night?  I, myself, had left
the village island, four miles distant, only a few hours
earlier, and at that time everyone was asleep.  There
was not a sound of human activity in the settlement;
not a glimmer of light to be seen anywhere excepting in
Moy Ling's, the Chinaman's, shop, and on the surface
of the lagoon where lay the misty reflections of the
stars.  "Perhaps," I thought, "these are not earthly
children.  Maybe they are the ghosts of those whose
souls were eaten here so many years ago."  I was
more than half serious in thinking of that possibility.
Stranger things had happened on islands not so far
removed from the world of men.

I dressed very quietly and went to the door, taking
care to keep well in the shadow so that I might look
on for a moment without being seen.  My doubts
vanished at once.  Not only the children had come
out to play; fathers and mothers, as well.  Tamitanga
was there and Rikitia and Nahea and Pohu and
Tahere and Hunga; Nui-Tane and Nui-Vahine, Tamataha,
Manono, Havaiki; and I saw old Rangituki,
who was at least seventy and a grandmother several
times over, clapping her hands with others of her
generation and swaying from side to side in time to the
music of Kaupia's accordion.  All the older people
were grouped around Puarei, who was seated in an old
deck chair, a sort of throne which was carried about
for him wherever he went.  Poura, his wife, lay on a
mat beside him, her chin propped on her hands.
Both greeted me cordially, but offered no explanation
for the reason of the midnight visit.  I was glad that
they didn't.  I liked the casualness of it, which was
quite in keeping with habits of life at Rutiaro.  But I
couldn't help smiling, remembering my reflections
earlier in the evening.  I believed then that I was
crossing the threshold of what was to be an adventure
in solitude, and was in a mood of absurdly youthful
elation at the prospect.  "I was to delve deeply, for the
first time, into my own resources against loneliness.
I had known the solitude of cities, but there one has
the comfortable sense of nearness to others; the refuge
of books, pictures, music—all the distractions which
prevent any very searching examination of one's
capacity for a life of retirement.  At Soul-Eaters'
Island I would have no books, no pictures, excepting a
colored post card of the Woolworth Building which
had won me this opportunity; and for music I was
limited to what I could make for myself with my
*ocharina*, my sweet-potato whistle which had a range
of one octave.  Thus scantly provided with diversions,
I was to learn how far my own thoughts would serve to
make a solitary life not only endurable, but pleasant."

So I had dreamed as I paddled down the lagoon,
with my island taking form against the starlit sky to
the eastward.  It was one of those places which set
one to dreaming, which seem fashioned by nature for
the enjoyment of a definite kind of experience.  Seeing
it, whether by day or by night, the most gregarious of
men, I am sure, would have become suddenly enamored
of his own companionship and the most prosaic would
have discovered a second, meditative self which pleads
for indulgence with gentle obstinacy.  But, alas! my
own unsocial nature gained but a barren victory, being
robbed, at the outset, of the fruits of it, by the
seventy-five convivial inhabitants of Rutiaro.  Here within
six hours was half the village at my door, and Puarei
told me that the rest of it, or as many as were provided
with canoes, was following.  Evidently he had
suggested the invasion.  My new house needed warming—or
the Paumotuan equivalent to that festival—so
they had come to warm it.

Preparations were being made on an elaborate scale.
The children were gathering green nuts for drinking
and fronds for the cloth at the feast.  Women and
girls were grating the meat of ripe nuts, pressing out
the milk for the *miti haari*; cleaning fish; preparing
shells for dishes.  Some of the men and the older boys
were building native ovens—eight of them, each one
large enough for roasting a pig.  All of this work was
being carried out under Puarei's direction and to the
accompaniment of Kaupia's accordion.  I wish that I
might in some way make real to others the unreal
loveliness of the scene.  It must be remembered that
it took place on one of the loneliest of a lonely cloud
of islands which lay in the midmost solitude of an
empty ocean.  The moonlight must be remembered,
too, and how it lay in splinters of silver on the
motionless fronds of the palms as though it were of the very
texture of their polished surfaces.  And you must
hear Kaupia's accordion, and the shouts of the children
as they dove into the pool of silvered foam.  The
older ones, out of respect to me, I think, wore wisps of
parou cloth about their loins, but the babies were as
naked as on the day they were born.  Tereki was
standing among these five-and-six-year-olders, who were
too small for the climb to the diving place, taking them
up, sometimes two at once, and tossing them into the
pool among the others, where they were as much at
home as so many minnows.  Watching them, I thought
with regret of my own lost opportunities as a child.
I felt a deep pity for all the children of civilization who
must wear clothing and who never know the joy of
playing at midnight, and by moonlight too.  Mothers'
clubs and child-welfare organizations would do well to
consider the advisability of repealing the old "to bed
at seven" law, the bugbear of all children.  Its only
merits, if it may be so called, is that it fosters in
children, a certain melancholy intellectual enjoyment in
such poems as, "Up the ladder and over the wall,"
where the forbidden pleasures are held out to them as
though they were natural ones—which most of them
are, of course—and quite possible of attainment.

I was sorry that Tino, supercargo of the *Caleb
S. Winship*, could not be present to see how blithely the
work went forward.  He had called the people of
Rutiaro a lazy lot, and he was right—they were lazy,
according to the standards of temperate climates.
But when they worked toward an end which pleased
them their industry was astonishing.  Tino's belief was
that man was made to labor, whether joyfully or not,
in order that he might increase his wealth, whether
he needed it or not, and that of the world at large.
I remember meeting somewhat the same point of view
in reading the lives and memoirs of some of the old
missionaries to the islands.  It seems to have irked
them terribly, finding a people who had never heard
that doleful hymn, "Work, for the Night Is Coming."  They,
too, believed that the needs of the Polynesians
should be increased, but for ethical reasons, in order
that they should be compelled to cultivate regular
habits of industry in order to satisfy them.  Although
I didn't agree with it, Tino's seemed to me the sounder
conviction.  The missionaries might have argued as
reasonably for a general distribution of Job-like boils,
in order that the virtues of patience and fortitude
might have wider dissemination.  But neither trade nor
religion had altered to any noticeable extent the habits
of life at Rutiaro.  The people worked, as they had
always done, under the press of necessity.  Their simple
needs being satisfied, their inertia was a thing to marvel
at.  I have often seen them sitting for hours at a time,
moving only with the shadows which sheltered them.
There was something awe-inspiring in their immobility,
in their attitude of profound reverie.  I felt at times
that I was living in a land under a perpetual
enchantment of silence and sleep.  These periods of
calm—or, as Tino would say, laziness—were usually brought
to an end by Puarei.  It was a fascinating thing to
watch him throwing off the enchantment, so gradual
the process was and so strange the contrast when he
was thoroughly awakened and had roused the village
from its long sleep.  Then would follow a period of
activity—fishing, copra making, canoe building,
whatever there was to do would be done, not speedily,
perhaps, but smoothly, and fasts would be broken—in
the case of many of the villagers for the first time in
two or three days.  My house was built during such a
period.  I was still living with Puarei on the village
island, wondering when, if ever, I was to have the
promised dwelling.  Then one afternoon, while I was
absent on a shell-gathering expedition, the village set
out *en masse* for Soul-Eaters' Island, cut the timbers,
branded the fronds, erected, swept, and garnished my
house, and were at the settlement again before I
myself had returned.  That task finished, here they
were back for the warming festival, and the energy
spent in preparing for it would have more than loaded
Tino's schooner with copra.  I couldn't flatter myself
that all of this was done solely to give me pleasure.
They found pleasure in it too, and, furthermore, I
knew that an unusually long interval of fasting called
for compensation in the way of feasting.

Puarei was in a gay mood.  Religion sat rather
heavily upon him sometimes—by virtue of his Papeete
schooling, he was the chief elder of his church; but
once he sloughed off his air of Latter Day Saintliness
he made a splendid master of revels; and he threw
it aside the moment the drums began to beat, and led a
dozen of the younger men in a dance which I had not
seen before.  It was very much like modern Swedish
drill set to music, except that the movements were as
intricate and graceful as they were exhausting.  Three
kinds of drums were used—one, an empty gasoline tin,
upon which the drummer kept up a steady roll while
the dance was in progress.  The rhythm for the
movements was indicated by three others, two of them
beating hollowed cylinders of wood, while a third was
provided with an old French army drum of the
Napoleonic period.  The syncopation was extraordinary.
Measures were divided in an amazing variety of ways,
and often when the opportunity seemed lost the
fragments joined perfectly just as the next one was at
hand.  The music was a kaleidoscope in sound, made
up of unique and startling variations in tempo, as the
dance moved from one figure to the next.

At the close of it Kaupia took up her accordion again,
and dancing by some of the women followed.  At
length, Rangituki, grandmother though she was, could
resist the music no longer.  The others gave way to
her, and in a moment she was dancing alone, proudly,
with a sort of wistful abandon, as though she were
remembering her youth, throwing a last defiance in the
teeth of Time.  Kaupia sang as she played to an air
which had but four changes in it.  The verse was five
words long and repeated endlessly.

   |  Tu fra to potta mi,
   |  Tu fra to potta mi.

Both the words and the air had a familiar sound.
They called to mind a shadowy picture of three tall,
thin women in spangled skirts, all of them beating
tambourines in unison and dancing in front of a painted
screen.  I couldn't account for the strange vision at
first.  It glimmered faintly, far in the depths of
subconscious memory, like a colored newspaper supplement,
lying in murky water at the end of a pier.  Suddenly
it rose into focus, drawn to the surface by the
buoyant splendor of a name—the Cherry Sisters.  I
remembered then a vaudeville troupe which long ago
made sorry capital of its lack of comeliness; and I saw
them again on the island where the souls were eaten as
clearly as ever I had as a youngster, knocking their
tambourines on bony elbows, shaking their curls, and
singing

   |  "Shoe, fly, don't bother me,"

in shrill, cracked voices.  Kaupia's version was merely
a phonetic translation of the words.  They meant
nothing in the Paumotuan dialect; and—old woman
though she was—Rangituki's dance, which accompanied
the music, played in faster and faster time, was
in striking contrast to the angular movements of the
Cherry Sisters, tripping it in the background, across the
dim footlights of the eighteen nineties.

Other canoes were arriving during this time, and at
last a large canoe, which had put off from the ocean side
of the village island, was seen making in toward the
pass.  It was loaded with pigs and chickens, the most
important part of the feast, and had been eagerly
awaited for more than an hour.  Shouts of anticipation
went up from the shore as the boat drew in with its
wished-for freight; but these were a little premature.
There was a stretch of ugly, broken water to be passed,
where the swift ebb from the lagoon met the swell of
the open sea.  The canoe was badly jostled in crossing
it, and some of the chickens, having worked loose from
their bonds, escaped.  Like the dogs of the atolls, the
chickens are of a wild breed, and they took the air with
sturdy wings.  The chase from the shore began at
once, but it was a hopeless one.  Soul-Eaters' Island
is five hundred yards long by three hundred broad,
and there is another, on the opposite side of the pass,
which is more than a mile in extent.  We made frantic
efforts to prevent them from reaching it.  We threw
sticks and stones, tried to entice them with broken
coconuts, the meat temptingly accessible.  It was to no
purpose.  They had been enticed before; their crops
were full, and several hours of captivity had made them
wary.  Furthermore, like all Polynesian chickens, they
seemed to have a racial memory of what they had been
in other times, in less congenial environments—of the
lean days when they had been caught and eaten at will,
chased by dogs, run down by horses.  They were not
so far from all that as to have lost conscious pride in
their regained prerogative of flight.  The last we saw
of them they were using it to splendid advantage over
the rapid stream which separated the two islands.
One old hen, alone, remained perched in the top of a
coconut tree on Soul-Eaters' Island.  She was in no
hurry to leave.  She knew that she could follow the
others whenever she liked, and she knew that we knew
it.  She seemed drunk with a sense of freedom and
power, and cackled proudly, as though more than half
convinced that the nuts clustered in the nest of foliage
beneath her were eggs which she had laid.

Knowing the wholesomeness of the Paumotuan
appetite, I could understand why the loss of the
chickens was regarded seriously.  A dozen of them
remained, and we had eight pigs weighing from one
hundred to one hundred and fifty pounds each, to say
nothing of some fifty pounds of fish.  All of this was
good, in so far as it went, but there was a gloomy
shaking of heads as we returned from our fruitless chase.
Not that the Paumotuans are particularly fond of
chicken; on the contrary, they don't care greatly for
fowl of any sort, but it serves to fill odd corners of their
capacious stomachs.  It was this they were thinking of,
and the possible lack, at the end of the feast, of the
feeling of almost painful satiety which is to them an
essential after-dinner sensation.  In this emergency I
contributed four one-pound tins of beef and salmon,
my entire stock of substantial provisions for the
adventure in solitude; but I could see that Puarei, as
well as the others, regarded this as a mere relish—a
wholly acceptable but light course of *hors-d'oeuvre*.
Fortunately there was at hand an inexhaustible reservoir
of food—the sea—and we prepared to go there for
further supplies.  I never lost an opportunity to witness
those fish-spearing expeditions.  Once I had tried
my hand as a participant and found myself as dangerously
out of my element as a Paumotuan would be at
the joy stick of an airplane.  I saw a great many fish,
but I could not have speared one of them if it had been
moored to the bottom, and after a few absurd attempts
was myself fished into the boat, half drowned.  I
lay there for a few minutes, gasping for breath, my
ear drums throbbing painfully from the attempt to
reach unaccustomed depths.

The experiment convinced me that fish spearing in
the open sea is not an easily acquired art, but one
handed down in its perfection through at least twenty
generations of Low Island ancestors.  It is falling into
disuse in some of the atolls where wealth is accumulating
and tinned food plentiful; but the inhabitants of
Rutiaro still follow it with old-time zest.  They handle
their spears affectionately, as anglers handle and sort
their lies.  These are true sportsman's weapons,
provided with a single unbarbed dart, bound with sinnet
to a tapering shaft from eight to ten feet long.  Their
water goggles, like their spears, they make for
themselves.  They are somewhat like an aviator's goggles,
disks of clear glass fitted in brass rims, with an inner
cushion of rubber which cups closely around the eyes,
preventing the entrance of water.  When adjusted they
give the wearer an owlish appearance, like the
horn-rimmed spectacles which used to be affected by
American undergraduates.  Thus equipped, with their *pareus*
girded into loin cloths, a half dozen of the younger men
jumped into the rapid current which flows past
Soul-Eaters' Island and swam out to sea.

Tohetika, Tehina, Pinga (the boat steerer), and I
followed in a canoe.  Dawn was at hand and, looking
back, I saw the island, my house, and the crowd on the
beach in the suffused, unreal light of sun and fading
moon.  In front of us the swimmers were already
approaching the tumbled waters at the entrance to the
pass.  Upon reaching it they disappeared together,
and I next saw them far on the other side, swimming
in a direction parallel to the reef, and some fifty yards
beyond the breaking point of the surf.  When we
joined them the sun was above the horizon and they
were already at the sport.  They lay face down on the
surface of the water, turning their heads now and then
for a breath of air.  They swam with an easy breast
stroke and a barely perceptible movement of the legs,
holding their spears with their toes, near the end of the
long shaft.  Riding the long, smooth swell, it was hard
to keep them in view, and they were diving repeatedly,
coming to the surface again at unexpected places.

Through the clear water I could see every crevice
and cranny in the shelving slope of coral; the mouths
of gloomy caverns which undermined the reef, and
swarms of fish, as strangely colored as the coral itself,
passing through them, flashing across sunlit spaces, or
hovering in the shadows of overhanging ledges.  It was
a strange world to look down upon and stranger still
to see men moving about in it as though it were their
natural home.  Sometimes they grasped their spears
as a poniard would be held for a downward blow;
sometimes with the thumb forward, thrusting with an
underhand movement.  They were marvelously quick
and accurate at striking.  I had a nicer appreciation
of their skill after my one attempt, which had proven to
me how difficult it is to judge precisely the distance,
the location of the prey, and the second, for the thrust.
A novice was helpless.  He suffered under the heavy
pressure of the water, and the long holding of his breath
cost him agonized effort.  Even though he were
comfortable physically he might chase, with as good result,
the dancing reflections of a mirror, turned this way
and that in the sunlight.

As they searched the depths to the seaward side the
bodies of the fishers grew shadowy, vanished altogether,
reappeared as they passed over a lighter background of
blue or green which marked an invisible shoal.  At
last they would come clearly into view, the spear held
erect, rising like embodied spirits through an element
of matchless purity which seemed neither air nor water.
The whistling noises which they made as they regained
the surface gave the last touch of unreality to the
scene.  I have never understood the reason for this
practice which is universal among the divers and
fishers of the Low Islands, unless it is that their lungs,
being famished for air, they breathe it out grudgingly
through half-closed teeth.  Heard against the thunder
of the surf, the sounds, hoarse or shrill, according to the
wont of the diver, seemed anything but human.

We returned in an hour's time with the canoe half
filled with fish—square-nosed *tinga-tingas*, silvery
*tamures*, brown spotted *kitos, gnareas*; we had more
than made good the loss of the chickens.  The
preparations for the feast had been completed.  The table
was set or, better, the cloth of green fronds was laid
on the ground near the beach.  At each place there was
a tin of my corned beef or salmon; the half of a coconut
shell filled with raw fish, cut into small pieces in a
sauce of *miti haari*—salted coconut milk—and a green
coconut for drinking.  Along the center of the table
were great piles of fish, baked and raw; roast pork and
chicken; mounds of bread stacked up like cannon
balls.  The bread was not of Moy Ling's baking, but
made in native fashion—lumps of boiled dough of the
size and weight of large grape fruit.  One would
think that the most optimistic stomach would ache at
the prospect of receiving it, but the Paumotuan stomach
is of ostrichlike hardihood and, as I have said, after
long fasting it demands quantity rather than quality
in food.

It was then about half past six, a seasonable hour for
the feast, for the air was still cool and fresh.  The food
was steaming on the table, but we were not yet ready
to sit down to it.  Fête days, like Sundays, required
costumes appropriate to the occasion, and everyone
retired into the bush to change clothing.  I thought
then that I was to be the only disreputable banqueter
of the lot, and regretted that I had been so eager to see
my new house.  Not expecting visitors, I had come
away from the village with only my supply of food.
Fortunately, Puarei had been thoughtful for me.  I
found not only my white clothing, but my other
possessions—bolts of ribbon, perfume, the cheap
jewelry, etc., which I had bought, on credit, of Moy Ling.
And the house itself had been furnished and decorated
during the hour when I was out with the fish spearers.
There was a table and a chair, made of bits of old
packing cases, in one corner; and on the sleeping
mat a crazy quilt and a pillow with my name worked
in red silk within a border of flowers.  Hanging from
the ceiling was a faded papier-mache bell, the kind
one sees in grocers' windows at home at Christmas
time.  This was originally the gift of some trader;
and the pictures, too, which decorated the walls.
They had been cut from the advertising pages of some
American magazine.  One of them represented a man,
dressed in a much-advertised brand of underwear, who
was smiling with cool solicitude at two others who were
perspiring heavily and wishing—if the legend printed
beneath was true—that their underwear bore the same
stamp as that of their fortunate comrade.  There was
another, in color, of a woman smiling across a table
at her husband, who smiled back while they ate a
particular brand of beans.  The four walls of my house
were hung with pictures of this sort, strung on cords of
coconut fiber—Huirai's work, I was sure, done out of
the kindness of his heart.  He was merely an
unconscious agent of the gods, administering this further
reproof for my temerity in seeking consciously an
adventure in solitude.  As I changed my clothing I
pondered the problem as to how I could get rid of the
gallery without giving Huirai offense, and from this I
fell to thinking of the people smiling down at me.  Is
our race made up, in large part, of such out-and-out
materialists, whose chief joy in life lies in discovering
some hitherto untried brand of soup or talcum powder?
Do they live, these people?  They looked real enough
in the picture.  I seemed to know many of them, and
I remembered their innumerable prototypes I had met
in the world I had left only the year before.  "Well, if
they are real," I thought, "what has become of the old
doomsday men and women who used to stand at street
corners with bundles of tracts in their hands, saying to
passers-by, 'My friend, is your soul saved?'?"  No
answer came from the smiling materialists on all sides
of me.  They smiled still, as though in mockery of my
attempt to elude them in whatsoever unfrequented
corner of the world; as though life were merely the
endless enjoyment of creature comforts, the endless,
effortless use of labor-saving devices.  One man, in
his late fifties, who really ought to have been thinking
about his soul, had in his eyes only the light of sensual
gratification.  He was in pajamas and half shaven,
announcing to me, to the world at large: "At last!
A razor!"

The sight of him offering me his useful little
instrument put an end to my meditation.  I rubbed
ruefully a three days' growth of beard, thinking of the
torture in store for me when I should next go to Pinga
for a shave.  He was the village barber, as well as its
most skillful boat steerer.  His other customers were
used to his razor and his methods, and their faces were
inured to pain; for had not their ancestors, through
countless generations, had their beards plucked out
hair by hair?  I, on the other hand, was the creature
of my own land of creature comforts.  The anticipation
of a shave was agony, and the realization—Pinga sitting
on my chest, holding my head firm with one immense
hand while he scraped and rasped with his dull razor—that
was to die weekly and to live to die again.  I got
what amusement I could from the thought of the
different set of values at Rutiaro.  I had only to ask for
a house, and Puarei had given me one, with an island
of my own to set it on.  He thought no more of the
request than if I had asked him for a drinking coconut.
But not all the wealth of the Low Island pearl fisheries,
had it been mine to offer, could have procured for me a
safety razor with a dozen good blades.

I heard Puarei shouting, "*Haere mai ta maa!*" and
went out to join the others, my unshaved beard in
woeful contrast to my immaculate white clothing.
But my guests, or hosts, had the native courtesy of
many primitive people, and I was not made conscious
of my unreaped chin.  Furthermore, everyone was
hungry, and so, after Puarei had said grace for the
Church of Latter Day Saints, and Huirai a second one
for the Reformed Church of Latter Day Saints, and
Nui-Tano a third as the Catholic representative, we
fell to without further loss of time.

The enjoyment of food is assuredly one of the great
blessings of life, although it is not a cause for perpetual
smiling, as the writers of advertisements would have
one believe.  According to the Low Island way of
thinking, it is not a subject to be talked about at any
length.  I liked their custom of eating in silence, with
everyone giving undivided attention to the business in
hand.  It gave one the privilege of doing likewise,
a relief to a man weary of the unnatural dining habits
of more advanced people.  It may be a trifle gross to
think of your food while you are eating it, but it is
natural and, if the doctors are to be believed, an
excellent aid to digestion.  Now and then Puarei
would say, "*E mea maitai, tera*" ("A thing good, that"),
tapping a haunch of roast pork with his forefinger.
And I would reply, "*É, é mea maitai roa, tera*" ("Yes,
a thing very good, that").  Then we would fall to
eating again.  On my right, Hunga went from fish to
pork and from pork to tinned beef, whipping the *miti
haari* to his lips with his fingers without the loss of a
drop.  Only once he paused for a moment and let his
eyes wander the length of the table.  Shaking his head
with a sigh of satisfaction, he said, "*Katinga ahuru
katinga*" ("Food and yet more food").  There is no
phrase sweeter to Paumotuan ears than that one.

Huirai, the constable, was the only one who made
any social demands upon me.  As already related, he
had once made a journey from Papeete to San Francisco
as a stoker on one of the mail boats and was immensely
proud of the few English phrases which he had picked
up during the voyage.  He didn't know the meaning of
them, but that made no difference.  He could put on
side before the others, make them believe that he was
carrying on an intelligent conversation.  "What's the
matter?" "Oh yes!" "Never mind" were among
his favorite expressions—unusually mild ones, it seemed
to me, for one who had been associated with a gang of
cockney stokers; and he brought them out apropos of
nothing.  He was an exasperating old hypocrite, but a
genial one, and I couldn't help replying to some of his
feints at conversation.  Once, out of curiosity,
wondering what his reply would be, I said, "Huirai, you're
the worst old four-flusher in the seventy-two islands,
aren't you?"  He smiled and nodded, and came back
with the most telling of all his phrases, "You go to
hell, me."  On that occasion it was delivered with what
seemed something more than mere parrotlike aptness
of reply.

Clipped to his undershirt he wore a fountain pen,
which was as much a part of his costume on those
dress occasions as his dungaree trousers and pandanus
hat.  It had a broken point, was always dry, and,
although Huirai read fairly well, he could hardly
write his own name.  No matter.  He would no more
have forgotten his pen than a French soldier his
*Croix de guerre*.  But he was not alone in his love for
these implements of the *popaa's* (white man's) culture.
There was Havaiki, for example, who owned a small
folding camera which he had bought from some trader.
The two men were very jealous of each other.  Huirai
had traveled and had a fountain pen, but Havaiki's
camera was a much more complicated instrument.
There had never been any films for it, but he was quite
satisfied without them.  The camera stood on a shelf
at his house, an ever-present proof of his better title
to distinction.  His chief regret, I believe, was that he
couldn't wear it, as Huarai did his pen.  But he often
carried it with him on Sundays and went through the
pretense of taking pictures.  Some of the more sanguine
still believed that he would one day surprise the
village by producing a large number of magnificent
photographs.

A further account of the feast at Soul-Eaters'
Island would be nothing more than a detailed statement
of the amount of food consumed, and it would not be
credited as truthful.  It is enough to say that it was a
Latter Day miracle, comparable to the feeding of the
five thousand, with this reversal of the circumstances—that
food for approximately that number was eaten by
twenty-two men.  At last Puarei sat back with a groan
of content and said, "*Aué!  Paia 'huru paia to tatou*."  It
is impossible to translate this literally, but the exact
meaning is, "We are all of us full up to the neck."  It
was true.  We were.  That is, all of the men.  The
women and children were waiting, and as soon as we
gave them place they set to on the remnants.
Fortunately, there was, as Hunga had said, food and yet
more food, so that no one went hungry.  At the close
of the feast I saw old Rangituki take a fragment of
coconut frond and weave it into a neat basket.  Then
she gathered into it all of the fish bones and hung the
basket from one of the rafters of my house.  Rangituki
was pure heathen, one of the unredeemed of the
Rutiaroans, but I noticed that some of the Catholics
and Latter Day Saints, even the Reformed Saints of the
later Latter Day persuasion, all in good standing in
their churches, assisted her in making the collection.
I had observed the same practice at other islands.
At the beginning of a meal thanks were given to the
God of Christians for the bounty of the sea; but
fisherman's luck was a matter of the first importance,
and, while the old gods might be overthrown, there
seemed to be a fairly general belief that it would not do
to trifle with immemorial custom.

It was midmorning before the last of the broken
meats had been removed and the beach made tidy.
The breeze died away, and the shadows of the palms
moved only with the imperceptible advance of the sun.
It was a time for rest, for quiet meditation, and all of the
older people were gathered in the shade, gazing out
over a sea as tranquil as their minds, as lonely as their
lives had always been and would always be.  I knew
that they would remain thus throughout the day,
talking a little, after the refreshment of light slumbers,
but for the most part sitting without speech or
movement, their consciousness crossed by vague thoughts
which would stir it scarcely more than the cat's-paw
ruffled the surface of the water.  No sudden,
half-anguished realization of the swift passage of time
would disturb the peace of their reverie; no sense of
old loss to be retrieved would goad them into swift
and feverish action.

A land crab moved across a strip of sunlight and
sidled into his hole, pulling his grotesque little shadow
after him; and the children, restless little spirits,
splashed and shouted in the shallows of the lagoon,
maneuvering fleets of empty beef and salmon tins
reminders of the strange beginning of my adventure in
solitude.

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   Chapter VIII tailpiece





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.. _`The Starry Threshold`:

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   CHAPTER IX


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   The Starry Threshold

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The only visible reminder which I have
now of my residence on "the island
where the souls were eaten" is a
pocket notebook of penciled comment,
with a dozen pages, blank and fair, at
the back—in themselves a reminder of the fragmentary
nature of that adventure in solitude, of the blank pages
at the close of every chapter of experience, awaiting the
final comment which is never set down.  It is a small
notebook of Chinese manufacture, with a pretty fantasy
of flowers woven through the word "Memoranda,"
and butterflies with wings of gold-and-blue hovering
over it, meant to suggest, perhaps, that one's memories,
however happy or however seemingly enduring, are
as ephemeral as they and must soon fade and die.
But I am not willing to accept such a suggestion, to
believe that I can ever forget even the most trivial of
the events which took place at Rutiaro or at
Soul-Eaters' Island.  By some peculiar virtue of their own
they stand out with the vividness of portions of
childhood experience which remains fixed in the memory
when other more important happenings have been long
forgotten.

The casual reader of the notebook would never guess
this from the comment written there.  Did he know
the length and the nature of my residence at the atoll,
he would be surprised, merely, that with so much
leisure for observation there should be such poverty
of recorded fact.  I, myself, am surprised and a little
appalled when I think how the weeks slipped by,
leaving me nothing to show for them.  I became a
spendthrift of time.  I was under the delusion that my own
just share of it had been immeasurably increased, that
in some unaccountable way I had fallen heir to a
legacy of hours and days which could never be
exhausted.  The delusion was of gradual growth, like
the habit of reverie which fastens itself at last upon the
most restless of wanderers among the atolls.  In the
beginning I was full of business.  I remember with
what earnestness of purpose I wrote on the first page
of the notebook, "Rutiaro: Observations on Life and
Character in the Low Archipelago."  I had ambitious
plans.  I meant to go back and forth between my
hermitage and the village island, notebook in hand
saying, "*Eaha tera?*" ("What is that?"), "*Nafea ia
parau Paumotu?*" ("How do you say this in
Paumotuan?").  And when I had learned the language and
had completed my studies of flora and fauna I was to
be the Boswell of the atoll, curious, tireless, not to be
rebuked by the wind rustling the fronds of the palms
nor by the voice of the sea when the wind was low,
saying, "Sh-h-h, sh-h-h," on thirty miles of coral reef.
But I was rebuked—or so it seemed to me—and now,
I fear, the learned monograph is never to be written.
A faltering purpose is plainly indicated in the
notebook.  It becomes apparent in the first observation on
"The Life and Character of the Paumotuans," which
reads:

   |  Before the starry threshold of Jove's court
   |  My mansion is; where those immortal shapes
   |  Of bright aerial spirits live ensphered
   |  In regions mild, of calm and serene air.

The president of the Polynesian society would say,
and rightly, no doubt, that this is not germane to the
subject.  But at the time I wrote it it was so accurately
descriptive of the place where my house stood that it
might have been embodied with scarcely the exchange
of a word in an exact real-estate announcement of the
location of my property.  I set it down one evening in
early summer, the evening of my first day's residence
at Soul-Eaters' Island.  The completion of my house
had been celebrated with a feast, and toward midnight
I was left alone, watching the departure of the last of
the villagers, who were returning in their canoes along
the ocean side of the atoll.  The sea was as calm as I
have ever seen it, and as they went homeward, dipping
their paddles into the shining tracks of the stars, my
guests were singing an old chant.  It was one of
innumerable verses, telling of an evil earth spirit in the
form of a sea bird which was supposed to make its
home on the *motu*, and at the end of each verse the
voices of the women rose in the refrain which I could
hear long after the canoes had passed from sight:

   |  "*Aué!  Aué!*
   |  *Te nehenehe é!*"
   |  ("Alas!  Alas!
   |  How beautiful it is!")

a lament that a spirit so vindictive, so pitiless, should
be so fair to outward seeming.

Standing at the starry threshold, listening to the
ghostly refrain, I translated its application—its
meaning, too—from the bird to the island where, perhaps,
I would one day see it in my rambles.  I regretted that
it was so inaccessible, so remote and hidden from the
world, as though that were not more than half the
reason for its untarnished beauty.  It is a maudlin
feeling, that of sadness at the thought of loveliness
hidden from appraising eyes; and I am inclined to
think that it springs, not so much from an unselfish
desire to share it, as from a vulgar longing to say
to one's gregarious fellows: "See what I have found!
Can you show me anything to equal it in beauty,
you dwellers in cities?"  Whatever its source in this
case, I was glad that it passed quickly.  No tears
stained my pillow, even though I knew that Rutiaro
could never be the goal of Sunday excursionists.  But
I was not quite easy in mind as I composed myself for
sleep.  I had made a poor beginning as a diarist.  The
first entry was fanciful and, furthermore, not my own.
What original contribution to truth or beauty could I
make as a result of the day's events?  Finally I rose,
lit my lamp, and wrote, underneath the Comus
quotation:

"The Paumotuans are very fond of perfume.  This is
probably due to the fact that their islands, being
scantly provided with flowers and sweet-smelling
herbs, they take this means of satisfying their craving
for fragrant odors."

   |  Alas!  Alas!
   |  How erroneous it was!

that observation.  But I thought when I made it that
it was based upon a careful enough consideration of the
facts.  During the afternoon I had distributed some
gifts among my guests, chiefly among the children.  I
had some bolts of ribbon and dress goods, some
earrings and bracelets, thinly washed in gold, which I
had bought, on credit, of Moy Ling, the Chinaman,
and I had been saving them for just such an occasion
as the feast at Soul-Eaters' Island.  I also had a case
of perfume which Moy had been very reluctant to part
with—perfume and toilet waters in fancy bottles, with
quaint legends printed on the labels—"June Rose,"
which the makers admitted had "as much body as
higher-priced perfumes"; "Wild Violet: Like a faint
breath from the forest floor"; "Khiva Bouquet:
The Soul of the Exquisite Orient"; etc.  This gift
was greatly coveted.  Pinga immediately took charge
of the three bottles I had given his daughters and
packed them carefully in a *pareu*, together with a
bottle of bay rum presented to him by virtue of his
office as village barber.  Rangituki went among her
grandchildren scolding and rating, until she had made
a similar collection, and in a short time all of the
perfume was in the hands of a few of the older people.
This seemed to me rather high-handed procedure, but
it was not my place to interfere with parental and
grandparental authority.  And it was as well,
perhaps, that the children should be restrained.
Otherwise they would have saturated their clothing and
their hair, and the atoll would have smelled to heaven
or very near it.

I thought no more of the episode until the following
Sunday when I went to church at the village.  A
combined service of Latter Day Saints and the
Reformed Church of Latter Day Saints was being held, an
amicable arrangement which would have scandalized
the white missionaries of those rival denominations.
But at Rutiaro Saints and Reformed Saints live
together peaceably enough and, being few in numbers,
they often join forces for greater effect in the *himines*.
The meeting was held in the Reformed church, a
sightly structure built entirely of *niau*—the braided
fronds of coconut palms—and the earthern floor was
covered with mats of the same material.  At one end
of the room there was a raised platform and a deal
table which served as a pulpit.  The walls lengthwise
were built to prop open outward, giving free circulation
to the air and charming views of the shaded floor of the
island and the blue waters of the lagoon.

The church was full, the men sitting on one side and
the women on the other, according to island custom,
and the children playing about on the floor between the
benches.  Many of the older people, too, sat on the
floor with their backs to the posts which supported the
roof.  Interest lagged during the intervals between the
singing, and although Huarai was preaching in his usual
forceful, denunciatory manner, I found my own
thoughts wandering on secular paths.  Of a sudden it
occurred to me that June Rose should be discernible
among the women of the congregation if it had as much
body as had been claimed for it.  But I could not
detect its presence nor did the faintest breath reach
me from the forest floor.  I was conscious only of the
penetrating odor of drying copra which came through
the open windows and the not unpleasant smell of
coconut oil.

What had become of the perfume, I wondered.  On
Sunday, if at all, it should have been in evidence, for
the women were in white dresses and before coming to
church had made their most elaborate toilet of the
week.  But Huirai was warming to his theme and
demanded attention, at least from me, not having heard
him preach before.  He had removed his coat and was
perspiring and exhorting in a way which would have
pleased the most devout and gloomy of missionaries.
He had a peculiar oratorical manner.  His face
foretold clearly the birth of an idea.  One could read there
the first vague impulse in the brain which gave rise to
it; see it gathering lucidity, glimmering, like heat
lightning on a summer evening, in his cloudy mind,
until it was given utterance in a voice of thunder, which
rumbled away to silence as the light of creation died
out of his eyes.  Then he would stand motionless,
gazing on vacancy, profoundly unself-conscious, as
though he were merely the passionless mouthpiece of
some higher power.  The abruptness of his outbursts
and his ferocious aspect when delivering them were
disconcerting; and it was even worse when, at intervals,
his eyes met mine.  Even though he were in the midst
of a sentence he would pause and his face would beam
with a radiant smile, in striking contrast to the
forbidding scowl of the moment before.  Remembering his
mission, he would then proceed in his former manner.
Without understanding his discourse, one would have
said that he was condemning all of his auditors, who
had evidently been guilty of the most frightful sins.
But this was not the case.  His sentences were short
and in the periods of silence between them I had time
to make a translation.

"*Ua taparahi Kaina ia Abela* (Cain killed Abel)....
Why did he kill him? ... Because he was a bad man, a
very bad man—(*taata ino roa*)....  He was jealous of
Abel, whom God loved because he willingly brought
him gifts from his plantation....  Abel did not keep
everything for himself....  He said to God, '*Teie te
faraoa na Oe*' ('Here is bread for you')....  He gave
other things, too, many things, and he was glad to
give them."

Huirai talked at great length on this theme, the
members of the congregation sometimes listening and
sometimes conversing among themselves.  They had
no scruples about interrupting the sermon.  While
Huirai was awaiting further inspiration hymns were
started by the women and taken up at once by the
others.  Pinga, who sang bass parts, rocked back and
forth to the cadence, one hand cupped over his right
ear, the better to enjoy the effect of the music.
Rangituki, who went to the different churches in turn,
because of the *himines*, had one of her granddaughters
in her lap, and while she sang made a careful examination
of the child's head, in search of a tiny parasite
which favored that nesting place.  Nui-Vahine sat
with her breast bare, suckling a three-months-old
baby.  Old men and women and young, even the
children, sang.  Huirai alone was silent, gazing with
moody abstraction over the heads of the congregation
as he pondered further the ethical points at issue in the
Cain and Abel story.

I had witnessed many scenes like this during the
months spent in cruising among the atolls on the
*Caleb S. Winship*—scenes to interest one again and
again and to furnish food for a great deal of futile
speculation.  How important a thing in the lives of
these primitive people is this religion of ours which has
replaced their old beliefs and superstitions?  It would
be absurd to say, "how fundamental," for religious
faith is of slow growth and it was only yesterday, as
time is counted, that the ship *Duff*, carrying the first
missionaries who had ever visited this southern ocean,
came to anchor at Tahiti.  One of Huirai's remarks
called to mind an account I had read of that first
meeting between Christian missionaries and the heathen
they had come to save.  It is to be found in the
narrative of the *Duff's* three years' voyage in the
south Pacific, published in 1799, by the London
Missionary Society:

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*Sunday, March 6, 1797*.

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The morning was pleasant, and with a gentle breeze we had, by
seven o'clock, got abreast of the district of Atahooroo, whence
we saw several canoes putting off and paddling toward us with
great speed; at the same time it fell calm, which, being in their
favor, we soon counted seventy-four canoes around us, many of
them double ones, containing about twenty persons each.  Being
so numerous, we endeavored to keep them from crowding on board;
but, in spite of all our efforts to prevent it,
there were soon not less
than one hundred of them dancing and capering like frantic persons
about our decks, crying, "*Tayo!  Tayo!*" and a few broken sentences
of English were often repeated.  They had no weapons of any
kind among them; however, to keep them in awe, some of the
great guns were ordered to be hoisted out of the hold whilst they,
as free from apprehension as the intention of mischief, cheerfully
assisted to put them on their carriages.  When the first ceremonies
were over, we began to view our new friends with an eye of inquiry;
their wild, disorderly behavior, strong smell of coconut oil, together
with the tricks of the *arreoies*, lessened the favorable opinion we
had formed of them; neither could we see aught of that elegance
and beauty in their women for which they have been so greatly
celebrated.  This at first seemed to depreciate them in the
estimation of our brethren; but the cheerfulness, good nature, and
generosity of these kind people soon removed the momentary
prejudices....  They continued to go about the decks till the
transports of their joy gradually subsided, when many of them
left us of their own accord....  Those who remained, in number
about forty, being brought to order, the brethren proposed
having divine service on the quarterdeck.
Mr. Cover officiated; he
perhaps was the first that ever mentioned with reverence the
Saviour's name to these poor heathens.  Such hymns were selected
as had the most harmonious tunes—first, "O'er the Gloomy Hills
of Darkness"; then, "Blow Ye the Trumpet, Blow"; and at
the conclusion, "Praise God, from Whom All Blessings Flow."
... The whole service lasted about an hour and a quarter.

.. vspace:: 2

How clear a picture one has of the scene, described
by men whose purity of faith, whose sincerity of belief,
were beyond question.  But one smiles a little sadly at
the thought of their austerity, their total lack of that
other divine attribute—a sense of humor.  "*Tayo!
Tayo!*" ("Friend!  Friend!") the Tahitians cried, and
the missionaries, to requite them for their kindly
welcome, organized a prayer meeting an hour and a
quarter in length, and sang, "O'er the Gloomy Hills
of Darkness."  It was a prophecy, that song.  The
Tahitians and others of the Polynesian family have
gone far on that road since 1797.

Of course one doesn't blame the missionaries for this;
but it seems to me that the chief benefit resulting from
the Christianizing process is that it has offset some of
the evils resulting from the rest of the civilizing process.
This was not the opinion of Tino, supercargo of the
*Caleb S. Winship*, however.  I remember a conversation
which I had with him on the subject, when Rutiaro
itself lay within view, but still far distant.  For the
sake of argument I had made some willfully disparaging
remark about traders, and Tino had taken exception
to it.

"You're wrong," he said.  "You know as well as I
do—or maybe you don't—what these people used to be:
cannibals, and not so many years ago at that.  I
don't suppose you would call it a genteel practice?
Well, what stopped it?  I'll tell you what stopped
it—tinned beef."

That was a new angle of vision to me.  I said nothing,
but I thought I could detect a hint of a smile in
his eyes as he waited for the statement to sink in.

"I have had some fun in my time," he went on,
"arguing this out with the missionaries.  I say tinned
beef and they say the four gospels.  Can't be proved
either way, of course.  But suppose, right now, every
trading schooner in the archipelago was to lay a course
for Papeete.  Suppose not one of them was to go back
to the atolls for the next twenty-five years.  Leave the
people to themselves, as you say, and let them have
their missionaries, with the Golden Rule in one hand
and the Ten Commandments in the other.  What
chance would they have of dying a natural death?
The missionaries, I mean.  About as much chance as
I have of getting old Maroaki at Taka Raro to pay me
the eight hundred francs he owes me.

"What makes me laugh inside is that the missionaries
are so serious about the influence they have had
on the natives.  I could tell them some things—but
what would be the use?  They wouldn't believe me.
Just before we left Papeete this time I was talking to
one of the Protestants.  He told me that his Church
had two thousand converts in French Oceania, while
the Catholics had only around six hundred, I believe it
was.  I said that I knew how he could get that extra
six hundred into his own fold, and probably a good
many more if he wanted to.  All he had to do was to
charter my schooner, load her with Tahiti produce—bananas,
mangoes, oranges, breadfruit; he needn't take
a single gallon of rum unless he wanted to.  Then we
would make a tour of the islands, holding church
festivals, with refreshments, at every one; and at the
end of the cruise I would guarantee that there wouldn't
be a Catholic left in all the Paumotus.  He didn't take
to the plan at all, and of course it did have one weak
point—if the Brothers tried the same game they would
have just the same success, and nobody could tell from
one week to the next which were Protestants and
which were Catholics.

"That's about what happened at Taka Raro the last
time I was down there.  The population is supposed
to be divided about half and half between the Latter
Day Saints and the Catholics.  There are no missionaries
living on the island.  The head churches in Papeete
send their men around when they can to see how things
are going with their flocks.  That is usually about
once a year for each of them.  Boats don't often put
in at Taka Raro.  I've been there only four times in
ten years, myself, and the last time I brought down a
young fellow from the Protestant crowd.  He had been
with me the whole cruise, holding services at the
islands where I had put in for copra.  I hadn't gone
to any of them, but at Taka Raro I felt the need of
some religion.  I had spent the whole day chasing that
Maroaki I spoke about.  The old rascal has owed me
that eight hundred francs since nineteen ten.  He is
an elder in his church too.  The minute he makes out
my schooner standing in toward the pass off he goes
on important business to the far end of the lagoon.  I
went after him that day, with my usual luck.  He
wasn't to be found, and I came back to the village
feeling a bit ruffled up.

"It was just time for the meeting, and I decided that
I might as well go as to loaf around finding that old
hypocrite while my copra was being loaded.  The
church was packed when I went in.  There wasn't a
Catholic in the village that evening.  All of those
who had been Catholics were taking part in the *himine*
and singing the Protestant songs as well as the Latter
Day Saints'.  No one seemed to pay much attention to
the sermon, though.  The young missionary didn't
understand the language very well, and the preaching
was hard for him.  But he seemed to feel pretty good
about the meeting, and when we left, the next day,
he went down to the cabin to write a report of the
progress his church had made at Taka Raro.  He
must have had a lot to say, for he was at it all the
morning.  He didn't know that we passed the Ata
just after we got out of the pass.  That made me feel
good, for Louis Germaine, her skipper, has been a
rival of mine for years, and I had every kilo of dry
copra there was on the island.  I got the megaphone
and was about to yell, 'Good luck to you, Louis!'
when I saw that he had a missionary aboard, too—a
priest with a knee-length beard and a black cloak;
so I only waved my hand and Louis shook his fist and
shouted something I couldn't make out.  I was going
to the westward, stood close inshore, and passed the
village from the outside an hour later.  The priest
hadn't lost any time getting his congregation together.
Since there was no copra to be bought, I suppose Louis
told him he had to get a move on.  There had been
another religious landslide.  I was sure of that from
the singing, which I heard clear enough, the wind
being offshore.  Great singers these Paumotuans, and
it doesn't make very much difference to them whether
the song is 'Happy Day' or 'Jerusalem, the Golden.'  Of
course I didn't say anything to my missionary.
As the old saying is, 'What you don't know won't
hurt you.'"

This conversation with Tino was running through
my mind as I strolled down the village island after the
service.  Tino, I decided, was prejudiced.  His was the
typical trader's point of view.  I had heard many
other incidents which bore him out in his findings,
but they came usually from men interested in exploiting
the islands commercially.  Huirai's exposition of the
old biblical story—was that merely the result of a
prolonged tinned-beef crusade?  Remembering the
kind of sacrifice which was discussed, very likely on
this very island, in the days of pure heathendom, such
a conclusion seemed fantastical.  No, one must be
fair to the missionaries.  Perhaps they were
over-zealous at times, oversanguine about the results of
their efforts—so were all human beings in whatever
line of endeavor; but their accomplishment had been
undeniably great.  Here were people living orderly,
quiet lives.  They didn't drink, although in the early
days of their contact with civilization—until quite
recently, in fact—there had been terrible orgies of
intoxication.  To overcome that was, in itself, a
worthwhile accomplishment on the part of the Church.
Only a few weeks before I had met Monsieur Ferlys,
the administrator of the Paumotus, at Taenga.  "The
reign of alcohol is over," he had said to the islanders
there—strange words, coming from the lips of a
Frenchman.  There was to be no more rum nor gin
nor wine for any of the Paumotuans.  Henceforth, any
trader found selling it or any native drinking it was to
be severely punished.

I continued my walk to the far end of the island and,
selecting a shady spot, sat down to rest.  The pressure
of a notebook in my hip pocket interrupted my examination
of the problem, "The missionary versus the trader
as a civilizing influence."  I was reminded that I had
made no recent observations on the life and character
of the Paumotuans, and the recollection was annoying.
Was I never to be able to pursue, in indolence, my
unprofitable musings?  Why this persistent feeling that
I must set them down in black and white?  Why
sully the fair pages of my notebook?  Words, words!
The world was buried beneath their visible manifestations,
and still the interminable clacking of innumerable
typewriters, the roar of glutted presses.
In the mind's eye I saw magnificent forests being
destroyed to feed this depraved appetite for words,
which were piled mountain high in libraries; which
encumbered all the attics in Christendom.  Words,
blowing about the streets and littering the parks on
Sundays; filling the ash carts on Mondays.  "No," I
thought, "I will no longer be guilty of adding to the
sum of words.  I'll not write my learned monograph."  But
that inner voice, which itself is a creature born of
many words—an artificial thing, however insistent its
utterance—spoke out loud and clear: "You idler!
You waster of your inheritance of energy!  You
throwback to barbarism—write!"

"But why?" I replied.  "Tell me that!  Why?"

"Sir, because it is your vocation.  And have you no
convictions?  Your grandfather had them, and your
great-grandfather, and those missionaries of the *Duff*
you have been thinking about.  Ah! the decay of
convictions in this age!  The lack of that old sublime
belief in something—anything!  Now then, I have
come down to you through a long line of ancestors, and
I don't mean to die through lack of exercise.  You
may not believe in me, but you've got to obey me.
Write!"

I know that I should have no peace until I did, so
I drew forth my notebook and, in line with my thoughts
of a moment before, wrote, underneath the last
observation on perfume: "The sale and consumption of
alcoholic beverages among these islands is now
prohibited by law.  It is strange to find such legislation
in territory under French administration.  Is the
prohibition movement to become world-wide, then?
Is the reign of alcohol doomed in all lands?"

Exhausted by the mental effort, but somewhat
easier in conscience, I replaced the notebook in my
pocket.  It was pleasant then to let the mind lie
fallow or to occupy it with the reception of mere
visual impressions.  At length, although I didn't
sleep, I was scarcely more animate then the fluted shell
lying close by on the beach or the *kopapa* bushes which
formed a green inclosure around my resting place.

Something whirled through the air over my head and
fell with a light splash in the water before me.  I
sat gazing at it without curiosity, hardly moved, so
slowly does one come out of the depths of dreamless
reverie.  Little waves pushed the object gently shoreward
until it lay, rolling back and forth in a few inches
of clear water.  "What!" I shouted.  I didn't
actually shout—I didn't open my lips; but the shock
of astonishment seemed vocal—as loud as a blare of
trumpets or a clash of cymbals.  Before me lay a
prettily fashioned bottle, half filled with sea water,
and the label on it read, "Khiva Bouquet: The Soul
of the Exquisite Orient."  "Impossible!" I thought.
"I am three miles from the village and no one lives at
this end of the island."  Then I heard voices or,
better, one voice which I recognized as that of
Rangituki.  She was talking in a low monotone, her most
effective manner when reciting one of her interminable
stories of former days.  Cautiously I pushed aside the
bushes and looked through.  Rangituki was sitting
about twenty yards away, in the midst of a company
of five.  Pinga was one of them and Tevai another—both
fathers of families and both much concerned, a few
days earlier, lest their children should waste the
perfume I had given them.  Pinga took a pull at a
bottle which I identified as belonging to Wild Violet.
He made a wry face as he did it, but he took another
and then another, before he set it down.  The wind
was toward me, and as the corks popped—or, more
accurately, as stoppers were lifted—I was forced to
admit that June Rose had body, impalpable, perhaps,
but authentic.

I passed the furtive revelers unnoticed by going along
the lagoon beach, keeping under the screen of kopapa
bushes.  Should I tell Puarei, the chief, of this evasion
of the law?  I decided that I would not, for he was a
stern man and would punish the culprits severely.
After all, on an island where there were so few
distractions, what was a little perfume among friends?

All of which proves plainly enough, it seems to me,
the folly of keeping a notebook; at any rate, the folly
of jumping hastily to conclusions.

Or perhaps, more important than this, it gives further
light on the vexed question, Does prohibition prohibit?

.. vspace:: 2

I find no other observations on Paumotuan life and
character, under this date, unless the word,
"*Mamafaaamu*," scribbled on the margin of a leaf, may be
regarded as a discouraged hint at one; a suggestion
for a commentary on a curious Polynesian relationship,
when—and only when—I should have had time to
gather all of the available data concerning it.  This
relationship has to do with the transfer of a child,
or children, from the original blood parents to another
set known as "feeding-parents."  My interest in the
practice dates from the moment when I made my first
notebook reference to it, and it was aroused in a very
casual, leisurely fashion.  For this reason it will be
best, I think, to tell the story of it in a leisurely way.

Returning to the village from the scene of the
perfume orgy, I found the church still occupied,
although the service was long over.  The benches had
been stacked in one corner; the mats shaken out and
spread again on the floor, where fifteen or twenty
people were reclining at ease or sitting native
fashion—some of them talking, some sleeping, some engaged in
light tasks such as hat weaving and the fashioning of
pearl-shell fish hooks; others in the yet more congenial
task of doing nothing at all.  It was the practice, on
Sunday, for the village to gather at the Reformed
church, which they felt at liberty to use for secular
as well as for sacred purposes, for it was a native-built
structure, with walls and roof of thatch, like those
of their own houses.  The two other churches were
never so used.  They were frame buildings, in the
European or American style of church architecture,
with formal furnishings and windows of colored glass.
To have done any sort of work in either of them
would have been regarded as a serious offense, certain
to be followed by unmistakable evidence of divine
displeasure.  As Tuina once told me, sores, illness,
even death might result as a punishment for such
desecration.

I was thinking of this and other primitive reactions
to ecclesiastical furniture, and my hand was faltering
toward my notebook pocket when Huirai's little
daughter, Manava, entered the church, carrying a
white cloth which she spread on the pulpit table.
She returned a moment later with a tin of sardines,
some boiled rice on a *kahaia* leaf, and a bowl of tea.
I was Huirai's guest for the day, and had been
anxiously awaiting some evidence that food was on the way;
but I had not expected that it would be served in
the church.  I had not eaten a church dinner since
boyhood, and, strangely enough, the memory of some
of those early feasts came back to me while Manava
was setting the table.  As one scene is superimposed
upon another on a moving-picture screen, I saw an
American village of twenty years ago—a village of
board sidewalks and quiet, shaded streets bright with
dandelions, taking ghostly form and transparency
among the palms of Rutiaro.  Two small boys walked
briskly along, ringing hand bells, and shouting, "Dinner
at the Pres-by-terian church ri-i-i-ight awa-a-a-ay."  The
G.A.R. band—a fife, two tenor drums, and one
bass—played outside the church where the crowd was
gathering, and horses, attached to buggies and spring
wagons, were pawing the earth around the hitching
posts.  Then Mrs. MacGregor appeared in the doorway,
her kindly face beaming the warmest of welcomes.
"Come on in and set down, folks.  Everything's all
ready."  Members of the Ladies' Relief Corps—mothers
of large families, used to catering for large
appetites—hurried back and forth with platters of
roast turkey and chicken, roast beef, mashed potatoes
of marvelous smoothness and flakiness—with everything
in the way of food which that hospitable Middle-Western
country provides.  I heard the pleasant talk
of homely things, smelled the appetizing odors, saw
plates replenished again and again.  Throughout the
length of the tables old-fashioned gravy boats sailed
from cover to cover—but I spared myself further
contemplation of the scene, further shadowy participation
in a feast which cost the affluent but a quarter,
and a bell ringer nothing at all.  The vision faded, but
before it was quite gone I heard a voice saying: "Land
sakes!  You boys ain't eating a thing!  Have some
more of these dumplings?  What's the matter with
your appetities?  Ain't you feelin' well?"  It seemed a
thousand years away, that voice; and no doubt it was,
and is, even farther than that.

Church dinners at Rutiaro were not such sumptuous
affairs.  They were not, in fact, an integral part of the
community life.  In so far as I know, this was the
only one ever held there and was the result of Huirai's
peculiar notions of the hospitality due a white man.  I
told him that I was not accustomed to dining in
churches at home, even on Sunday, and, furthermore,
that I liked companionship at table.  But he was not
convinced, and he refused to join me.  He and his
family had already eaten, he said; so I sat on a box
at the pulpit table, partaking of a solitary meal, and
got through with it as quickly as possible.

I smiled inwardly at the thought of the inheritance
of prestige, granted me without question, at Rutiaro,
merely because I was the sole representative there of a
so-called superior race.  No white wasters had
preceded me at the atoll.  This was fortunate in a way,
for it gave me something to live up to—the ideal
Rutiaroan conception of the *popaa*—white man.
Huirai was partly responsible for the fact that it was
ideal.  His tales of San Francisco—which, to the
Paumotuan, means America—had been steadily
growing in splendor.  He seemed to have forgotten
whatever he may have seen there of misery or incompetence
or ugliness.  All Americans were divinities of a sort.
Their energy was superhuman; their accomplishment,
as exemplified in ships, trains, buildings, automobiles,
moving-picture theaters—beyond all belief unless one
had actually seen those things.  And the meanest of
them lived on a scale of grandeur far surpassing that of
the governor of the Paumotus at Fakavava.  Yes, I
had something to live up to at Rutiaro.  The necessity
was flattering, to be sure, but it cost some effort and
inconvenience to meet it.  I didn't dare look as slack
as I often felt, both mentally and physically.  I could
not even sit on the floor, or stretch out at my ease,
when in a native house; and I was compelled, when
eating, to resume the use of my two-pronged fork and the
small tin spoon, although it was much simpler and
easier to eat with my fingers as the rest of them did.

Having finished my meal, I took what comfort
prestige permitted by placing my box by the wall and
leaning back against a post.  Takiero, a woman of
barbaric beauty, was sitting near by playing, "Conquer
the North" on my ocharina.  I taught her the air in
an unguarded moment and had been regretting it ever
since.  Hunga, her husband, lay at her side, his
strong, fine limbs relaxed in sleep.  I would have
given all my gratuitous prestige as a *popaa* to have
exchanged legs or shoulders or girth of chest with him.
It was at about this time, as I remember it, that my
thoughts turned to the subject of feeding-parents.
Nui-Vahine was present, still—or again—nursing the
three months' old baby.  It belonged, as I knew, to
Takiero, who appeared to be quite capable of nourishing
it herself.  Why had she given it to Nui-Vahine?
And why had Hunga, the father of the child,
consented to this seemingly unnatural gift?  The transfer
of parenthood had been made a month earlier, since
which time Takiero and her husband had shown only
a slight, proprietary interest in their offspring.  Takiero
sometimes dandled it on her knee, as any woman might
the child of some one else; but no one would have
guessed that she was the mother of it.  Nui-Vahine
fed, clothed, and bathed it, and her husband, Nui-Tane,
was as fond of it as she herself.  They kept the child
at their house, and between them made as much fuss
over it as though it were their own flesh and blood.
What could have been the origin of this strange practice
of parenthood by proxy?  It was a common one
throughout eastern Polynesia.  I had seen a good
many instances of it in the Cook islands, the
Marquesas, and the Society group.  Here was a subject
worthy of an important chapter in the Life and
Character monograph, and I decided that I might as well
begin my researches at once.

Takiero reluctantly left off her playing and placed
herself in a receptive mood.  Why, I asked, had she
given her child to Nui-Vahine?  Her reply was, because
Nui-Vahine had asked for it.  "But, see here, Takiero,"
I said, "I should think that you and Hunga would
want to keep your own baby.  It is none of my business,
of course.  I ask you only because I would like
to get some information on this feeding-parent custom.
Can't you feed it yourself?  Is that the reason you
gave it away?"

I blundered atrociously in asking that question.
Without meaning to, I touched her pride as a woman,
as a mother.  Takiero looked at me for a moment
without speaking.  Then she tore open her dress and
gave me absolute proof—not that I wanted it—of her
ability to nurse her own or any other child.  Following
this, she went over to where Nui-Vahine was sitting,
snatched the baby from her arms, and almost smothered
it against her body.  She fondled it, kissed it, covered
it with her magnificent hair.  I had never before seen
such a display of savage and tender maternal passion.

By that time Nui-Vahine had recovered from her
astonishment and came to the defense of her own.
Her month of motherhood gave her claims to the
child, apparently, and she tried to enforce them
physically.  Takiero stood her ground, her black eyes
flaming and, holding the baby in one arm, pushed
Nui-Vahine away with the other.  I expected to see hair
flying, but, luckily, both women found their tongues
at the same moment.  They were like—they were, in
fact—two superb cats, spitting at each other.  The
torrent of words did not flow smoothly.  It came in
hot, short bursts, like salvos of machine-gun fire, and,
curiously enough, it was almost pure Paumotuan, not
the hybrid Paumotuan-Tahitian commonly used in
their temperate speech.  It bristled with snarling
ng's, with flintlike k's from which fire could be struck
in passionate argument.  Other women took sides in
the quarrel.  Had I poked an inquisitive pencil into a
wasps' nest the effect could hardly have been more
disconcerting.  Hunga was awakened by the angry voices
and looked on with sleepy perplexity.  Nui-Tane
grinned reassuringly, as much as to say: "Don't be
upset.  You know what women are."  Finally, Puarei,
the chief, who had been an impassive spectator,
bellowed out a command for silence.  The tumult
subsided at once, and the fury of the women with it.
Five minutes later everything was as it had been before.
Hunga was sleeping and Nui-Tane polishing a pearl-shell
fish hook; Nui-Vahine had the baby and Takiero
the ocharina.  Neither of them showed the least
resentment, either toward me or toward each other.  In
intensity and briefness the gust of passion which swept
through the little church was precisely like the squalls
of wind and rain which darken the seas of the Low
Archipelago in the midst of the hurricane season,
which burst almost from a clear sky and then as
suddenly melt into pure sunlight again.

When I left the village to return to Soul-Eaters'
island Takiero was still playing the old border ballad
on my ocharina.  It had once been my favorite air
for that instrument.  I first heard it in northern
France on a blustering winter evening when a brigade
of English regiments was marching, under heavy shell
fire, into one of the greatest battles of the war, to the
music of pipes and drums.  Humming the air now,
although I still feel a tightening of the nerves, a
quickening of the pulses, it is not because of the old
set of associations.  They have been buried forever
beneath a newer set.  The village at Rutiaro comes
into view, and I see Takiero, clutching a baby against
her naked breast, standing in the midst of a crowd of
turbulent women.

Should there be some other Polynesian scholar who
wishes to pursue farther an inquiry into a curious
practice of child adoption I would advise extreme
caution at an atoll far on the southeasterly fringe of the
Low Archipelago.

The place may easily be identified; for he will find
there a young woman of barbaric beauty who will be
playing "Conquer the North" on an ocharina.

.. vspace:: 2

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   :alt: Chapter IX tailpiece

   Chapter IX tailpiece





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`Costly Hospitality`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER X


.. class:: center medium bold

   Costly Hospitality

.. vspace:: 2

For an authentic test of one's capacity
for solitude—or better, perhaps, for
convincing proof of the lack of it—two
conditions are essential: complete
isolation—that goes without saying, of
course; and the assurance that such isolation will not
be broken into.  At Soul-Eaters' Island I expected to
find both of these conditions fulfilled.  My house was
four miles from the settlement, but in reality I had no
more seclusion there than a hermit whose retreat is
within easy walking distance of a summer hotel.
Visitors came in canoes, in cutters; and as the pass
and the reef on either side of it were a favorite fishing
ground many of them came prepared to spend the day,
or the night, or both.

It is as well, perhaps, that the event fell out as it did.
If life is to keep its fine zest many wished-for experiences
must be perpetually unrealized, and we perpetually
following our alluring phantoms until we tumble
headlong out of existence.  Not having been put to the
proof, I may still persuade myself that I am a lover of
solitude, gifted for the enjoyment of it beyond other
men.  Meanwhile, at Soul-Eaters' Island, I had a
further experience with Moy Ling, the Chinese
storekeeper, which convinced me of very definite limitations
in another direction.

Some time after I had taken up residence there the
village came in a body to the adjacent island on the
other side of the pass.  During the year they moved
in this way from one piece of land to another, collecting
the ripe coconuts and making their copra on the spot.
The land was not owned in common, but they worked
it in common; and as house building was a simple
matter, instead of going back and forth from the village,
they erected temporary shelters and remained at each
island in turn until the work there was finished.
They were not unremitting toilers.  After an hour or
two of copra making in the cool of the early morning
they were content to call it a day, and spent the rest
of the time at more congenial occupations—swimming,
fishing, visiting back and forth, talking forever of the
arrival of the last trading schooner and the probable
date of arrival of the next one.

During all of this time I kept open house, and since
I was indebted to nearly all of my friendly visitors for
past hospitalities I felt that it was necessary to make
returns.  Unfortunately, I had nothing to make
returns with, except such supplies of provisions and
trade goods as I was able to purchase on credit of
Moy Ling.  Fish were abundant in the lagoon, and
a few minutes of fine sport each day more than
supplied my wants; but I knew that fish was not acceptable
to palates long accustomed to little else.  Furthermore,
having accepted, at the time of my arrival at
Rutiaro, the role of the generous, affluent *popaa*, I
had to carry it through.  As previously related,
although I had been left at Rutiaro unexpectedly, the
inhabitants took it for granted that I had plenty of
money.  The possession of wealth in the form of
banknotes is regarded there as one of the attributes of a
white man, as necessary to his comfort and convenience
and as much a part of him as arms and legs.  Pride
prevented my disillusioning them at first when I was in
desperate need of a new wardrobe; but it got me into
a devil of a hole with Moy, and I dug myself in more
deeply every day.

Having traded upon the native tradition of the
mysterious affluence of all white men by opening up
a credit account with the Chinaman I had to sustain
his confidence in my ability to cancel it at once if I
choose; and, feeling inwardly abject, it was all the
more necessary to maintain a reassuring front in the
face of his growing anxiety.  It was growing.  I could
see that.  He never actually dunned me, but I escaped
the humiliating experience only by making additional
purchases on so vast a scale, according to island
standards, that even Moy seemed to be awed, for brief
periods, into a stupefied acceptance of the mysteriously
affluent myth.  I, myself, was awed when I thought
of the size of my bill.  Trade goods carried across
thousands of miles of ocean are more than usually
expensive.  A one-pound tin of bully beef cost nine
francs, and other things were proportionally dear.
The worst of it was that Moy's stock of supplies was
much larger than I had at first supposed.  He had a
warehouse adjoining his store which was full of them,
and so, with guests making constant demands upon
my hospitality, I was forced to buy with the greater
abandon as his confidence waned.  But I returned from
these encounters with a washed-out feeling, regretting
that I had ever accepted guile as an ally and longing
for relief from a state of affairs which I knew could
not continue indefinitely.

Relief came in histrionic, eleventh-hour fashion.
Providence saved me when I thought Pride was riding
me to a starry fall.  One evening I paddled across to
the other island for further supplies.  Huirai and his
family had been staying with me for several days.
Fishing was better on my side of the lagoon pass, he
said, but I think his real purpose in coming had been to
eat my, or, rather, Moy Ling's tinned beef.  At any
rate, when they returned I had nothing left.  It was
still fairly early, but no one was abroad in the village
street.  There was a light in Moy's shop, however,
and looking through the open window I saw him sitting
at a table with his adding machine before him.  He
was counting aloud in Chinese, his long, slim fingers
playing skilfully over the wooden beads which slid
back and forth on the framework with a soft, clicking
sound, and as he bent over columns of figures the lamp
light filled the hollows of his cheeks and temples with
pits of shadow.  In repose his face was as expressionless
as that of a corpse.  I felt my courage going as I
looked at it.  What chance had I of carrying through
successfully this game of beggarman's bluff?  How long
could I hope to maintain the fiction of affluence before
a man wise with the inherited experience of centuries
of shopkeeping ancestors?  I had a moment of panic,
and before I realized what I was doing I had entered
the shop and had asked for my bill.

Moy slip-slopped into his back room and returned
with a large packet of old newspapers.  He was a
frugal soul and kept his accounts, as he ordered his
life—with an eye to avoiding unnecessary expense.  The
journals were painted over with Chinese characters—the
items of my various purchases.  He arranged the
lists in order, sat down to his counting machine again,
and presently gave me the grand total.  The amount
was something over four thousand francs.

Thank Heaven for righteous anger!  Thank Heaven
for anger which is only moderately righteous.  I knew
that I had bought lavishly, but I had kept a rough
estimate of the amount of my purchases, and I also
knew that Moy had added at least 10 per cent to his
legitimate profit.  He had reasoned, no doubt, that
a man who bought on mere whim, without asking the
price of anything, would settle his obligation as
thoughtlessly as he had incurred it.  And I would of course.
This was necessary if I were to live up to native
tradition in the grand style.  But when I saw how costly
the game had become, and how thoroughly Moy had
entered into the spirit of it, too, I felt indignant;
and instead of confessing my predicament as I meant
to do, I ordered another case of tinned beef and a bag
of rice and left the shop without further talk.

This righteous wrath was all very well, but now that
I had asked for my bill, I would have to settle it.
How was this to be done?  If only I had my sea chest
which Tino, supercargo of the *Caleb S. Winship*, had
carried away with him when he left me at Rutiaro!
My pocketbook was in it, containing all of my money,
more than enough to cancel the debt with Moy.  I
had rather an anxious time during the next few days.
I remember entertaining as usual, but in a faint-hearted
way; sleeping badly, and between times, walking up
and down Soul-Eaters' Island, trying to subdue my
pride to the point of confession.  Then one afternoon,
when I was sitting on the ocean beach, watching the
surf piling up on the barrier reef, I became aware of a
vessel, hull-down, on the horizon.  I could hardly
believe my eyes.  It was like a far halloo from a world
which I had almost forgotten existed.  All through
the afternoon she beat steadily to windward until at
dusk she was about two miles distant, and I saw that
she was one of the small schooners, without auxiliary
power, which are used by Papeete trading companies
for collecting copra at the less profitable atolls.

All the village came over to Soul-Eaters' Island, for
the anchorage at this end of the atoll lay just behind it.
The schooner was recognized.  It was the *Potii
Ravarava* which visited the atoll about once a year.
She entered the pass with the turn of the tide, lighting
her way by the fire which was burning in a primitive
galley, a tin-lined box half filled with sand.  I could
see her native skipper at the wheel, a couple of sailors
preparing to take in sail, and two native women sitting
on the poop, with a great pile of luggage behind them.
One of these was Tepera, daughter of Puarei, chief of
the atoll, who had been sent to the Protestant school
at Papeete nearly a year ago.  The other was Tuarava,
her aunt, with whom she had been living there.  The
crowd on the beach waited in deep silence while the
schooner anchored and the sails were being furled.  I
remember that I could hear very plainly the far-off
rumbling of the surf on the windward side of the atoll
and the hissing of frying fish, or whatever it was, a
native boy was cooking at the galley fire.  Then the
small boat was lowered and the women brought ashore
with their luggage.  Tepera went at once to her father
and, putting her head on his shoulder, began to cry
softly.  Not a word was spoken.  Tuarava and Poura,
her sister, squatted on their heels close by, their arms
around each other, moaning in the same softly audible
way.  The women then went in turn among all their
relatives, having their little cry while the rest of the
village looked on in sympathetic silence.  When they
had finished, a fire was lit on the beach and everyone
gathered around to hear the news and to examine the
schooner's cargo which was being put on shore.  More
trade goods for Moy Ling, I thought.  Remembering
my debt, I couldn't summon any great amount of
interest in the scene.  I was about to return to my
house when Huirai came bustling up, carrying my sea
chest.  "You like this?" he said.  What he meant was,
"Is this yours?" but for once he misused his English
with splendid relevancy.  I sat down weakly on the
box, holding a letter which he had thrust into my hand.
No doubt of it.  It was my box, and the letter was
addressed to me in Tino's familiar handwriting.  It
read, in part, as follows:

.. vspace:: 2

We have just met the *Potii Ravarava* here at Hao.  She is going
to Rutiaro within a few weeks, so I am sending your sea chest by
her.  Sorry I left you in that God-forsaken hole; but I was tight
that evening, and pretty mad at the way you upset my plans with
your marble-playing foolishness.  Next morning, when I sobered
up, I felt like going back for you.  But we had a fair wind, and
I had my cargo to think of.  The price of copra is on the down
grade, and I've got to get back to Papeete with mine before the
bottom falls out of the market.  You said once you wanted to
see all you could of life in the Paumotus.  Well, I guess you'll
have your chance at Rutiaro.  If I was you I would come back
on the *Potii Ravarava*.  She only carries twenty-seven tons cargo,
so she'll probably go direct to Papeete from there.  I am also
sending you an empty three-gallon demijohn.  Fill this with
water before you leave, if you come back on the *P.R*.  Miti,
her skipper, is a good sailor, but all he knows about navigation
you could write on a postage stamp.  I met him once about twenty
miles south of Fakahina.  He was cruising around looking for
Angatau, which was seventy miles to the northeast.  Well, he
can't miss Tahiti if he gets within a hundred miles of it, so you
better take a chance and come back with him.  But don't forget
to carry your own supply of fresh water.  Sometimes these little
native boats get becalmed, and it's no joke being thirsty at sea.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   Yours,
       TINO.

.. vspace:: 1

P.S.—Miti has a big bunch of letters for you, from your friend
Nordhoff.  I saw the packet.  It looks as though it had been
traveling some.  Nordhoff, he says, is in Tahiti again.  I'll probably
see him there and will tell him to wait for you.

Give my regards to all the marble players.

.. vspace:: 2

Good old Tino!  He did me nothing but good turns.
Late that night when the rest of the villagers had
crossed the pass I pried open the lid of the
chest—having lost the key—and found my belongings just
as I had left them—my camera; my binoculars and
charts; and, most important of all, in the bottom of
the chest, wrapped in a pair of trousers, my
pocketbook.  I didn't pay Moy until just before the
departure of the schooner, and staged the final episode
at an hour when his shop was filled with loungers.  I
came away with his receipted bill, one hundred and
twenty francs, and the consciousness of having
adequately safeguarded tradition.

We left Rutiaro the following day.  I did not
realize until the moment of leave-taking how painful
the farewells would be.  As soon as they were over I
went on board, crawled into the little cabin and, despite
the cockroaches and copra bugs, remained there until
the schooner had left the pass and was well out to sea.
After our separation at Papeete, Nordhoff went on
to the southwest.  He wrote me from an island he
called Ahu Ahu, and from there, apparently, he took
passage to Rarotonga, the principal island of the Cook
group.  Long before the discovery of New Zealand
Rarotonga was the goal of Polynesian mariners from the
north and west—fearless explorers traveling in their
double canoes across hundreds of leagues of ocean,
guided by sun and stars, some of them arriving at their
destination, many others, doubtless, perishing in search
of it.

From Samoa—in the early centuries of our era—came
the Karika family to reign in Rarotonga down to
the present day; and Samoa is believed to have been
the principal starting point of the voyagers which
peopled the eastern Pacific.  In the language of those
old-time voyagers, *tonga* meant south, and they gave
that name to the Friendly Islands.  Farther to the
west and south they came upon the Cook group—in
those days, no doubt, the southernmost ends of the
earth—and the high island of this group, the faint
blot on the horizon which led the canoes to land, they
called Rarotonga (Under the South).





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`His Mother's People`:

.. class:: center large bold

   Under the South

.. vspace:: 3

.. figure:: images/img-205.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: woodcut

   Woodcut

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XI

.. class:: center medium bold

   His Mother's People

.. vspace:: 2

The hurricane season ended in a fortnight
of calm before the trade came up from
the southeast, announcing its arrival
with a three days' gale that caught our
schooner among the outer islands of the
group.  It was by no means a great storm, yet the
constant fury of the wind, unbroken by lull or gust,
and the lines of huge breaking seas running under a
cloudless sky impressed me more than anything I have
experienced in ships.  By day we lived in a world of
blue-and-white—pale-blue sky; sea of a dark, angry
blue; acres of white foam.  To go on deck by night
and watch the leaping ridges of salt water rear up to
windward—formless, threatening, fringed with wan
phosphorescence—was to revise any beliefs one might
have had regarding the friendliness of nature.

On the evening of the second day we were laid-to
under a rag of foresail, riding the seas obliquely, a few
points off the wind.  The schooner took them like an
eider duck; it was so thick in the cabin that I slid
back the hatch and squeezed through into the clean
turmoil above.  The mood of the Pacific was too
impressive for pleasure, but I was glad at least of the
fresh air and able to derive a species of awed enjoyment
from what went on about me.  It may have been
fatigue, or carelessness, or inexperience—at any rate,
the man at the wheel suddenly allowed the schooner
to bear off; she was climbing the slope of a sea at the
time—the crest of it caught her weather side with a
crash and next instant a rush of solid water swept the
decks.  Thin and faint as the voices of sea birds above
the roaring of the wind, the cries of native passengers
drifted back, "*Aue!  Aue!*"; the hatch slid back
abruptly; the skipper burst on deck—bristling, gesticulating,
clad in a waistcloth—to deliver an address in
passionate Mangaian, insulting and only partially
audible.

Under the swinging lamp in the cabin I found Tari—our
singular and philosophic supercargo, whose calm
no ordinary gale could disturb—bending over his books,
a bottle and a glass in racks at his elbow.  A mat was
spread on the floor and on it—huddled under a quilt
of bright patchwork—lay Apakura, his young native
wife.  Her feet were bound in a *pareu* and the quilt
pulled over her head, for the cockroaches were
everywhere.  I entered my stateroom to lie down.  A large
cockroach, insolent and richly perfumed, trotted along
the springs of the upper berth and halted just above
my face.  Waves of the hand had no effect on him—I
had reasons for not wishing to crush him in his
tracks.  One of his comrades began a tentative
nibbling at my hair—something tickled my foot—I started
convulsively.  The sudden rolls of the schooner flung
me against her side; it was useless to try to sleep.  As
I sat down beside him, Tari closed his books and
motioned me to fill a glass.

A faint noise of shouting came from on deck; the
engine-room bell sounded a sudden and peremptory
signal.  The hatch opened with a gust of spray—the
head of the skipper appeared dimly in the swaying
light.  "*Atitu*," he shouted; "I'm going to run into
the lee and stand off and on till this blows over."  The
engine started and Tari and I went on deck for a
glimpse of the land, looming close and vague in the
starlight.  Presently, as we took our seats in the cabin,
the schooner ceased her violent pitching and began
to ride a long, easy swell.  Tari rose, stepped to where
his wife lay sleeping, picked up the slender bundle in
the quilt, and disappeared into his stateroom; next
moment he was beside me again, uncorking a fresh
bottle of rum.

"She's had a bad time of it," he said, "with a berth
on the weather side; she was spilled on the floor half a
dozen times before she gave up and came out here.
I shouldn't have let her come along—I had my doubts
of the weather, but it was a chance to see the relatives
she's got scattered through the group.  They're
constantly visiting one another; blood means a lot down
here where they recognize degrees of consanguinity
absurdly farfetched to our minds.  First cousins are
like brothers, second and third cousins considered
members of one's immediate family, and so on through
the descendants of remote ancestors.  When you stop
to think of it, this respect for ties of blood—in the
isolated communities of Polynesia—rests on a solid base."

I asked him a question concerning the end of these
island people—whether they will fade away and
disappear, like our own Narragansett and Seminole,
without leaving their mark on the supplanting race or
whether they will be absorbed gradually, developing
in the process of absorption a new type.  Tari set down
his glass.

"One thing is certain," he replied—"if left to
themselves they would soon be extinct.  Wherever you go
among the islands you will find couple after couple of
full-blooded natives—young, strong, wholesome, and
childless.  No doubt the white man is partially to
blame, but, for myself, I believe the race is worn out
with isolation and old age.  They are justified in their
dread of being childless, but an infusion of European
blood—however small—works a miracle; you must
have noticed this, to me a most striking and significant
fact.  It is the cross of white and brown that is
repopulating the islands to-day; one can venture a glimpse
into the future and see the process of absorption
complete—the Polynesian is not fated to disappear without
leaving a trace behind ... and perhaps it will be more
than a trace, for half-caste children cling strongly to
the distaff side.

"The question of half-castes is an interesting one,
particularly to men like me—but it is a waste of time
to struggle against nature; in the end the solution is
nearly always the same.  Varana's children furnish the
best example I have run across—you've never been to
Rimarutu, I fancy; it is not often visited nowadays;
probably you've never heard of Varana.  And yet he
was an extraordinary man, his life an almost unique
study in extremes.  Like everything real, the story has
no beginning, unless one were able to trace back the
strain that gifted the man with his exceptional temperament;
as for an end, that is still working itself out on
Rimarutu.  It is, in fact, no story at all, but a bit of
life itself—unmarked by any dominating situation,
haphazard, inconclusive, grimly logical.  No one can know
the whole of it—-the play of motives, the decisions, the
pure chance—but I worked with Varana for years and
have patched his story together after a fashion.  Now
and then, when the mood struck him, he used to speak
of himself; sometimes at night when we were working
his schooner from island to island; sometimes by day,
as we lay smoking under the palms of a remote atoll,
while the canoes of the divers dotted the lagoon.  On
those occasions I had glimpses of a man not to be judged
by the standards of everyday life—a man actuated by
motives as simple as they were incomprehensible to
those about him.  His death, if he is dead—  But I
will speak of that in its place.

"His real name was Warner—a big, blue-eyed man,
slow-spoken and a little dreamy in manner, with an
immense blond mustache and a serenity nothing could
disturb.  I never knew him to hesitate in making a
decision or to speak unless he had something to say.
All decent men liked him, and the natives, who were
better able than a white man to fathom his simplicity,
took to him from the first.  He had been miserably out
of place in England—squeezed through Cambridge,
which he detested, unhappily married, done out of a
fortune by the defaulting brother-in-law whose last
debt he paid, and divorced just before he came out
here.

"It is often observed that when an Englishman's
feelings are hurt he travels, and in this respect Varana
was not exceptional.  One day, a little more than a
generation ago, he stepped off the mail boat at Papeete—a
rather typical English tourist, I fancy—dressed in
tropical costumes from Bond Street and accompanied
by an extraordinary quantity of luggage.  At the club
he ran across Jackson of the Atoll Trading Company—the
old man liked him from the first and they used to
spend the evenings together, lingering over their glasses,
talking a little in low tones.  A fortnight later Varana
left as quietly as he had come—outbound in one of
Jackson's schooners for a cruise through the Paumotus.

"It was the year of the hurricane at Motutangi.
Varana's boat, commanded by a native skipper, had
drifted through the group in a desultory way, touching
at an island here and there to pick up a few tons of
copra or a bit of shell.  One can imagine the effect on a
newcomer of those early days among the atolls—long
sunlit days when gentle breezes filled the sails of the
vessel skirting the shores of the lagoons—waters of
unearthly peace and loveliness, bordered by leagues
of green.  And the nights ashore, when the moon rose
at the end of a path of rippling silver, and the people
gathered before their thatched houses to sing....  It
was not long before Varana realized that he had found
his anodyne.

"At home he had been a yachtsman of sorts; by the
time they reached Motutangi the brown skipper was
leaving a good part of the working of the schooner to
his guest.  They were diving in the lagoon that year
at the end of a long *rahui* on the shell—a sort of closed
season, scrupulously respected by the natives; half a
dozen schooners were anchored off the village, where
every house overflowed with people from the surrounding
islands, and by day their canoes blackened the water
above the patches of shell.

"The hurricane gave ample warning of its approach—Varana
told me as much as that.  He had spent the
night ashore with a trader, whose old glass rose and
fell spasmodically, sinking always a little lower, until
it stood at a figure which sent the trader off, white and
cursing, to break open a fresh case of gin.  None of the
divers went out at daybreak; with the other people,
they stood in little frightened groups before the houses.
The older men were already beginning to hack off the
tops of the stout palms in which they planned to roost.
By the time Varana came off in a canoe the schooners
were double anchored, the wind was shifting uneasily
in sharp gusts, and a tremendous surf was thundering
on the outer beach.  The native skipper, like the people
ashore, knew perfectly well what was coming and,
like most of his kind, his spirit broke in the face of a
large emergency—before the feeling that the forces
of nature were about to overwhelm him.  Well, I've
been through one hurricane—I can't say that I blame
him much!  Varana found him not exactly in a funk,
but in a state of passive resignation, hoping vaguely
that his two anchors would let him ride it out inside.
The crew was clustered on the after deck, exchanging
scared whispers.  Varana, who had the instinct of a
deep-water sailor, took in the situation at a glance,
and next moment he had taken command of the
schooner.

"Without a word of protest the men reefed, got sail
on her, heaved up one anchor, and cut the other cable.
Varana had very little to say about the rest—how he
edged out through the pass and managed to claw off
just as the cyclone struck Motutangi—but afterward
the story went the rounds of every group.  All the
other schooners in the lagoon, as well as most of the
people ashore, were lost.  How Varana weathered it,
without piling up his vessel on any one of half a dozen
atolls, is a sort of miracle.

"A week later, when he had sailed his battered
schooner—the only survivor of the disaster at
Motutangi—into Papeete harbor, he found himself famous by
nightfall, for the native captain gave him entire credit
for the achievement.  Old Jackson's imagination was
touched, or perhaps it was the destruction of so many
rival schooners in the shell and copra trade—at any
rate, he acted on impulse for once in his life, sent for
Varana, and offered him a remarkably good berth with
a fat screw attached.  But the wanderer only smiled
and shook his head—he had had a taste of the outer
islands.  It shakes one's faith in Providence to realize
that most men die without finding the place in life
for which they were designed.

"It was old Jackson who told him of Rimarutu—probably
during one of their almost silent evenings
at the club.  It was a mistake—Jackson thought—to
believe that a man could shut himself off from the
world; the mood would pass in time, but if Varana
wished seriously to try it, he would find no better
place than Rimarutu.  There was some copra to be
had and a little shell in the lagoon; the people numbered
about two hundred, a quiet, pleasant lot, not given to
wandering from their island.  Varana had salvaged a
few thousand pounds from the wreck of his affairs at
home; Jackson helped him pick up a schooner at a
bargain and load her with what was needed; there was
some difficulty about a crew, but his uncanny gift with
the natives got him three men content to follow his
fortunes.  On the morning when he shook hands with
the old man, stepped aboard his boat, and sailed out of
the harbor, Varana severed the last tie with the world
he had known.

"I could tell you a good deal about his life on the
island—I worked with him for nearly ten years.  He
began by renting a bit of land—for his store and copra
shed—from the chief and setting himself to learn the
language.  The Polynesian is a shrewd judge of character;
they saw that this man was just, kindly, fearless,
and to be trusted.  Those who had traveled a little
declared Varana a phenomenon—a white trader who
respected women and never lay on his veranda in a
stupor, surrounded by empty bottles.  He seemed to
know instinctively the best way to take these people,
with whom, from the very first, he found himself on
terms of a mutual understanding.  They regarded him
with a mixture of liking and respect, not accorded us,
perhaps, as often as we are apt to think; he worked
with them, he played with them, and finally took a
daughter of the island as his wife—yet it was
characteristic that he never permitted himself to run barefoot
and that even after twenty years of friendship the
native entering Varana's house took off his hat.  I
remember Tupuna as a woman of thirty—tall, robust,
and grave, with delicate hands and masses of bright,
rippling hair; the years were kind to her—even in
middle life she did not lose a certain quiet charm.
Make no mistake—they were happily mated, this man,
turned out by what Englishmen believe the highest
civilization in the world, and the daughter of an island
chief whose father had been a savage and an eater of
men.  She was not spoiled like so many traders'
wives; when they had been on the reef she walked home
behind, carrying the torches and the fish—but he felt
for her an affection deep as it was undemonstrative,
a strong attachment, proven at the end in his own
extreme and romantic way.

"During the early years of his life on Rimarutu,
Varana had enough to do with his store, his occasional
trips for supplies, and his work for the betterment of
the island people.  He found them living on fish and
coconuts, depending for all their luxuries on a dwindling
production of copra.  He showed them how to thin
their palms, how to select nuts for new plantings, how
to dry their copra with a minimum of effort.  The
shell in the lagoon was nearly exhausted; he persuaded
the chiefs of the two villages to forbid diving for a
term of years.  After experiments conducted with
Tupuna's aid he set the men to catching flying fish,
which swarmed in the waters about the island, and
taught the women to split them, rub in salt, and dry
them on lines in the sun.  Rimarutu is high, as atolls
go—five or six yards above the sea in spots; he laid out
beds of *puraka taro*, and had pits dug on the high
portions of the island, lined the bottoms with rock to keep
the taproots from salt water, filled them with humus
and topsoil—scraped up in handfuls—and planted
breadfruit, mango, and lime, brought from the high
islands to the north.  At long intervals, when in need
of something that only civilization could supply—paint,
rigging, or a new set of sails—he went north
with a cargo of copra and dried fish and took on a
brief charter with Jackson.  On these trips he visited
scores of islands, and came to know the people of a
thousand miles of ocean.

"It was not until his son was born that Varana
began to think seriously of money.  His daughters had
given him no concern; he explained to me once his
peculiar philosophy as to their future.  Perhaps he was
right.  With their happiness in mind, he preferred to
bring them up as island girls—without education or
knowledge of the outside world and no greater
prospects than those of their full-blooded playmates—rather
than give them the chances of the usual half-caste:
half-educated and partially Europeanized, whose
most brilliant hope is marriage with a white man of the
inferior sort.  But the birth of Terii set the father to
thinking.

"The child was about ten when I saw him first, a
fine strong boy, very fair for a half-caste, with his
father's eyes, a high carriage of the head, and skin
touched with a faint bloom of the sun.  Tupuna was
immensely proud of him.  I was a youngster then and
new to the islands, but I had heard of Varana before
Jackson introduced me to him.  It was at Jackson's
place, on the upper veranda, that he told me how he had
leased Fatuhina; some one had spoken of my work.
I had operated diving machines?  He needed a man
familiar with them, for he had leased an atoll with
some big shell patches in the lagoon, and machines
would be necessary to work the deeper portions.  I
was doing nothing at the time.  I liked what I had
heard of Varana, and I liked the man better still.  In
an hour we had come to an understanding.  I worked
with him, off and on, from that time until the
beginning of the war.

"Without caring in the least for wealth, Varana had
set out to make himself rich.  Long before I knew him
he had decided the question of his son: Terii was to
have the same chances that his father had had before
nim—was to see both sides and choose for himself.

"Even Varana's friends spoke of his luck; to my
mind his success was inevitable.  Regarded with an
almost superstitious affection by the people of widely
scattered groups, he possessed channels of information
closed forever to the ordinary man.  It was in this way
that he learned of the shell in Fatuhina lagoon; perhaps
he did not know that the native who approached him,
one evening on a distant atoll, to speak casually of the
matter and stroll away, had paddled across twelve miles
of sea with no other object than to bring the news to
Varana.  When the *Gaviota* was beached he was the
first to learn of it—that affair alone brought him a
neat fortune; and when men had fine pearls to sell
they saw him before they went to the Jews.  By the
time his son was twelve Varana was a rich man.

"I was on Rimarutu when he left to take the boy to
England.  Tupuna shed a few tears, but there was no
scene—she knew he would return.  'I go to take our
son to my own land,' he told her; 'there will be six
moons before I come.'  Five months later I was waiting
with the schooner when he stepped off the mail boat.
That night, as he lay on a mat on the afterdeck,
dressed in a *pareu* and a pair of slippers, he spoke of
England briefly in the midst of our talk on island
matters.  'Damned senseless treadmill,' he remarked;
'I can't think how I stood it so many years.'  The
ordinary man, who had left home under a cloud of
misfortune to return twenty years later, after wanderings
in distant lands, with a fortune and a beautiful
child, would have lingered not without a certain
relish.  But Varana was different; he grudged every
moment spent in civilization and lived only for the
day when he would again take the wheel of his schooner
and watch the ridges of Tahiti sink beneath the
horizon.

"The years passed rapidly and tranquilly on
Rimarutu.  The days of Varana's activity were over; he
was no longer young, though he kept his store and
took the schooner out at long intervals for supplies.
Then came the outbreak of the war.

"I was in Gallipoli when the letter reached me,
written in the native language by Varana's old mate.
It told a story fantastically unreal—incredible from the
viewpoint of everyday life—and yet to me who knew
him, as to the people of his island, the end of Varana
seemed a natural thing, in keeping with what had gone
before.  Tupuna had fallen ill (the old man wrote)
and had died suddenly and peacefully, as natives do.
Varana stood beside her grave with no great display of
grief, returned to his house and spent three days
putting his affairs in order.  On the fourth day he
gave the mate a thick envelope of documents, called
together the people of the island and bade each one
of them farewell.  When he turned to leave they did
not disperse; the women had begun to sob—they felt
already the desolation of a final parting.  It was the
hour of sunset, when the trade wind dies away and the
lagoon lies like a mirror under an opalescent sky....  I
can see in imagination those simple and friendly
islanders, standing in little groups before the
settlement—raising no voice in protest, moving no hand in
restraint—while the man they loved walked to the
ocean beach, launched a tiny canoe in the surf, and
paddled out to the west.  The nearest land in that
direction is distant six hundred miles.  When he had
passed the breakers—they say—Varana did not once
turn his head; the watchers stood motionless while the
sky faded, their eyes fixed on the dot that was his
canoe—a dwindling dot, swallowed up at last in the night."

.. vspace:: 2

Tari ceased to speak.  He was sitting propped on the
lounge, arms folded, legs stretched out, eyes staring
at the table.  Without seeming aware of what he did,
he filled his glass, raised it to his lips, and drank.
Presently he emerged from his revery to light a pipe.

.. vspace:: 2

"In due time," he went on, "I had word from the
lawyers, inclosing a copy of the will and informing me
that I had been named executor with old Jackson,
who seemed to have discovered the secret of eternal
life.  There was also a letter from Varana, written
after Tupuna's death—a friendly and casual note,
with a mere line at the end, asking me to do
what I could for his boy.  The land Tupuna had
brought him was to be divided equally among his
daughters; all the rest was for Terii, saving his parting
gift to me.  Only one condition was attached—Terii
must visit Rimarutu before inheriting the property of
his father; once he had set foot on the island, he would
be his own master, free to choose his path in life.

"The boy was nineteen when the war broke out; he
joined up at once as a cadet in the Flying Corps.
During the second year I began to hear of Lieutenant
Warner—he had shot down a German plane near
Zeebrugge; he had been wounded; he had received
the Military cross.  Once I saw his picture in the
*Sphere*—a handsome lad, very smart in the old uniform
of the R.F.C., with a jaunty cap over one eye and
ribbons on his breast.  This was the little savage whose
shrill cries I used to hear at dawn, when he raced with
his half-naked companions on the beach!  At the end
of the war he was Captain Terry Warner, a celebrity
in a small way....  I felt a certain pride in him, of
course.  We had done our best to meet, but something
always happened to prevent my getting a glimpse of
him.

"I ran across him as I was homeward bound, leaving
San Francisco for the islands.  I had already gone
aboard and was standing by the rail, watching the last
of the luggage swing over the side in nets, when a
motor drove up to discharge a party of men and
women—fashionables of the city, from their looks.
One of them, a lean, tanned boy, with the overcoat of
a British officer over his civilian clothes, was saying
good-by to the others, shaking hands and smiling very
attractively.  A little later, when the lines were being
cast off, I saw him close beside me at the rail.  A girl
in blue was standing on the dock, waving up at him.
'Good-by, Terry!' she called.  I looked closely; there
could be no doubt—it was the son of Varana.

"We had long talks on the voyage south; the lad
had not forgotten me.  The memory of the old life—of
the island, of his mother, of his father—would always
be fresh in his mind, but he regarded those days as a
distant and beautiful episode, now forever closed.
He was going to visit Rimarutu for the last time—to bid
farewell to those who remembered him.  He had not
forgotten the friends of his boyhood; there were many
little presents in his boxes, and he told me that the
schooner—reported sound as on the day of her
launching—would be his gift to Varana's old mate.
Afterward he would return to San Francisco, where
opportunities had been offered him; he had brought letters
to America and had been well received.

"The schooner was in port when we arrived.  Varana's
mate met us on the dock; there were tears in the
old man's eyes as he took the boy's hands in his own
and murmured in a trembling voice, '*O Terii iti e*.'  The
tourists descending the gangplank looked with
interest at the spectacle of Captain Warner, almost
embracing an old barefoot *kanaka*, dressed in
dungarees and a faded shirt, wrinkled brown face working
with emotion.  As Terii shook hands with the crew—some
of them boys with whom he had played in childhood—I
noticed that a phrase or two of the native
came to his lips—twelve years had not been sufficient
to blot out all memory of his mother's tongue.

"We had a long passage south, beating against the
trade; Varana had installed an engine in the schooner,
but time is cheaper than petrol in this part of the
world.  Terii delighted in handling the boat; there
was salt water in his blood; and his father had seen
to his training in navigation and the ways of the sea.
With each new day I perceived symptoms of a change
in the boy.  White suits and canvas slippers gave
way to pajamas and bare feet; finally the pajamas
were replaced by a *pareu*, taken from the trade-room
stock.  The summers at home had not been wasted;
I used to watch him at the wheel, working the schooner
to windward, an eye on the canvas aloft, steering with
the easy certain movements of a seaman born.  He
was in love with the schooner before we had been out
a week, and he had reason—Frisco-built for the last
of the pelagic sealing, Varana's boat was the fastest
thing of her tonnage in the South Seas.  More than
once in our talks Terii seemed to forget the plans he had
confided to me....  She needed a new foresail; the set
of this one did not please him; he was going to have
her copper renewed in places; she was getting dingy
below; the cabin needed a touch of paint.  At times,
speaking of these things, he stopped short in the midst
of a sentence and changed the talk to other subjects.
The language came back to him surprisingly; he was
able to understand and make himself understood before
we raised the palms of Rimarutu.

"The mate took her in through the pass.  It was
late afternoon, cool and cloudless, with a gentle sea
nuzzling at the reef.  The island was like the memory
of a dream—fresh green palms, snowy beaches, cat's-paws
ruffling the lagoon in long, blue streaks—so
beautiful that the sight of it made one's heart ache
and the breath catch in one's throat.  A dozen canoes
put out to meet us from the first settlement; there were
greetings from friends and relatives—embraces and
tears.  Terii lay silent, propped on his elbows and
staring ahead, as we slipped across the lagoon; the
island people spoke in tones so low that I could hear
the crisp sound of the schooner's bows parting the
landlocked water.  The other village lay beyond the beach
ahead of us, Varana's village, where Terii had been
born—a place of dreams in the mystery of the evening
light.  It was not difficult to guess at the boy's
thoughts—the moment was one of those which make up the
memories of a lifetime.  Every man has known
them—rapture, pain, the enjoyment of supreme beauty, the
flavor of exotic and unrepeatable experience; but not
every man is permitted to taste such contrasts as this
boy had known in twenty-four years of life....  I was
a little envious, I think, of the rarity of that poignant
home-coming.

"On the first evening, when we had greeted the
people of the village, Terii was led away by his old
aunt, Tupuna's sister.  Just before bedtime I saw them
at his mother's grave—a lonely shrine, roofed over in
island fashion, where the light of a lamp shone on
stunted bushes of frangipani.  My eccentricities were
not forgotten; they had spread my mat under the
palms before Varana's house, and toward midnight
Terii came quietly and lay down close by.  I was
wakeful in a revery, living over the old days with my
friend, wondering, with the usual idle and somber
doubt, if we were destined to meet again.  Low over
the palm tops a planet glimmered like a shaded lamp;
the Milky Way arched overhead through a sky
powdered with fixed stars—remote suns, about which
revolve myriads of worlds like ours....  I rebelled at the
thought that the strong soul of Varana should be
snuffed out.  Terii said nothing for a long time; I
thought he had dropped off to sleep, but suddenly I
heard his voice: 'I have the strangest feeling to-night,'
he said, thoughtfully; 'if my father were here I could
believe that I had never been away, that everything
since I left—England, school, my friends, the war—was
no more than a dream.  I can't explain to you,
but somehow this island seems the most real thing in
the world.  I've been talking with my aunt—I'd
almost forgotten her name, you know—and I managed
to understand a good bit of what she had to say....
There is no doubt she believes it herself.  My father
comes to her every now and then, she says, for a talk
on family matters; last night he told her we would
come to-day, and that I would stop here to take
his old place among the people.  It seems they are
good enough to want me to stay—I almost wish I
could.' ...

"The drums were going at daybreak—the feast in
Terii's honor was the greatest the island had known
since heathen days.  The entire population was on
hand; the beach black with canoes; dozens of
good-humored babies on mats under the trees, with small
brothers and sisters stationed to fan the flies away.
The people sat in long rows in the shade, strings of
shell about their necks, their heads wreathed in hibiscus
and sweet fern.  Terii was placed between the chief
of the other village and Tehina, the chief's daughter,
a full-blooded Rimarutu girl of sixteen, barefoot,
dressed in a white frock, with gold pendants in her
ears and a thick, shining braid of hair.  There is an
uncommon charm about the women of that island—a
stamp of refinement, a delicacy of frame and feature,
remarked as long ago as the days of Spanish voyaging
in the Pacific.  Blood counts for something in
Polynesia, and one needed only a glance at Tehina to know
that the best blood of the island flowed in her veins;
her ancestor—if tradition may be credited—was in the
long canoe with Penipeni when the god pulled Rimarutu
up from the bottom of the sea.  I like those people,
and in spite of the night's depression I managed to
enjoy the fun—I even danced a bit!  Finally I saw
that the dancers were taking their seats; voices were
lowered, heads were turned.

"Tehina was dancing alone to the rhythm of a
hundred clapping hands.  In twenty years of the
islands I have never seen a girl step more daintily.
Little by little she moved toward Terii until she
stood directly before him, inviting him to dance,
hands fluttering, swaying with an unconscious grace,
smiling into his eyes.  Every head turned; there were
smiles, good-humored chuckles, nudges; they were
proud of this girl and anxious that the son of Varana
should dance with her.  They had not long to wait.
Next moment Terii had leaped to his feet and was
dancing, with more enthusiasm than skill, to a long
burst of cheers and clapping.

"When the canoes put off at nightfall I noticed that
Tehina did not leave; she had stopped to visit her
uncle, the parson of the village church.  I saw Terii
with her often during the days that followed—fishing
on the lagoon, swimming in the cove, lying on mats in
the moonlight where groups of young people were
telling their interminable stories of the past.  He
seemed a little shy of me, and no longer exchanged
confidences in the hour which precedes sleep.  One
evening, smoking and strolling alone after dinner, I
passed the parson's house and became aware of the
vague figure of Terii, walking to and fro impatiently
beside the veranda.  He stopped—I heard the rattle
of a coral pebble on the roof.  A moment later Tehina
glided like a phantom around the corner of the house,
and they went off arm in arm along the path to the
sea.  I thought to myself that the lad was not doing
badly after his twelve years away from the island,
but the blood was in him, of course—there was
instinct in his manner of tossing the pebble and in the
unhesitating way he had led the girl toward the outer
beach: the haunt of dreadful presences, a place no
ordinary islander would visit after dark.  I fancied
him sitting there—the rumble of the surf in his ears,
watching the lines of breakers rear up under the
moon—with Tehina beside him, admiring and afraid.  When
his eye was not on her she would glance right and left
along the beach and back toward the bush, half
expecting to see some monstrous thing, crouched and
watching with fiery eyes.  As for the boy, one could only
guess at the troubled flow of his thoughts, stirred by
cross-currents of ancestry and experience.  In her own
environment Tehina was a girl to make any man look
twice; for him, with his mother's blood and the
memories of his childhood, she must have possessed a
powerful appeal—the touch of her hand; her voice,
soft and low-pitched, murmuring the words of a
half-forgotten tongue; her dark eyes shining in the
moonlight; the scent of the strange blossoms in her hair.
It was the test, the final conflict Varana had foreseen.
I had my own opinion of the result, and yet the other
life pulled hard.

"The days passed in pleasant island fashion; the
loading of the schooner went on; there was no mention
of a change in plans.  The chief came to take his
daughter home, and when she had gone Terii spoke
to me, not too convincingly, of his return to civilization.
My trip to Rimarutu was a matter of pleasure alone;
I was already planning to take this berth, and was not
sorry when Terii announced one morning that we
would sail north that afternoon.  One seems
perpetually saying good-by down here—these islands are
havens of a brief call, of sad farewells, of lingering and
regretful memory.  Our parting from the people of
Rimarutu was more than usually painful; they had
hoped to the last that Terii would leave some word,
some promise; but he remained silent, though I could
see that the leave-taking was not without effect.

"Finally the last canoe put off for shore; the anchor
came up, the motor started, and Terii steered across
the lagoon for the pass.  The sails were still furled,
for there was a light head wind.  I watched his face
as he stood in silence at the wheel; there was a look
in his eyes which made me sorry for the boy.  We
crossed the lagoon, glided past green islets, and drew
abreast of the other village.  The people lined the
shore, fluttering handkerchiefs, shouting good wishes
and farewells.

"Beyond the settlement the pass led out, blue and
deep, between sunken piers of coral, where the surf
thundered in patches of white.  All at once the old
mate sang out and pointed—a dot was on the water
ahead of us, a swimmer moving out from land to cut
us off.  The son of Varana turned the wheel; the
schooner swung inshore; I heard a quick command
and felt the speed of the engine slacken.

"Terii was staring ahead with a strange intensity—instinct
or premonition was at work.  I looked again
as we drew near; a cloud of dark hair floated behind
the swimmer's head; it was a woman—Tehina!  Terii
sprang to the rail.  A moment later she had been
lifted over the side and was standing beside him in the
cockpit, dripping, trembling a little with cold and fear,
doing her best to smile.  The mate was pulling at
Terii's arm and pointing back toward the village.  A
whaleboat had put out from shore and was heading
for us at the top speed of the rowers; it was the chief
himself, I believe, who stood in the stern and whose
shouts were beginning to reach our ears.

"At that moment Terii proved that he was his
father's son.  He glanced back once, and then, without
the smallest interval of hesitation, his arm went
about the wet shoulder of Tehina.

"'Full speed ahead,' he ordered in a cool voice."

.. vspace:: 2

Tari poured rum into my glass, and tilted the last
of the bottle into his own.  The schooner was taking
it easily with her engine at half speed, riding a gentle
swell.  The ship's bell rang twice, paused, and rang
again—a sharp and mellow sound.  It was long past
midnight.

.. vspace:: 2

"If you ever get down to Rimarutu," said Tari,
as he rose to go on deck, "you will find Terii there—he
bids fair to leave the island even less than Varana
did."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`In the Cook Group`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XII


.. class:: center medium bold

   In the Cook Group

.. vspace:: 2

I was close to beginning this letter with a
little fun at your expense; you would
have been mystified—perhaps convinced
that my haunted friends of Ahu Ahu
were just a bit uncanny.  It is really
a pity not to do it!  I should have begun with a vivid
glimpse of a séance; the quiet moonlight outside, seen
through an open door; the glimmer of a turned-down
lamp in the house, revealing the rapt sightless face of
the medium; the summoning of old Rakamoana from
her sleeping place in the *marae*; the unnatural voice
proclaiming the coming of the spirit.

Then I would have told how a message from the
visitor was announced—for the strange white man
vouched for by the mother of Apakura.  "I see an
island," the ghostly voice might have gone on—"a
little land surrounding a great lagoon.  It is Nukuhina,
in the far-off Sea of Atolls.  A schooner lies at anchor
in the calm water off the settlement; she does not
move, for the lagoon is very still.  A boat is putting
off for shore, and in the stern sits a dear friend of the
white man—a slender man, who gazes eagerly toward
the shore with dark eyes like the eyes of our people.
A crowd is gathered on the beach; the girls carry gifts
of necklaces and wreaths; and in the village the old
women are preparing a feast.  The man in the boat
believes that this welcome is for the captain of the
schooner, not knowing that this people was once a race
of warriors, and that they are gathered to give him
welcome—the first soldier from the army of France
to visit their island since the war.  The keel of the
boat grates on the sand; a score of men seize her to
pull her up; the women crowd about the stranger
(Aué!  They are good to look upon these girls of
Nukuhina!), to throw their necklaces over his head
and crown him with wreaths of flowers and shell.  His
face grows red; the old men smile; the girls laugh
aloud.  One, bolder than the rest, runs at him
suddenly, puts her arms about him, and kisses him after
the fashion of the white man.  His face grows redder
still; at that, the old men, too, laugh aloud.  One
after another, pushing and pulling to be first, the girls
scramble to kiss him; he is overwhelmed, suffocated,
and now his face is like fire, but he is not angry, for he
smiles."

Well, what do you think of Ahu Ahu magic?  I
really ought to refrain from telling you the truth,
which—like the stuff of most spirit messages—is simple,
unexpected, and disillusioning.  When we got to
Avarua I found S—— there, over from Tahiti to buy
cattle; before his departure the *Alouette* had turned
up from the Paumotus, bringing word of your reception
on Nukuhina.

I fancy you haven't had much time, in your progress
through the Low Archipelago, for the pursuits of a
landsman, so I'll give you an idea of how I've frittered
away the days on Rarotonga.

Soon after our arrival there was a great stir over the
coming of a shipload of parliamentary visitors from New
Zealand, making a tour of the Cook Islands; a feast
of welcome was to be given in Avarua, scores of pigs
and hundreds of chickens were set aside for fattening,
and the dancers of each village were to be seen
rehearsing in the evenings.  We drove to Avarua on the
appointed day and found the government boat already
anchored in the roadstead off the town—an anchorage
dreaded by skippers, for unless the anchor strikes
exactly on the summit of a sharp submerged peak,
it will slide clean off soundings.  Long before we
reached the settlement the air had been vibrant with
the sound of drums, the visitors were coming ashore,
the dancing was in full swing.

The performance, of course, was a perfectly
sophisticated one—like Papeete, Avarua is a small ocean
metropolis, the capital of a group—but it interested
me to see that the people, in spite of the efforts of the
missionaries to make them ashamed of everything
pertaining to heathen days, were not entirely without
pride in the past.  Each village was represented by a
corps of dancers, men and women equally divided,
and had its own drums and drummers, who furnished
the sole music of the dance.  The drums are of three
varieties.  The smallest are merely hollow sticks—six
inches in diameter and a yard long—open on one side,
and producing a loud, resonant click when struck with
a bit of wood.  There are others of medium size,
standing on short legs and beaten with the hand, but
the huge oldtime drums, suspended from the limbs of
trees, interested me most of all.  Imagine a five-foot
section of the trunk of a big *Barringtonia*, carefully
hollowed out and smoothed, with the skins of wild
goats stretched over the ends, and sides decorated
with outlandish painting.

The big drums are struck with the heel of the
hand—with such furious energy that the drummer streams
perspiration and is soon exhausted.  The deep pulsing
sound of them carries for miles in still air; sometimes
at night, when there was dancing in the villages, I
have heard it far and near, rising, falling, throbbing,
from Arorangi, from Titikaveka, and from Ngatangiia,
whence the ancients set out on their thousand-league
voyages to the south.

I wish I could make you feel, as I have felt, the
quality of this savage drumming.  Monotonous and
rhythmic sound, reduced almost to its simplest form,
it is the ancestor of all music, toward which, perhaps,
our modern dance music is a reversion.  There is
syncopation in it when the big drum halts at irregular
intervals, and the time is carried by the clicking of
hollow wood; but it is solemn and ominous—anything
but the meretricious syncopation of ragtime.  One feels
in it an appeal to the primitive emotions, at once vague
and charged with meaning; fear and madness are there,
with cruelty, lust, triumph, and a savage melancholy.

Except in the case of the contingent from Manihiki—an
atoll far off to the north—there was little
variation in the dances, for which one can only say that they
showed evidence of careful drilling.  The women
performed a variety of the dance common to all branches
of their race**basically the same whether called *hula*,
*hura*, or *ura*—but their motions were awkward and
stiff, without the abandon and graceful movements of
the arms to be seen in Hawaii or the Society Islands.
The men, who carried long staves like spears, were
freer in their motions, leaping, thrusting out their arms,
and clattering their sticks in unison.

The costumes—unfortunately for the eye of a sensitive
spectator—were slipped on over the wearer's best
European clothes; a concession to the missionary point
of view; but the beauty of some of the kilts, tunics and
headdresses, and the trouble evidently taken in braiding
them, showed that the Rarotongans have not wholly
forgotten the past.

The dance was followed by speeches, and the speeches
by a feast—all very conventional and uninteresting.  I
wonder if you are heartily fed up on baked pig.  One
needs a dash of Island blood to appreciate it after the
twentieth time!  Any other sort of meat would be
welcome here where bully beef and pork are the
staples.  The need of a change of diet drives one to the
lagoon; fishing becomes a practical as well as a sporting
proposition.

During the proper phases of the moon we lead a most
irregular life, for the hours from 3 to 5 A.M. are often the
ones most profitable to spend on the reef, and the
evenings are occupied with a search for hermit crabs.
You have probably made the acquaintance of the
hermit crab, but in case you have been too busy to
give him the notice he deserves, I'll venture to dwell
for a bit on his eccentricities.  It was not a pure love
of natural history that turned my attention to him;
I have been obliged to study him—at least
superficially—by the fact that he is the dainty preferred
by all the fish of this lagoon, and his capture, therefore,
an indispensable preliminary to every fishing expedition.

There must be several varieties of hermit crab—I
have counted three already: the ordinary small brown
one called *kakara*, the huge red one found in deep water,
and the black, hairy kind, whose pounded-up body is
mixed with grated coconut to extract the oil.  This
latter is called *unga*; in the old days the lowest class of
Rarotonga society was known by the same name—meaning,
I suppose, that all of their property could be
carried on their backs.  The common variety is a good
deal like the robber crab in habits; the natives go so
far as to say that it is the same creature, in different
stages of its existence.  I doubt this theory, for while
there are plenty of the little *kakara* on the volcanic
islands, the robber crab is very rare; he lives on the
atolls, and to my mind it is incredible that he should
journey from island to island, through leagues of deep
sea.  Like his formidable relative, the *kakara* spends
most of his time ashore, frequenting the bush along the
water's edge, where he lies hidden throughout the day
in a hole or under a pile of leaves.  His first duty of the
evening is a trip to salt water, for he seems to need a
thorough wetting once in each twenty-four hours.
After his bath he heads back for the bush to begin his
nightly search for food—nearly any kind of edible
refuse—a dead fish on the beach, the fallen fruit of a
pandanus, a coconut, opened by rat or flying fox, and
containing a few shreds of meat.

The size of the *kakara* can be judged from his shell,
which may be as small as a thimble or as large as an
orange.  The creature inside is marvelously adapted to
the life he leads.  His soft and muscular body curls
into the spiral of the shell and is securely anchored by
a twist of the tail.  The fore-end of the crab, which
protrudes from the shell when he is in motion, reminds
one of a tiny lobster; the same stalk eyes, the same
legs, the same strong claws.  When alarmed he snaps
back into his mobile fortress, and you perceive that
legs and claws fold into a flat armored barrier, sealing
up perfectly the entrance of the shell.  Sit still and
watch him; presently the claws unfold cautiously and
he emerges little by little, feelers waving and eyes
peering about in a ludicrously apprehensive manner.
Finally he gathers courage and starts off for the bush
at his curious rolling gait.

One might suppose the hermit crab the least social of
living tilings, but in reality he is gregarious and seems
to enjoy the company of his friends.  They wander in
little bands; very often one finds two or three small
ones perched on the back of a larger comrade and
enjoying an effortless trip across the beach to the
lagoon.  One afternoon I came upon three of them
traveling in single file; the last member of the party—a
frail little chap—crunched under the heel of my
boot before I saw him.  I stopped a moment in regret
and saw that the two other crabs were also stopping—warned,
by I know not what obscure sense, that all
was not well with their friend.  They drew together
as they halted, and went through a hasty and obviously
anxious exchange of ideas—face to face, with feelers
waving nervously.  One was reminded irresistibly of a
pair of fussy little old gentlemen, halted in the street
to decide which should do an unpleasant errand.  At
length one of the two settled himself to wait, while the
other faced about and shambled off briskly to the rear.
A few seconds brought him to what was left of his
unfortunate comrade; his eyes seemed to start from
his head as he felt over the crushed wreck.  A moment
later he turned and hastened back even faster than he
had come.  His arrival had an air of palpitating
excitement; I fancied I felt transmitted to me a tiny thrill
of horror at the news about to be communicated.
This time the four antennae fairly vibrated—I imagined
the conversation going on an inch above the ground.

"My God!" announced the bearer of ill tidings,
breathlessly.  "Poor Bill is dead!"

"Bill dead!" exclaimed the other, shocked in spite of
his incredulity; "but no, you must be wrong—what
could have killed him?"

"I don't know; he's dead all the same—crushed and
mangled—it upset me fearfully."

"Come, come—you've been seeing things; he
must have taken a short cut to the beach."

"I tell you he's dead; come and have a look if you
don't believe me."  So off they went together for a
look at the corpse, and I left them to mourn their
friend—perhaps to eat him.

If you want to see a curious sight get a hermit crab
some day and pick up half a dozen empty shells of the
size to fit him.  Lay the shells on the sand in a circle
a few inches across, extract the crab without hurting
him from his house, and set him down naked among
the empty shells.  To get him out, by the way, is not so
easy as it sounds, but you can do it by taking hold of
his claws and maintaining a steady, gentle pull; in
time the muscles of his tail will tire and his grip relax.
You will be amused when you see his first attempts to
walk without his shell, which weighs three or four times
as much as the tenant; it is precisely as a man might
act, set down on some planet where gravity is weaker
than on our earth.  Naked, helpless, and worried—*très,
très inquiet*—the crab makes a dash for one of the shells,
gives it a hasty inspection with his feelers, finds
something not quite right, and hobbles off to the next one.
Perhaps this suits him.  He faces about, in goes his
tail to take a grip on the whorls, he snaps in and out
a few times as if trying the strategic possibilities of the
new quarters, and next moment you will see him
ambling off blissfully toward the bush.

The chase of the hermit crab is tame sport, no
doubt, but not entirely without interest.  One evening
we set out just after dark, bucket and torch in hand—not
the old South Sea torch of coconut leaf, but the
modern tube of galvanized iron, filled with kerosene
and plugged with burlap, which acts as a wick.  The
high beach is best at this hour, for one's quarry is
beginning to emerge from the bush for the evening
dip, and those that have passed will leave spoor in
the soft coral sand.  Here is the track of a small one,
winding toward the water in eccentric curves and
zigzags; follow it and you find him, motionless in the
torchlight, hoping to escape notice.  He goes into the
pail with a clang—you can hear his feet scratching
vainly at the smooth sides.  There were not many
about on this stretch of beach; they are uncertain in
their habits and seem to be great wanderers.  Here
is the track of a monster, broad and corrugated like
the trail of a miniature Whippet Tank; the spoor leads
to the lagoon—no signs of him at the water's edge—he
has doubled back.  Lift up that rotten coconut
frond ... an *unga*, black, hairy, armed with a vicious
pair of claws; you can hear him raging in the pail,
a noise halfway between a whine and a growl—a crab
with a voice!

A stroll of an hour or two along the btuch usually
procures enough bait for a day's fishing, and one turns
inland to follow the road home.  Sometimes, when the
new moon has set behind the Avarua peaks and thick
darkness settles over the bush—when the surf murmurs
almost maudibly in a stillness broken by the plunge
of a fish in the lagoon, or the grating screech of a
flying-fox, quarreling with his mates in the palm
tops—one is not sorry when the lights of the plantation
begin to glimmer through the trees.

We went to bed early that evening, for we had to be
up long before daylight to catch the first of the flood
tide, but these island nights are not meant for sleep—I
was soon up again, to spend a couple of hours alone
on the veranda.  The feel of the air was like a caress;
neither hot nor cold, and perfumed with the scents of
strange flowers—waxen *Tiaré Tahiti*, sweet and heady
frangipani, languorous Queen of the Night.  In the
mango tree behind the house a mynah twittered—a
drowsy overture to one of their abrupt nocturnal
choruses.  They are quaint birds, the mynahs;
introduced to the Islands many years ago, they have
increased amazingly in this friendly environment, where
they live in a state of half-domesticated familiarity
with mankind.  One sees them everywhere, hopping
fearlessly about the streets of villages, fluttering to the
table to finish the bread crumbs left after a meal,
perched on the backs of cattle in the coconut groves.
They are intensely gregarious, gathering in large
flocks at sunset to roost in some thick-foliaged
tree—orange, mango, or alligator pear.  From time to time
during the night, with an abruptness and perfect
unison that make one suspect the presence of a feathered
leader of the orchestra, the two or three hundred
members of the colony burst into deafening song—a chorus
which lasts perhaps twenty seconds, and stops as
suddenly as it began.

At last I knocked the ashes out of my pipe and
turned in; at intervals, before sleep came, I heard the
far-off thud of a ripe coconut, or the faint slither and
crash of an old frond, falling from a palm.  We were
awakened at three o'clock by the cook's announcement
that coffee was ready; it is a pleasure to live where
dressing is only a matter of slipping on a fresh singlet
and hitching the *pareu* tight about one's waist.  Each
man carried a pair of old shoes, for even the leathery
feet of a native must be protected before he ventures
on the live coral.  Half a dozen plantation boys
followed us to the beach, along a path leading down an
avenue of coconuts, the slender boles illuminated by the
glare of torchlight.  In five minutes we were under the
dark ironwoods at the water's edge, where the canoes
are hauled up; without waiting for us, the boys
plunged into the lagoon—-half swimming, half wading
toward the reef—torches held aloft in their left hands.

The tide was very low; we had only a short paddle
to the shallow water on the inner side of the barrier.
It was dead calm—ideal weather for the spear—but
there had been a storm somewhere to the south; lines
of tall glassy combers, faintly visible in the starlight,
were curling with the splitting reports of field
artillery—crashing down on the reef until the coral beneath us
seemed to tremble at each shock.  The eastern sky had
not yet begun to pale—the constellations glimmered
with the soft glow of the tropics: the Southern Cross,
Orion, and the Pleiades.

When the water was only knee-deep we moored the
canoe to a coral mushroom and went overboard in
bare legs and tucked-up *pareus*.  Wading slowly, about
twenty feet apart—the lagoon so still and clear that it
was not easy to tell where air ended and water
began—nothing moving in the circle of torchlight could escape
notice.  It was necessary to watch the bottom and
walk warily; the reef is a honeycomb of holes and
passages through which the sea boils in at certain tides.
Many of these holes, only a few feet in diameter at the
surface, lead deep down and out into the caverns lining
the edges of the pass—the haunts of octopus and the
man-eating rock-cod called *tonu*.  A faint ripple
revealed a big blue parrot fish skulking in the shadow
of a bowlder; one of the native boys slipped his spear
close before he thrust with a skill that needs years to
acquire.  He killed the fish with a stab just where the
head joins the body, and strung it on the strip of hibiscus
bark at his waist.

These lagoons swarm with strange forms of life
unknown in northern waters; until one learns one's
way about there is a certain amount of danger in
wading through the shallows along the reef.  A sea
scorpion passed close by us—a wicked-looking thing,
all feelers and enormous fins; a touch of those spines
would give you a nasty leg.  An even more poisonous
fish is found here—though fortunately not often: the
*noo*, which lies buried in patches of coral sand.  I
have never seen one, and do not know its name in
English, but the spines of its dorsal fin are said to be
hollow like the fangs of a rattlesnake, and to inject a
poison—when stepped on—that is apt to kill or cripple
for life.  The *totara*, or sea porcupine, is another odd
creature, but not at all to be feared; at the approach
of danger he blows himself up like a football, and once
inflated, is proof against almost anything—I've seen
a man hurl a heavy stone on one a dozen times without
being able to burst him open.  In a different way, the
conger eels are nearly as hard to kill, particularly the
big ones, which are no joke to handle when one is
wading barelegged.  One must be on the alert every
moment—torch blazing, spear poised.  One moment you
jump on a mushroom of coral to avoid a pair of sea
snakes, long, slender and spotted—active, fearless
creatures whose bite is said to be a serious matter; a
moment later you are slipping and scrambling at top speed
to cut off some large fish, working his way through the
shallows.  One of the boys bagged a *patuki*—a young
*tonu*; I was glad to have a look at the ugly little brute.
He was only a foot long—a marvel of protective coloring,
irregularly spotted and blotched so as to be nearly
invisible against a background of coral.  The size of the
mouth, the power of the jaws, and the rows of cruel
little teeth, convinced me that the full-grown fish must
deserve the bad name given him by the pearl divers.

The light was gray and the cloud banks along the
eastern horizon flushing pale rose when the boys
extinguished their torches and set out across the lagoon,
each one trailing a heavy string of fish.  My host had
had enough sport for once, but I love to be on the
water at dawn, so when I had landed him I paddled
out to the pass to fish for *titiara*.  The current was slack
and not a breath of wind stirred the lagoon.  The
light grew stronger; the contours of the island
developed in sharp serrations against the sky; presently
the sun rose.

I anchored the canoe in a fathom of water at the
edge of the pass, allowing her to swing out over the
depths.  Through my water-glass I could examine the
precipitous walls of the channel—fifty feet high,
overhanging in places, seamed, pitted, broken by the
dark mouths of caverns.  Shoals of fish moved leisurely
along the face of the coral—appearing and disappearing
like nesting swallows, seen from a cliff-top: swinish
parrot fish, bright blue and long as a man's arm;
*taputapu*, spangled orange and black—stopping to
nibble at the coral; slender pipefish; swift *nanue*; fish
of extraordinary form and coloring—indescribable,
perhaps undescribed.  At last I saw what I was after—a
school of *titiara*, working in from the sea.

I wonder if you know this fish; it is new to me,
though I have been told that it exists in the northern
Pacific.  It is of the true game type—swift and
rapacious—with the conformation of a mackerel, and
related, I should say, to the pompano of American waters.
The young ones, eight to ten inches long, and appearing
at certain times of year, in great schools, are called
*aturi*.  When medium-sized—running from two pounds
up to twelve—it is known as *titiara* in the Cook Islands;
*paihere* in Tahiti and to the east.  The fully grown fish,
which attains a weight of a hundred pounds or more, is
called *urua*.  These different names for stages in the
life of the same fish are interesting to me, for they
illustrate the richness, in certain directions, of a language so
poor in others.  We have such terms in English, but
they are rapidly becoming obsolete; I doubt, for
example, if the average man at home knows that a
young salmon is called a grilse, and a still younger one,
a parr.

One's outfit for this kind of fishing consists of a pail
of hermit crabs, a couple of stones for crushing them, a
hundred feet of stout cotton line, a single hook on a
length of piano wire, and several dozen pebbles, to be
used as sinkers.  First of all you smash the shells of a
few crabs, tear off the soft bodies for bait, and crush
the claws and legs to a paste.  This chum is thrown
overboard little by little to attrach the fish and keep
them about the canoe.  When a glance through the
water-glass shows that the fish you want are gathered
beneath you, a pebble is attached to the line by means
of a special hitch, which can be undone by a jerk.  Now
you lower the line over the side until the bait is in the
required position; a sharp pull frees the sinker, and
you are ready for the first client.  The theory of the
detachable sinker is that it enables one to fish at a
distance from the boat without having the hook rest
on the bottom, where it is apt to foul in the coral.

On this occasion my sport was ruined by one of those
tantalizing incidents which lend charm to every variety
of angling.  I had caught two fish and was lowering
my line to try for a third, when the small fry gobbling
my chum suddenly scattered and disappeared.  Next
moment a monstrous *titiara*—almost in the *urua*
class—loomed up from the depths, seized my bait, and
made off so fast that the line fairly scorched my
fingers.  My tackle was not designed for such game as
this—there was nothing to do but try to play him;
but when only a yard of line remained in my hands
I was forced to check the rush.  A powerful wrench,
the line slackened dead, he was off, the light hook had
snapped at the bend—and I had no other!  The old,
old story—it is never the fingerlings that get away.

Cut into filets and soaked for six hours in lime
juice, my two fish made a raw *hors d'oeuvre* of the most
delicate kind.  I took a plate of it to the house of a
neighbor who had asked me to dinner, and this
old-timer in the South Seas pronounced it of the very first
order.  You would enjoy knowing him: he has been
in this part of the world since the 'seventies—supercargo,
skipper, trader on islands seldom visited even
to-day.  Now he is retired and lives on a small plantation
which represents the savings of a lifetime.  After
dinner, as we sat on his wide veranda with pipes going
and glasses on the table between us, he told me a tale
so curious that I cannot resist repeating it to you—the
story of an island far away to the north and west—an
island I shall call *Ariri*.

Atolls are by nature lonely places, but of all atolls
in the Pacific, Ariri is perhaps the loneliest—never
visited, far off from any group, out of the paths of
navigation.  Not very many years ago Ariri was a bit
of no man's land; though marked on the chart, its
existence was ignored by the Powers—it had never been
inhabited, no flag had ever been raised above its benches
of dazzling coral sand.  At that time, as for centuries
before, the sea birds nested undisturbed on the islets
within the reef, where all day long the water flashed
blue in the sunlight and the trade wind hummed a song
of loneliness among the palm tops.

Then a day came when two Frenchmen—shrewd
traders and planters of coconuts in the Tuamotu—spoke
of Ariri.  Here was an island capable of an
annual hundred tons of copra, and claimed by no man;
they would plant it and reap the rewards of enterprise.
The chief difficulty was to find a superintendent to
take charge of the project; it needed a white man,
but white men willing to undertake a task of such
poignant loneliness were not to be found every day in
Papeete.  As it chanced, their man was at hand.

The natives called him Tino—perhaps his name had
once been King.  Years among the islands had
obliterated whatever stamp of nationality he might have
possessed; it was rumored that he was English by
birth, and also that he had held a commission in the
Confederate navy.  Tall, strong, and of fine presence,
with a full blond beard and eyes of reckless blue, a
great singer and dancer—always the merriest at a
feast and the idol of the women, a remarkable
linguist and story-teller, drunken, brave, witty, and
unprincipled—Tino was of a type which thrives in
Polynesia.

When they offered him the position of superintendent
at Ariri the two Frenchmen were not without
misgivings.  He was on the beach at the time, though the
only sign of that condition was an unusual laxity in
returning the favor when a friend invited him to drink.
Tino had no money, but that was his sole limitation;
each of a dozen native families vied for the honor of
transferring his mat and camphorwood box to their
house; when evening came he had his choice of a dozen
invitations to dine, and a dozen girls competed for the
joy of doing his laundry and making hats for him.
But this easy-going philosophy and lack of worry over
a situation scarcely respectable in the eyes of Papeete's
business men were calculated to sow distrust.  In the
case of Ariri, however, it was difficult to see how he
could go astray; there would be no liquor—they would
see to that—and with no visitors and no means of
leaving the island there seemed little chance of trouble.
Tino was a famous handler of native labor.

The agreement was made and in due time a schooner
sailed into the Ariri lagoon to land Tino and a score of
Raiatea boys with their wives.  The Frenchmen took
care to leave no boat capable of putting out to sea, but
as there were houses and sheds to build they left a
considerable variety of tools and gear, in addition to
a year's supply of medicine, food, and clothing.  A day
or two later the schooner sailed away.

The superintendent called his men together and
appointed a foreman.  The main island was to be
cleared, rows staked out, and the nuts brought for
seed to be planted in such a manner.  Before this
work began, a house was to be built for each family.
That was all, except that Tino needed five men at once
for special work of his own—let them be those most
skilled in woodworking.  With that he seems to have
dismissed the business of planting coconuts from his
mind.

There was a certain amount of hibiscus on the
island, as well as the trees called *tou* and *puka*.  In
seven months' time, with the help of his men, Tino cut
down trees, sawed out timbers and planking, and built
a forty-foot cutter—sturdy, fast, and seaworthy.  Her
mast was the smoothed-down trunk of an old coconut
palm; her sails a patchwork of varied fabrics; her
cordage of cinnet, twisted and braided coconut
fiber—the work of women, incredibly skillful and patient.
For anchor, she carried a grooved coral bowlder, and
her water tanks were five-gallon kerosene tins.  At the
end of the seventh month this improbable vessel was
launched, rigged, and provisioned.  Tino bade his men
farewell and set sail—promising to return—to the
westward, fearless and alone.  His only instrument was a
compass, and yet he made the passage to Fiji—twelve
hundred miles—in fifteen days.

I forgot to say that before his departure he had
ordered the top of a tall palm chopped off, and on this
stout flagpole had hoisted a homemade edition of the
Union Jack.  In Fiji he wasted no time.  At the office
of the High Commissioner of the Pacific he announced
that he had taken possession of Ariri in the name of the
British Empire, and petitioned that a fifty years' lease
of the island—at nominal rate—be given him.  The
request was granted; a few days later Tino was again
at sea, still alone, and headed for his little kingdom.

The story is that he bought a sextant in Fiji, but
at any rate, something went wrong and he was fifty
days without a landfall.  Think of this extraordinary
man, drifting about alone in his absurd boat—careless,
self-confident, and unworried!  Even Captain Slocum,
said to have navigated thousands of miles of ocean
with no other chronometer than a Connecticut alarm
clock, performed no madder feat.  Tino fetched up at a
big lagoon island, six or seven hundred miles out of his
course.  It is enough to say of his stop there that he
spent a week and left, loaded down with provisions and
drinking nuts, and accompanied by five of the younger
and prettier girls of the village.

This time all went smoothly; the plural honeymoon
party enjoyed a merry voyage to Ariri, where Tino
established his large and amicable family, and
proceeded to the less diverting business of planting
coconuts.  A year passed; a day came when the schooner
from Tahiti rounded to in the lagoon and sent a boat
ashore.  Accompanied by his twenty men, Tino met
the supercargo on the beach.  Copra from the old trees?
There was not much, but what there was belonged to
him.  This was a British island, and he was the lessee;
here were the papers to prove it.  He regretted that
as the proprietor he could not allow strangers
ashore—demoralize the labor, you know.  The Frenchmen
fumed, but they were too shrewd not to recognize
defeat.

The years passed in peaceful and idyllic fashion; a
score of Tino's half-savage offspring fished and swam
and raced along the beach.  Then one day Tino fell ill.

While he lay in bed, despondent, and brooding over
the unfamiliar experience, a schooner entered the lagoon
and dropped anchor opposite the settlement.  Her
boat—trim and smartly manned as a yacht's gig—brought
ashore the first missionary to set foot on Ariri.
Tino was difficult in the beginning, but the moment
was perhaps the weakest of his life; when the missionary
left he had married the sick man to Manini—his
favorite wife—and received permission to install a
native teacher for the children of the island.

It amuses me to think of Tino's recovery and
probable regret over his weakness—the thing is so natural,
so human; bodily illness and spiritual reform have
always gone hand in hand.  But his word had been
given in good faith; he finished the church and
schoolhouse he had promised, and in due time installed the
teacher among his flock.  The supreme irony of the
affair comes at this point, for the native teacher, on the
lookout for a flirtation, was indiscreet enough to select
Manini as the object of his attentions, and ended by
being caught with her under circumstances of the most
delicate and compromising nature.  As Tino said
afterward:

"He had a score of women to choose from, beside
four of mine who wouldn't have mattered—and then
he picked on Manini!  Why, damn it all! man, I was
a bit fond of the old girl!"

The teacher paid dearly for his indiscretion.  Tino
lashed him to a post in the sun, where he would
probably have died if the missionary schooner had not
appeared just at that time.  Cowed and whimpering,
the culprit was thrown into a canoe by the indignant
husband, who pushed off and paddled angrily alongside
the schooner.

"Here's your bleeding missionary!" he roared out,
as he hurled the struggling native into the lagoon.
"I'm through with him—from now on this island will
have to get along with me for teacher and missionary
and king!"

That is all of the story, except that Tino died not
long ago—happy, rich enough, and surrounded by a
numerous tribe of grandchildren.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`At the House of Tari`:

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   CHAPTER XIII


.. class:: center medium bold

   At the House of Tari

.. vspace:: 2

You will not find Ahu Ahu—under that
name—on any chart, and it would be
equally useless to search for Nukutere;
yet both islands exist, and I like their
ancient names better than the modern
ones.  Glance at your maps and you will see the
eastern Pacific dotted with islands bearing names like
Jarvis, Maiden, and Starbuck—names which suggest
no more than the thought of some wandering skipper,
immortalizing himself by adding new dangers to the
chart.  Then think of Nukutere—the immemorial
name of an island known wherever the old Polynesians
gathered to tell their tales; Nukutere: The Object of
the War Fleet's Voyage ... it needs a dull imagination
not to feel a stir.

It was on Nukutere that I found that curious fellow,
Tari, at home.  Friends often smile at my passion for
wild fowl, yet I owe this peaceful adventure entirely
to a duck.  For several days I had been awaiting a
chance to photograph the sky line of the island, and
when, one afternoon, the clouds about the peaks
dispersed, I put my camera into a small outrigger canoe
and paddled down the lagoon, on the lookout for the
viewpoint of greatest beauty.  I had gone a number of
miles and the sun was low when I found the view I
wanted; though the silhouette of Nukutere was clear-cut,
there were clouds in the west and the light was not
strong enough for an instantaneous picture.  The
lagoon is narrow at this point; there was nothing to do
but paddle out to the reef and set up my tripod in the
shallow wash of the sea.  In this manner I made ten
exposures—pretty things they must have been, with
the long evening shadows, the foreshore of dark bush
beyond the water, the high profile of peaks and jagged
ridges against the sky.

I folded the steel tripod and stowed the camera in
its case; just as I pushed off to paddle back to the
village I heard the whimper of a duck's wings in
leisurely flight.  I have a very fair acquaintance with
the ducks of the northern hemisphere, which winter in
considerable numbers in Hawaii and occasionally drift
down as far as Penrhyn Island, nine degrees south of
the equator; but though it must be well known in
scientific quarters, the odd nonmigratory duck of the
South Seas is a puzzle to me.  It is an unsocial bird,
this Polynesian cousin of the mallard; a lover of
solitude, a haunter of thick woods and lonely valleys;
though I have seen them many times in the distance.
I have been unable to obtain a specimen so far.  I
used to wonder how they survived the swarms of
bloodthirsty island rats until a friend wrote me from
the Cook group: "On top of the razor-back ridge
behind the plantation, the dogs put up a duck almost
under our feet.  I found the nest well hidden in the
fern a beautifully constructed affair, edged with a
coaming of down, curled inward.  There were eight
eggs, standing on end and arranged to occupy the least
possible space.  When the ducklings appear the old
bird must carry them down one at a time—a thousand
feet or more—to the swampy feeding grounds."

I could tell by the sound of its wings that the duck
approaching me over the lagoon was closer than any
I had seen; in my eagerness for a glimpse I forgot all
about cameras and canoes.  I flung myself around to
look, intent and open-mouthed.  Next moment the
outrigger heaved up with the speed of a rolling porpoise,
described a flashing arc through the air, and smacked
heavily into the water closing over my head.  It was a
fast bit of comedy.  The coral anchor and my tripod
went to the bottom; I caught the camera instinctively
and rose, sputtering, to the surface, where I managed
to balance it on the flat bottom of the canoe.  Then,
as the water was not deep, and I had on nothing but a
singlet and a *pareu*, I swam down to get the tripod,
and started for shore, pushing the canoe before me.
Ahead on the beach two girls and a boy were dancing
and rolling in the sand; as the water left my ears I
could hear their screams of joy.  For the moment I
found myself unable to join in the mirth.  My thoughts
dwelt on cameras and on a story I had heard the night
before—how a fisherman, not far from where I was,
had felt a tug at his waist as he swam with face
submerged, watching the bottom, and turned to see a
shark of imposing size nip off the largest fish on his
string.

The closer sight of me seemed to redouble the
appreciation of my audience, but it was not until I was
splashing in the shallows that I was able to smile.
Then I saw that the elder of the girls was Apakura,
the wife of Tari.  She had been washing clothes at the
mouth of a little stream and came forward,
bare-armed and smiling maliciously, to greet me.

"Ah, you have come to bathe in the sea," she said,
as I took her hand, and at this enormous joke all three
fell into such a convulsion of laughter that they were
obliged to sink down on the sand once more.  When
she had caught her breath she turned to call her
husband: "*E Tari!  E Tari e!  Aere mai ikonei!*"  A
moment later he stepped out of the bush, rubbing
from his eyes the sleep of an afternoon nap, and I
was shaking his hand.

I know Tari rather well, and have spent a good deal
of time within a few miles of where he lives, yet I
had been in his house only once before.  This is
characteristic of the islands.  There is an agreeable
indifference about the relations of white men down here, a
careless friendliness I find pleasanter than the more
strained and effusive sociality of civilized places.  In
every part of the world, of course, this tranquil
simplicity—the essence of the finest manner—is to be found
among the few who have studied the art of living, but
the average one of us is neither sure enough of himself
nor sufficiently indifferent to the opinion of others;
handicapped by an abnormal sense of obligation, we
permit ourselves both to bore and to be bored.  In
certain respects the native is a very well-bred man;
perhaps the white intruder has caught something of
his manner—or it may be that distance from home
brings life into a truer focus; in any case, one deals
with the white man of the islands without consciousness
of an effort either to entertain or to impress.  When
you stop at the house of a strange planter he will offer
you a whisky-and-soda—if you refuse, nothing more
will be said of the matter.  At home, with a parching
throat, it is quite conceivable that you might tell your
chance host not to bother, looking forward with hopeful
hypocrisy to his persuasion and your own inevitable
acceptance.  I think I liked Tari the better for not
having asked me to his house; now that hazard had
brought me to the door, he made me feel that I was
really welcome.

The house was set on a little rise of land, with a view
of the lagoon at the end of an avenue of tall coconut
palms.  The broad veranda, set with steamer chairs
and scarlet-bordered Aitutaki mats, gave on a garden
of small flowering trees—"Frangipani," "*Tiare Tahiti*,"
"Maid of Moorea," "Queen of the Night."  Tari
showed me to a corner room, and mixed a rum punch
while his wife put buttons on a fresh suit of drill.

Dressed in his clothes, I strolled into the living room
to wait while he was changing for dinner.  The place
was large, and one might have spent hours examining
the things it contained—the fruit of twenty years in
the South Seas.  There were wreaths of bright-colored
shell—the favorite parting gift of the islands—from
the Paumotus, from Raiatea, from Aitutaki, and
Mangaias.  There were fans from Manihiki, woven in
patterns of dyed pandanus, and Savage Island fans,
decorated with human hair.  Ranged on a series of
shelves, I found a notable collection of *penus*—the
taro-mashers of eastern Polynesia, implements in
which the culture of each group expresses itself.  I
was able to recognize the pestle of Mangaia, eight-sided
and carved with almost geometrical perfection
from a stalactite of pink lime; the Marquesan *penu*
of dark volcanic stone with its curious phallic handle;
the implement of old Tahiti, gracefully designed and
smoothly finished by a people far removed from
savagery; the rare and beautiful *penu* of
Maupiti—unobtainable to-day—perfect as though turned on a
lathe, and adorned with a fantastic handle of ancient
and forgotten significance.  Mother-of-pearl bonito
hooks from a dozen groups were there, and on a table
I saw a rare *Toki Tiki* from Mangaia, an odd thing
which, for want of a better name, might be called a
Peace Adze.  It is a slender little tower of carved
wood, set with tiers of windows and surmounted by a
stone adze head, lashed on with wrappings of sennit,
above which extend a pair of pointed ears.  The
carving—in the close-grained yellow wood of the Pua—is
exquisitely done; I recognized the standard patterns
of the islands—-the Shark's Teeth, the Dropping Water,
and the intricate *Tiki Tangata*.  The significance of
the Peace Adze was religious and ceremonial; the story
goes that when, at the end of a period of fighting, two
Mangaian clans decided to make peace, the adze
played a leading part in the attendant ceremony.  A
handful of earth was dug up with its head to show
that the ground might now be cultivated, and the
people were told that they might come and go
unmolested, freely as the air through the windowlike
openings on its sides.  Tari had real adzes as
well—the tools with which trees were chopped down and
canoes hollowed out—stone implements of a perfection
I have never seen elsewhere, carved out of basaltic
rock, hard and close as steel, smoothed by processes at
which one can only guess, sharp and symmetrical as
the product of modern machines.

The Marquesan curiosities interested me most of
all—relics of those dark valleys which harbored the most
strangely fascinating of all the island peoples.  There
were ornaments of old men's beards, arranged in little
sennit-bound tufts, crinkled and yellowish white;
beaked clubs of ironwood, elegantly carved and
smooth with countless oilings; ear pendants cut in
delicate filigree from the teeth of sperm whales;
grotesque little wooden gods, monstrous and bizarre;
ceremonial food bowls of *Tamanu*, adorned with the
rich and graceful designs of a culture now forever gone.
One felt that the spirits of forgotten artists hovered
about the place, beckoning one back to days a century
before Melville set foot in the valley of Taipi, to
scenes of a strange beauty on which mankind will
never look again.  Some day—perhaps in a future less
remote than we like to fancy—nature's careless hand
may once more set the stage for a similar experiment,
but the people sequestered in those gloomy islands
will be of another blood, and the result can never be
the same.  The Marquesans themselves—if one is to
believe the students of antique mankind—were the
result of a racial retrogression; their continental
forebears knew iron and pottery and the culture of
rice—things lost in the eastward push which brought them
to the Nine Islands of Iva.

One curious trinket—labeled "Fatu Hiva"—caught
my eye; a squat little figure carved in a sawn-off
length of yellow ivory.  I examined it closely; it had
the air of being at least a hundred years old, and the
concentric rings of the section showed it to be the
tooth or tusk of some large animal.  Where could the
Marquesan carver have obtained such a lump of ivory
on which to exercise his skill?  Could it be possible
that this was the tusk of an elephant, carved not one
hundred but many centuries ago, and preserved by the
people of these distant islands—an immemorial relic
of the days when their ancestors left Persia or the
Indian hills?  I looked again; it was large enough to
be part of a small tusk, but the section was flatter than
any elephant ivory I had seen.  What could it be?
Not the tooth of a hippopotamus—it was too large
for that; not the sword of a narwhal, which shows a
betraying spiral twist.  Then I thought of a walrus
tusk, and the story seemed clear.  Seventy-five or a
hundred years ago some whaling vessel, after a venture
in the northern ice, must have sailed south and put
in at Fatu Hiva for water or wood or fruit.  They had
killed walrus off Cape Lisburne or in the Kotzebue
Sound and, as was the habit of whalers, some of the
tusks had been kept for scrimshaw work.  Knowing
the Polynesian passion for ivory (in Tonga it was
death for any but those of the highest rank to take the
teeth of a stranded sperm whale) it is not difficult to
imagine the rest—a lantern-jawed Yankee harpooner,
perhaps, trading his walrus tusk for a canoeload of
fruit or the favors of an exceptionally pretty girl.

I was examining a paddle from Manihiki—a graceful,
narrow-bladed thing, carved out of porcupine wood
and set with diamonds of mother-of-pearl—when Tari
came in.

"A pretty paddle, isn't it?" he remarked.  "You
won't find a more curious one in the Pacific.  Notice
the way that reinforcing ridge runs down the blade
from the haft?  Everything has a meaning in primitive
stuff of this sort; the original pattern from which this
has descended probably came from a land of little trees,
where the paddles had to be made in two pieces—blade
lashed to handle.  Look at the shape of it—more like
a Zulu *assegai* than anything else; it is a weapon,
primarily; a thrust of it would kill a naked man.
The Manihiki people spend a lot of their time in canoes
on the open sea—after bonito by day and flying-fish
by night—and those waters swarm with sharks.
They have developed their paddle into a weapon of
defence.  The Samoans carried a special shark club
for the same purpose."

I asked his opinion on the disputed question of
sharks—whether, in general, the shark is a real menace
to the swimmer or the paddler of a small canoe.

"I've heard a lot of loose talk," he said; "how
learned societies have offered rewards for a genuine
instance of a shark attacking a man, but I have seen
enough to know that there is no room for argument.
Some idiot goes swimming off a vessel in shark-infested
waters, and talks all the rest of his life, perhaps, of the
silly fears of others—never realizing that he owes his
life to the fact that none of the sharks about him
chanced to be more than usually hungry.  The really
hungry shark is a ravening murderer—dangerous as a
wounded buffalo, reckless as a mad dog....  I have
seen one tear the paddle from the hand of a man beside
me and sink its teeth, over and over again in a frenzy,
in the bottom of a heavy canoe.  How long do you
suppose a swimmer would have lived?  And it's not
only the big sharks that are dangerous.  I remember
one day when a lot of us were bathing in Penrhyn
lagoon.  Suddenly one of the boys gave a shout and
began to struggle with something in the waist-deep
water—clouded with blood by the time I got there.
A small tiger shark, scarcely a yard long, had gouged
a piece of flesh out of his leg, and continued to attack
until a big Kanaka seized it by the tail and waded to
the beach, holding the devilish little brute, snapping
its jaws and writhing frantically, at arm's length.  As
he reached the dry sand the native allowed his arm to
relax for an instant; the shark set its teeth in his
side and tore out a mouthful that nearly cost the man
his life."

The voice of Apakura was summoning us to eat.
"*Kaikai!*" she called: "*Aere mai korua!*"  Tari's
dining room was a section of the side veranda, screened
off with lattices of bamboo, where we found a table
set for two, fresh with flowers and damask.  Apakura
sat cross-legged on a mat near by; she was weaving
a hat of native grass and looked up from her work
now and then to speak to the girl who served
us—admonishing, scolding, and joking in turn.  Tari
followed my glance, and smiled as he caught the eye
of his wife.

"It probably strikes you as odd that she doesn't
sit with us," he said to me.  "I tried to get her into the
way of it at first, but it's no good.  For generations
the women of her family have been forbidden to eat
in the presence of men, and the old *tapu* dies hard.
Then she hates chairs; when she sits with me she is
wretchedly uncomfortable, and bolts her food in a
scared kind of way that puts me off my feed.  It is
best to let them follow their own customs; she likes
to sit on the floor there and order her cousin about;
when we've finished they'll adjourn to the cook house
for dinner and discuss you till your ears tingle.
Housekeeping down here is a funny, haphazard
business—hopeless if one demands what one had at home; easy
and pleasant if one is willing to compromise a bit.
To a man who understands the natives at all the
servant question does not exist; they will jump at a
chance to attach themselves to your household—the
trouble is to keep them away.  It isn't wages they are
after; I pay these people nothing at all for cooking
and washing and looking after the place.  They like
to be where tea and sugar and ship's biscuit are in
plenty, and they like to be amused.  An occasional
stranger, coming and going like yourself, gives them
no end of food for talk; I have a phonograph I let
them play, and a seine I let them take out for a day's
fishing now and then.  Once a month, perhaps, I
kill a pig and give a bit of a party, and once or twice
in a year I get a bullock and let them invite all their
relatives to a real *umukai*.  In return for all this they
look after my fifty acres of coconuts, make my copra,
do my housework, cooking, and laundry, and provide
me with all the native food I can use.  It strikes me as
a fair bargain, from my point of view, at least.  It is
understood that they are not to bother me; unless
there is work to do or they want to see me they never
set foot in the house.

"My greatest trouble has been to get some idea of
regularity into their heads.  These people cannot
understand why we prefer to eat our dinner at the same
hour every day.  Where contact with the white man
has not changed their habits, they eat whenever they
are hungry—at midnight or at four in the morning,
if they chance to be awake.  Even here they can't
understand my feelings when dinner is an hour or two late."

The cousin of Apakura took away the remnants of
a dish of raw fish and brought us a platter heaped with
roast breadfruit, taro, yams, and sweet potatoes,
served with a pitcher of *tai akari*—the sea water and
coconut sauce, worthy of a place on any table.  It is
only the uncivilized white who turns up his nose at
native food; the island's vegetables are both wholesome
and delicious, and cannot be cooked better than
in a Maori oven.  A certain amount of European food
is necessary to health, but the sallow, provincial white
man, who takes a sort of racial pride in living on the
contents of tins, need not be surprised that the climate
of the islands does not agree with him.  It is the same
type, usually with no other cause for pride than the
fact that he chanced to be born white, whose voice is
most frequently heard declaiming on the subject of
color.  Everywhere in the islands, of course, the color
line exists—a subtle barrier between the races, not to
be crossed with impunity; but the better sort of white
man is ready to admit that God, who presumably made
him, also made the native, and made of the Polynesian
a rather fine piece of work.  Tari had stepped across
with eyes open, counting the cost, realizing all that
he must relinquish.  He is not a man to make such a
decision lightly; in his case the step meant severing
the last material tie with home, giving up forever the
Englishman's dreams of white children and an old age
in the pleasant English countryside.  His children—if
children came to him—would have skins tinted by a
hundred generations of hot sunlight, and look at him
with strange, dark eyes, liquid and shy—the eyes of an
elder race, begotten when the world was young.  His
old age would be spent on this remote and forgotten
bit of land, immensely isolated from the ancestral
background to which most men return at last.  As the
shadows gathered in the evening of his life there would
be long days of reading and reflection—stretched in a
steamer chair on this same veranda, while the trade
hummed through the palm tops and the sea rumbled
softly on the reef.  At night, lying wakeful as old
men do, in a hush broken only by the murmur of a
lonely sea, his thoughts would wander back—a little
sadly, as the thoughts of an old man must—along a
hundred winding paths of memory, through scenes wild
and lovely, savage, stern, and gay.  Dimly out of the
past would appear the faces of men and women—long
since dead and already only vaguely remembered—the
companions of his youth, once individually vibrant
with the current of life, now moldering alike in forgotten
graves.  They would be a strangely assorted company,
Tari's ghosts: men of all the races, scholars, soldiers,
sportsmen, skippers of trading vessels, pearl divers
of the atolls, nurses of the Red Cross, Englishwomen of
his own station in life, dark-eyed daughters of the
islands, with shining hair and the beauty of sleek, wild
creatures—bewitching and soulless, half bold and half
afraid.  Whether for good or ill, wisely or unwisely, as
the case might be, no man could say that Tari had not
lived; I wondered what the verdict would be when,
in the days to come, he cast up the balance of his
life....

Apakura ceased her plaiting and began to measure
off the narrow braid, delicately woven in a pattern of
black and white, which would eventually be sewn in
spirals to make a hat—my hat, by the way, for it had
been promised to me weeks before.  One fathom, two
fathoms, three fathoms—another two fathoms were
needed, work for the odd moments of a month.  Some
day—in an uncertain future and on a distant island,
perhaps—the cabin boy of a schooner would step
ashore and present me with a box containing this same
hat, superbly new, decorated with a gay puggree and
lined with satin bearing my initials in silk.
Meanwhile, though I would have given much for a new hat,
there was nothing to do but wait.  Like other things
of native make, a hat cannot be bought with money;
the process of manufacture is too laborious to be other
than a matter of good will.  Think of the work that
goes into one of these hats.  First of all—far off in the
mountains—the stalks of *aeho* (*Erianthus floridulus*)
must be gathered.  These are split when thoroughly
dry, and the two halves scraped thin as paper before
being split again into tiny strips of fiber less than a
sixteenth of an inch wide.  A certain amount of the
*aeho*, depending on the pattern to be woven, must
now be dyed—usually black or in a shade of brown.
From a dozen to twenty of these strands—dyed and
undyed—are plaited into the flexible braid of which the
hat is built up—a task requiring extraordinary patience
and skill.  Such hats are made only for relatives and
close friends; if an unmarried girl gives one to a man
the gift has the same significance as the pair of
earrings he would give in return.  When a native boy
appears with a new and gorgeous hat, the origin of
which is veiled in doubt, village gossip hums until the
truth is known; even the classic sewing circle of New
England can show no faster or more efficient work
than these artless brown women, standing knee deep
in the waters of some dashing stream, prattling,
laughing, shattering the reputations of absent sisters, as
they pound and wring the soapy clothes.

When dinner was over and Tari was filling his pipe
in the living room I took up the lamp for a glance at
the titles on his shelves of books.  Side by side with the
transactions of the Polynesian Society and the modern
works of S. Percy Smith and McMillan Brown, I found
Mariner's *Tonga*, Abraham Fornander's *Account of
the Polynesian Race: Its Origin and Migration*, Lieut. William
Bligh's *Voyage to the South Seas for the Purpose
of Conveying the Bread-fruit Tree to the West Indies, in
His Majesty's Ship the* "Bounty," and the *Polynesian
Researches* of William Ellis.  I took down a volume of
Ellis; Tari crossed the room to glance over my shoulder
at the quaint title page—it was evident that he loved
his books.

"Tahiti was the most interesting of all the islands,"
he said, as we sat down, "and the best accounts of old
Tahiti are those of Bligh and Ellis.  Bligh wrote from
the standpoint of a worldly man and, though he was
unable to speak the language fluently and stopped only
a few months on the island, he has left an extraordinarily
vivid and detailed picture of the native life before
European religion and trade began their work of
change.  Ellis was a missionary of the finest
sort—broad-minded as religious men go, inspired by the purest
of motives, a close and sympathetic observer, and able
to appreciate much of the beauty and interest of the
old life.  If you believe that one branch of mankind is
justified in almost forcibly spreading its religion among
the other races, and that trade should follow the
Bible, you will enjoy every page of Ellis.  His point of
view concerning temporal matters is summed up in
this volume, at the end of a chapter on Hawaii.  Here
it is: 'Their intercourse with foreigners has taught
many of the chiefs to prefer a bedstead to the ground,
and a mattress to a mat; to sit on a chair, eat at a
table, use a knife and fork, etc.  This we think advantageous,
not only to those who visit them for purposes of
commerce, but to the natives themselves, as it increases
their wants, and consequently stimulates to industry.'  There
you hear the voice of the mechanical age, which
began a hundred years ago and ended—I rather fancy—when
we fired the last shots of the war.  Increase their
wants, advertise, speed up production—whatever the
impalpable cost, make the way smooth for the swift
wheels of progress—those are the germs of a disease
from which the world may need another century to
recover.  But the change in these islands was only
the insignificant corollary of a greater change throughout
the world; Ellis and his kind were no more than the
inevitable instruments of a harsh Providence.

"Ellis's book was published in eighteen thirty-one.
During the eighty-nine years that have passed since
that date we have seized the islands and profited
largely by them—as coaling stations, as naval bases,
as sources of valuable raw material, as markets for our
surplus manufactured goods.  What have we done for
the natives in return?  Instead of the industrious,
piously happy, and increasing communities foreseen
by the missionaries as the result of their efforts, one
finds a depressed and dying people, robbed of their old
beliefs and secretly skeptical of the new.  We who
conduct our wars in so humane and chivalrous a spirit have
taught them to abolish human sacrifice and to stop the
savage fighting which horrified the first messengers of
Christianity, but, in the case of the islands of which
Ellis wrote, the benefits of civilization end here.
Infanticide is now a punishable crime and rarely
practiced, but perhaps it is as well to have children and to
kill a certain number of them, as to be rendered sterile
by imported disease.  After all, infanticide, repulsive
though it may be, is only a primitive form of the birth
control which is making its appearance in Europe and
America, as the continents—the white man's
islands—approach the limit of population.

"As for true religious faith of the kind which the
missionaries sincerely hoped to instill, that plays in
the life of the Kanaka a part of about the same
importance as in the life of the average white man.  Don't
think I am cynical in saying this—I respect and envy
men who possess real faith; they are the ones by whom
every great task is accomplished.  But the religion of
the native is less than skin deep; his observance of
the Sabbath day a survival of the old *tapu*; his
churchgoing and singing of hymns—satisfying the social
instinct, the love of gossip, the desire to be seen in fine
clothes—replace the old-time dance, wrestling matches,
and exhibitions of the *areoi*.  You have seen something
of the outer islands, where the people are half
savage even to-day, still swayed by what we call
heathen superstition.  Now consider Tahiti, where the
people for more than a hundred years have been subjected
to exhortations of an intensity almost unparalleled.
If it is possible to inject our religion into their
blood, it must have been accomplished in Tahiti, but
in my opinion the efforts of three generations of
missionaries have produced a result surprisingly small
on this island—the most civilized of the South
Pacific—where heathen superstition is far from dead
to-day.

"Before the schooners took to Penrhyn Lagoon we
used to spend the hurricane season in Papeete; I never
cared much for towns; I usually put in the time
wandering about the more remote districts.  Civilization
has barely scratched the inner life of Tahiti.  Men who
wear trousers and go to church by day would fear to
sleep at night unless a lamp burned in the house to repel
the *varua ino* and ghastly *tupapau* of their ancestors.
If a girl falls ill the native doctor—a lineal descendant
of the heathen priest—is called in.  'What have you
done during the past week?' he asks....  'You spoke
harshly to that old woman?  Ah, I knew there was a
cause!'  He administers a remedy in the form of a
certain bath or a sprinkling with the water of a young
coconut, and takes his leave.  If the girl recovers it is
a remarkable instance of the doctor's skill; if she dies
it is proof that her offense was too grave to be remedied.
Perhaps a ghost walks and the native doctor is again
consulted.  'It is your wife who comes to trouble you
at night?  How was she buried?'  Eventually the
grave is opened and the body found to be lying face
down; when turned on her back and again covered
with earth the lady is content, and ceases her
disreputable prowlings.

"I am not convinced that all of these things are
absurdity....  I told you, when we were on the schooner,
about some of my curious experiences in this group.
There are happenings fully as strange on Tahiti and
Moorea.  You must have heard of what the natives
call *varua ino*—a vague variety of devil, a sort of earth
spirit, quite unhuman and intensely malignant.  The
people are not fond of discussing this subject, and
their beliefs have become so tangled that it is
impossible to get a straightforward story, but as nearly as I
can make out, numbers of these *varua ino* are thought
to lie in wait wherever a man or woman is dying,
struggling fiercely with one another in their effort to
catch and devour the departing human soul.  If the
spirit makes its escape the first time the ravening
watchers do not give up hope, but linger about the
body, to which the soul is apt to return from time to
time during the day or two following death.  The
human soul, at this stage, is considered nearly as
malignant and dangerous as the *varua ino*—you can see
what a garbled business it is.  Sometimes an earth
spirit enters the corrupted body and walks abroad at
night.  On one subject the natives all agree: the
struggles of the preying spirits and the human soul
are apt to be marked by splashes and pools of
blood—whose blood I have never learned to my satisfaction.

"A friend of mine—an educated and skeptical
Englishman, in whose word I have the utmost
confidence—was the witness of one of these blood-splashing
affairs.  He lived on Moorea, just across from Tahiti;
Haapiti was the village, I think.  One afternoon he
whistled to his fox terrier and strolled to a near-by
house, where the body of a native (an old fellow he had
liked) lay in state, surrounded by mourning relatives.
As he stood on the veranda the dog began to growl
furiously, and at the same moment the oldest man
present—a sort of doctor and authority on spiritual
matters—shouted out suddenly that everyone must
leave the house.  The native explained afterward that
he had caught a glimpse of something like a small
comet—a shapeless and luminous body, trailing a fiery
tail—rushing horizontally toward the rear of the building.
The people gathered outside in a bit of a panic; the fox
terrier seemed to have gone mad on the porch—alternately
cowing and leaping forward with frenzied
growls toward some invisible thing.  All at once there
was a great racket of overturned furniture inside the
house, and next moment the Englishman saw gouts of
what looked like blood splashing over the outer wall
and the floor of the veranda.  The dog was covered—it
was a week before his coat was clean.  The net
result of the affair was that the veranda needed a
cleaning, a couple of tables were overturned, and the
body of the old man considerably disturbed; but its
most curious feature is the fact that my friend—suspecting
native trickery and the desire to impress a
white man—took a specimen of the blood across to
Papeete, where he got the hospital people to examine
it.  It was human blood beyond a doubt.  What do
you make of that?

"The other evening, when I was having a yarn with
Apakura, she told me about another kind of *varua ino*,
who figures as the villain in the tale of a Polynesian
Cinderella.  It may interest you.  A great many years
ago, on Ahu Ahu, there was a man named Tautu—one
of Apakura's family—a renowned fighting man, who
dabbled in sorcery when there were no wars to be
fought.  Tall, handsome, and famous, it was no
wonder that Tautu was pursued by all the island
girls—scheming sisters, in particular, who went so far as to
build a hut near where he lived.  Hoping to catch the
eye of the hero, they took their finest ornaments and
robes of tapa and went to live in the hut, accompanied
by their little sister, Titiara, who was to act as a drudge
about the house.  Young Titiara had no designs on
Tautu, and she possessed no finery to make herself
beautiful in his eyes, but one day, when she was
gathering wood in the bush, he chanced to pass.
Stopping to speak with her, he was struck with her
goodness and beauty, and from that time the two met
every day in the forest.  The older sisters, meanwhile,
were the victims of a mischievous earth spirit which
haunted the vicinity and visited them in the guise of
Tautu.  They were triumphant—when it was known
that they had won the warrior's favors all their friends
would be wild with jealousy; they could not resist
preening themselves before their little sister.  'Tautu
loves us,' they told her; 'he comes every day when you
are off gathering wood.'  'But that is impossible,' said
Titiara, 'for Tautu is my lover; he meets me each
day in the forest.'  The older girls laughed scornfully
at this, but Titiara said no more until she met her lover
in the evening.  When she told him what her sisters
had said, he laughed.  'It is a *varua ino*,' he informed
her, 'a mischievous spirit whose true appearance is
that of a hideous old man.  To-morrow I will prove
to your sisters that it is not I who visit them.'  That
night Tautu sat up late, weaving a magic net of hibiscus
bark—a net which had the property of causing a spirit
to assume its true shape.  Next afternoon Tautu and
Titiara stole up to the house where the spirit, in the
form of a splendid warrior, was talking and laughing
with the two sisters.  Tautu cast the net; next
moment the spirit was howling and struggling in the
magic meshes, unable to escape, moaning as it shriveled
and changed to the appearance of an old man,
gray-bearded, trembling, and hideous.  The two sisters
shrank back in loathing and mortification, while Tautu
told them that he had chosen Titiara to be his wife."

As he finished his story Tari rose, crossed the room
to a bookshelf, and returned to hand me a volume
bound in worn yellow leather.

"I'm going to turn in now," he remarked; "we'll go
fishing in the morning if you will plan to stop over.  Take
this to your room if you are not sleepy; it is worth
running over—Bligh's account of the voyage of the *Bounty*,
published at Dublin in seventeen ninety-two."

Propped up in bed, with a lamp burning on the table
beside me, I opened Bligh's quaint and earnest account
of his voyage.  The mutiny, the commander's passage
in an open boat from Tonga to Timor, and the settlement
of the mutineers on Pitcairn Island have been
made familiar by a voluminous and sentimental literature,
but I had never before come across the story of
Bligh's residence among the natives of Tahiti, one
hundred and thirty-two years ago.

More than any other Eastern island, perhaps,
Tahiti was the cradle of the oceanic race; called the
Lap of God by Kamapiikai, the fabled Hawaiian
voyager, who discovered, in the southern group, the
fountain of eternal youth.  Knowing something of the
island as it is to-day, I had listened with interest when
Tari remarked, "Civilization has barely scratched the
inner life of Tahiti."  Bligh was a close observer,
blessed with insight and a pleasant sense of humor;
at the time of his visit the people were untouched by
European influence.  It is interesting to check his
observations against what any traveler may see
nowadays—to judge for oneself how deeply the civilization
of Europe has been able to modify the peculiarities of
Polynesian character.

The family of Pomare, of which the chief Tu (called
Otoo by Cook, Tinah by Bligh) was the founder, owed
its rise to power largely to the friendship of the English.
Bligh often entertained Tinah and his wife, Iddeah,
on board the *Bounty*—they must have been amusing
parties.  "Tinah was fed by one of his attendants, who
sat by him for that purpose ... and I must do him the
justice to say he kept his attendant constantly
employed: there was, indeed, little reason to complain
of want of appetite in any of my guests.  As the women
are not allowed to eat in presence of the men, Iddeah
dined with some of her companions about an hour
afterward, in private, except that her husband, Tinah,
favored them with his company and seemed to have
entirely forgotten that he had already dined."  In his
rambles about the island Bligh noticed precisely what
strikes one to-day: "In any house that we wished to
enter we always experienced a kind reception and
without officiousness.  The Otaheiteans have the most
perfect easiness of manners, equally free from
forwardness and formality.  When they offer refreshments,
if they are not accepted, they do not think of offering
them the second time; for they have not the least idea
of that ceremonious kind of refusal which expects a
second invitation."  Bligh was not deceived, like the
French philosophers who read Bougainville's account of
Tahiti, and rhapsodized about the beauty of a life
free from all restraint; he remarked the deep-rooted
system of class inherent in the island race, a system
of which the outward marks are gone, but which is far
from dead to-day.  "Among people so free from
ostentation as the Otaheiteans, and whose manners are so
simple and natural, the strictness with which the
punctilios of rank are observed is surprising.  I know
not if any action, however meritorious, can elevate a
man above the class in which he was born, unless he
were to acquire sufficient power to confer dignity on
himself.  If any woman of the inferior classes has a
child by an Earee it is not suffered to live."

Bligh's observations on the gay and humorous
character of the people and their extraordinary levity
might have been written yesterday.  "Some of my
constant visitors had observed that we always drank
His Majesty's health as soon as the cloth was removed;
but they were by this time become so fond of wine that
they would frequently remind me of the health in the
middle of dinner by calling out, 'King George Earee
no Brittanee'; and would banter me if the glass was
not filled to the brim.  Nothing could exceed the mirth
and jollity of these people when they met on board."  One
day Tinah told Bligh of an island "to the eastward
of Otaheite four or five days' sail, and that there were
large animals upon it with eight legs.  The truth of this
account he very strenuously insisted upon and wished
me to go thither with him.  I was at a loss to know
whether or not Tinah himself gave credit to this
whimsical and fabulous account; for though they have
credulity sufficient to believe anything, however
improbable, they are at the same time so much addicted
to that species of wit which we call humbug that it is
frequently difficult to distinguish whether they are in
jest or in earnest."  On another occasion, while
walking near a place of burial, Bligh was "surprised by a
sudden outcry of grief.  As I expressed a desire to see
the distressed person, Tinah took me to the place,
where I found a number of women, one of whom was
the mother of a young female child that lay dead.  On
seeing us their mourning not only immediately ceased,
but, to my astonishment, they all burst into an
immoderate fit of laughter, and, while we remained,
appeared much diverted at our visit.  I told Tinah
the woman had no sorrow for her child, otherwise her
grief would not have so easily subsided, on which he
jocosely told her to cry again: they did not, however,
resume their mourning in our presence.  This strange
behavior would incline us to think them hard-hearted
and unfeeling did we not know that they are fond
parents and, in general, very affectionate: it is therefore
to be ascribed to their extreme levity of disposition;
and it is probable that death does not appear to them
with so many terrors as it does to people of a more
serious cast."

When the surgeon of the *Bounty* died and was buried
ashore "some of the chiefs were very inquisitive about
what was to be done with the surgeon's cabin, on
account of apparitions.  They said when a man died in
Otaheite and was carried to the Tupapow that as soon
as night came he was surrounded by spirits, and if any
person went there by himself they would devour him:
therefore they said that not less than two people
together should go into the surgeon's cabin for some
time."  I thought of Tari and his tales of the *varuo ino*
... four generations of schools and churches have
failed to work a metamorphosis.

.. vspace:: 2

I read on till drowsiness overcame me and the pages
blurred before my eyes.  It was late and the night was
very calm; a vagrant night breeze, wandering down
from the mountains, rustled gently among the fronds
of the old palms around the house.  When the rustling
ceased—so faint as to be almost inaudible—I could
hear the far-off whisper of the sea.  The world about
me was asleep; I roused myself with an effort, adjusted
the mosquito net, and blew out the lamp.

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   Chapter XIII tailpiece





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.. _`In the Valley of Vaitia`:

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   CHAPTER XIV


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   In the Valley of Vaitia

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It is not easy to analyze the magic which
cozens every traveler into believing that
he is the first to see Tahiti with clear
eyes—one feels that it is made up of
nature in a mood of unearthly loveliness;
of a sense of ancient and unalterable life; of a
realization that strange beliefs persist under a
semblance of Christianity; of the lure of a race whose
confidence the white man can never fully gain.  The mail
steamers, the wireless, the traders, the scattering of
French officials—these things are a mere play of
shadows on the surface.  Even the churches, I was
tempted to say; but the church plays more than a
shadowy part in the life of the native, whose religion,
at the present day, is a singular blending of Christian
doctrine and old heathen belief.  The Tahitian reads
his Bible (he has no other book) and sings loudly every
Sunday in church; but the dead are still things of
horror in his mind; sorcerers—masquerading as
doctors—still carry on a brisk trade; and Tautau, the
Great-headed, is still a living presence in the valley
of Punaruu.

When the people of the Society Islands accepted
Christianity a century ago they did so with reservations
of which the missionaries, perhaps, were not aware.
Here and there, as at Faatoai on Moorea, there was a
burning of idols, but a great mass of material—old
gods and heathen weapons—was stored in secure hiding
places among the hills.  To-day, after three generations
of increasing European influence, hundreds of natives
know of these caves and repair to them for purposes
of their own, yet a white man might spend his life on
Tahiti without a glimpse of a cinnet-bound orooro or a
slender ironwood spear.

My friend Airima is typical.  The widow of a Yankee
skipper, the owner of a neat wooden villa in Papeete,
where she appears regularly, on her way to church, in
shoes, stockings, and a black-silk gown, she finds it
necessary, from time to time, to cast off the unnatural
manners of Europe and live as she was meant to live;
to be herself, an elderly and delightful savage.  When
the mood comes she closes the villa in Papeete, gathers
the willing members of her family, and repairs to her
native house, far off on the peninsula of Taiarapu.

The house of Airima stands on the river bank, shaded
by a pair of mango trees, dark green and immemorially
old.  The roof is thatched with braided fronds of
coconut; breezes play through the lofty single room,
bare of furniture and floored with mats spread on white
coral gravel, leveled and packed.  Past the veranda,
on which the family sleeps through the warm hours of
the day, the river flows out gently to the sea; a broad,
still water, deep and glassy clear, peopled with darting
shoals of fish—mullet, young pampano, and *nato*, the
trout of the South Seas.  Opposite the river mouth the
reef is broken by a pass, through which the steady
lines of combers sweep in to crash and tumble on the
bar.  Morning and afternoon the breakers are alive
with naked children, shouting and glistening brown in
the sunlight as they ride the waves.

Inland, the valley marking the river's course is lost
in a maze of broken and fantastic peaks; seaward,
bordering the green and blue of the lagoon, the snowy
line of the reef stretches off endlessly; and beyond a
three-league expanse of bright sea the headlands of
Tahiti Nui rise in vast, swelling curves, up and up to
the perpetual clouds which veil the heights.  Under a
bright sun at midday, when the palm tops toss to the
trade which paints the lagoon—in the deep passes and
over the patches of sandy bottom—with ruffled
sapphire and emerald, and sets the whitecaps to dancing
beyond the reef, or in the calm of night, with the
moon hanging low over pinnacles of basalt—when the
polished surface of the lagoon is broken by the plunge
and swirl of heavy fish, and native songs, rising and
falling in savage cadences, float out across the
water—it is a place not easily forgotten.

.. vspace:: 2

It was still dark when we rose—Maruae and I; the
brothers of Maruae had returned from the reef, and the
ovens behind the cook house were smoking, for in these
places the hour of the day's first meal is set by the
return of the fishermen.  I took one shuddering plunge
into the river, dressed myself in a shirt, a waistcloth,
and a pair of hobnailed boots, and squatted with the
rest to consume a fresh-caught mackerel and a section
of breadfruit, dipped in the common bowl of sauce.

Maruae sucked his fingers and stood up, calling to
the dogs.  Airima glanced at me over the back of a
large fish she was gnawing, holding it with both hands.
"Go, you two," she said.  "You stay," replied Maruae,
as he turned to take the path to the mountains.  The
oceanic tongue possesses no other words of parting.

We followed the river across the flatlands of the
coast.  Dawn was flushing in the east; the profile
of lofty ridges, fern clad and incredibly serrated, grew
sharp against the sky.  The mynahs were awakening;
from the thick foliage of orange and mango trees came
their extraordinary morning chorus—a thousand voices,
whistling, screaming, and chattering that it was time
the assembly broke up for the foraging of another day.
In one place, where a turn of the path brought us
suddenly to the edge of a still reach of water, a pair of
native ducks (*Anas superciliosa*) rose vertically on
beating wings and sped off over the palm tops.  A
little farther on, where volcanic bowlders began to
appear through the alluvial soil and the river leaped
and foamed over the first rapids, a family of Tahitian
jungle fowl, led by a splendid burnished cock, sprang
out of the grass and streamed away, in easy, rapid
flight, toward the hills.  The dogs bounded forward
and stopped, whining as they watched the wild chickens
dwindle to speeding dots.

The groves of coconut palms and open pasture land
were behind us now; the valley was narrowing,
hemmed in by thousand-foot cliffs to which a tangle of
vegetation clung.  The river had become a torrent,
boiling and waist deep—plunging over cataracts,
roaring down dark rapids under a roof of matted trees:
giant hibiscus a yard through, too remote to tempt the
ax of the canoe builder; candle nut, Barringtonia, and
mapé, the island chestnut, with boles like fluted
columns of a temple.  The trail wound back and forth,
across the river, over the trunks of fallen trees, around
masses of rock tumbled from the cliffs above, mounting
higher and higher into the heart of the island.  Once,
as we stopped to rest, I looked back and caught a
glimpse of the sea—a wedge of blue, far behind us and
below.  The dogs had begun to range ahead, for they
knew that any moment we might start a sounder of
wild pig.  I was growing tired—it was not easy to
follow Maruae at his own gait.  He walked with the
rapid, springy tread of a mountain man; when he
stooped to clear a low-branching limb or lopped off a
section of creeper with an easy swing of his machete
I admired the play of muscles on his back, rippling
powerfully under the smooth, brown skin.  Silken and
unblemished—unless it be by scars—the skin of these
people is not like ours, but softer and closer in texture;
seeming, like marble, to glimmer with reflected light.

The gorge grew narrower; we rounded a buttress
of jointed basalt and came suddenly into the light and
open of a lonely valley.  A quarter of a mile wide and
twice as long, set high above the sea, and hemmed in
by untrodden ridges, it lay here uninhabited and
forgotten, in a silence broken only by the roar of
savage cataracts and the far-off bellowing of wild
bulls.  Yet man had been here.  Along the base of the
cliffs we found the terraced stone of his dwellings, the
blocks of volcanic rock pried apart by the roots of huge
old trees.

Maruae was squatting on his heels beside me,
contemplating in silence these relics of an older time.
Finally he turned his head.  "Those stones are very
old," he remarked; "they have been here always,
since the beginning.  Men placed them there and men
slept on them, but not the men of my people."  My
thoughts dwelt on the old idle tales I had heard—of
the Lizard men, of the dark-skinned aborigines, the
Manahune, said to have been in possession of the land
when the eyes of Polynesian voyagers first rested on
cloudy Orofena.  There were other tales, too, of a later
day; of a tribe of men dwelling in the valleys, neither
tasting fish nor setting foot on the beach except when,
at certain intervals, they were permitted to come
down to worship by the sea.  Even to-day it needs no
effort of the imagination to see two distinct types
among the island people: men and women of the
kind one considers typically Polynesian—tall, clean
limbed, and light brown, with clear, dark eyes, straight
or waving hair, and heads not differing greatly from the
heads of Europeans; and another kind, of a negroid
or Melanesian cast—short, squat, and many shades
darker in complexion, thick-lipped and apish, with
muddy eyes, kinky hair, and flattened, undeveloped
heads.  And, strangely enough, after more than a century
of missions and leveling foreign influence, the dark
and awkward people seem still to fill the humbler walks
of life—they are the servants and dependents, the
feeders of pigs, the carriers of wood and water.  Great
stature, physical beauty, and light complexion are still
the hall marks of aristocratic birth.  Writing of the
islands a hundred years ago, old Ellis, the often-quoted,
closest observer of them all, remarked: "It is a singular
fact in the physiology of the inhabitants of this part of
the world that the chiefs, and persons of hereditary
rank and influence of the islands, are, almost without
exception, as much superior to the peasantry or common
people in stateliness, dignified deportment, and physical
strength as they are in rank and circumstances, although
they are not elected to their station on account of
their personal endowments, but derive their rank and
elevation from their ancestry.  This is the case with
most of the groups of the Pacific, but peculiarly so in
Tahiti and the adjacent isles.  The father of the late
king was six feet four inches high; Pomare was six
feet two.  The present king of Raiatea is equally tall....
Their limbs are generally well formed, and the
whole figure is proportioned to their height, which
renders the difference between the rulers and their
subjects so striking that Bougainville and some others
have supposed they were a distinct race, the descendants
of a superior people, who at a remote period had
conquered the aborigines and perpetuated their
supremacy."  There is a curious inconsistency in the
matter of complexion, for in the old days a dark skin
was considered the sign of a strong, warlike, and
masterly man.  Ellis records an extract from an old song:
"If dark be the complexion of the mother, the son
will sound the conch shell"; and yet, on the same
page, he observes that "the majority of the reigning
family in Raiatea are not darker than the inhabitants
of some parts of southern Europe."

While Maruae and I rested among the ruins of the
ancient settlement the dogs had been more usefully
engaged.  My musings were disturbed by a sudden
burst of squeals, punctuated by excited yelpings.
Maruae sprang to his feet, long knife in hand.  It was
only a small pig, a sixty-pounder, but he was bursting
fat, stuffed with Vi apples fallen from the great tree
under which he had been feeding.  The dogs had him
by the ears when we arrived; a thrust of the machete
put an end to his short and idyllic life.  I hung him
from a branch and skinned him while Maruae went off
in search of *fei*.  Presently he returned, carrying on his
shoulder a stout pole of hibiscus, from either end of
which swung a bunch of the mountain plantains, like
huge, thick bananas, the size of quart bottles and
bright yellowish red.  There was a clump of palms
near by, another sign, perhaps, of man's former
occupation—the relics of unnumbered vegetable
generations; we had coconuts to drink, pork and *fei* were at
hand, and plenty of fresh-water crayfish to be had in
the river.  In the islands, the obtaining of food is
always the signal for a meal.  Maruae beckoned to me
and led the way to the river, where he readjusted his
waistcloth to leave a kind of apron hanging in front
and plunged up to his armpits in the still water.
With the apron spread as a trap for the darting
crayfish, he moved slowly along the grassy and
overhanging bank of the stream, stopping every moment or
so to hand a struggling victim up to me.  This little
fresh-water lobster is one of the most delicious shellfish
in the world—of the same dimensions as the French
ecrivisse, and not unlike it in flavor.  In fifteen
minutes we had enough, and the work of preparing our
meal began.

I gathered wood and started a fire against a face of
rock.  Maruae cut a section of giant bamboo, half
filled it with water, threw in the crayfish, and stood
it beside the fire to boil.  Our meal was genuinely
primitive; I had cigarettes, matches, and a paper of salt
stowed in the tuck of my *pareu*—excepting our knives,
we had nothing else that the rudest of savages might
not have possessed.  Turning up the earth with his
machete, my companion scraped out a shallow trench—a
Maori oven.  He set a ring of stones about the edge,
lined the inside with pebbles, and filled the whole
with coals from our camp-fire.  While the coals glowed,
heating the earth and stones, he cut off a loin and
hindquarter of pork, wrapped the meat carefully in plantain
leaves, and selected half a dozen of the riper plantains
for our meal.  Finally, when the oven was thoroughly
hot, he scraped away the coals from the middle, laid
in the leaf-wrapped pork, surrounded by a ring of
plantains, pushed the hot stones close to the food, and
covered the whole with a thick layer of plantain leaves.
We ate the crayfish—boiled to a bright scarlet—while
the balance of our meal was cooking.  I added salt to
the boiled-down liquor in the bottom of the bamboo,
and dipped in this natural sauce.  The first course
whetted our appetites for the tender meat and juicy
plantains which soon came from the oven.

As we lay smoking after our meal I could see that
Maruae had something in his mind and was debating
whether or not to speak.  Finally he began, cautiously
and with an air of skeptical restraint at first, but with
more and more assurance as he saw that I listened
seriously to his story.

"The old people say," he remarked, pointing to the
head of the valley, where the cliffs narrowed to a deep
crack through which the river rushed, "that far up
in this same valley, beyond the upper gorge you see,
a spirit dwells, one of the heathen spirits which are as
old as the land.  You and I may not believe in these
things, but it is good, when the evenings are long, to
listen to the stories of the old men.  The name of this
spirit is Tefatu; some call him *varua ino*, saying that he
dogs the footsteps of the living and preys upon the
souls of the newly dead, but that is not true, for many
times in the memory of my fathers he has been known
to aid those in perplexity or distress.  The old men
believe that if a traveler, lost in these mountains at
nightfall, calls on Tefatu for succor, the spirit will
appear before him in the likeness of a pale, moving
fire, and lead him in safety down to the sea.  Once in
sight of the sea, the man must cry out in a loud voice,
'You have aided me, Tefatu, and I am content; stop
here and I will go on my way.'  It is not good to neglect
these words of parting.  Sometimes he is seen at night,
flying from ridge to ridge of the mountain—a great
glowing head, trailing a thin body of fire.  Long ago,
during the childhood of my grandmother, Tefatu left
this land for a space of years; men said that he had
flown to Hawaii, but now he is returned beyond a
doubt.  High up among the cliffs I found the cave
in which he sleeps by day....  These eyes of mine have
seen the Old Lord lying there among the whitened heads
of men—I looked and turned away quickly, for my
stomach was cold with fear.

"I cannot tell you clearly," Maruae went on, in
answer to my obvious question, "for I was greatly
afraid.  It seemed to me that he was a figure of wood,
longer and thinner than a man, black with age, covered
with carved patterns, and bound, in places, with close
wrappings of *napé*—the fine sennit my people have
forgotten how to make.  The place was full of bones;
scores of men had been slain and their bodies offered
there, as was the custom of our old kings.  Once, not
many years ago, a wise man came here from the islands
of Hawaii—an old man, bearded and wearing spectacles.
It was his work to write down the names of our
ancestors, and he spoke our tongue, though haltingly
and with a strange twist.  He lived with us for a time
and we grew fond of him, for he was a simple man,
who made us laugh with his jokes and was kind to the
children.  One evening I told him how I had found the
place of Tefatu.  As I spoke his eyes grew bright
behind their windows of glass, and when I had done he
begged me, in great excitement, to lead him to the
cave—offering a hundred of your dollars if I could prove
that I had spoken true words.  I was younger then,
and in need of money, for I was courting a girl.  We
went together into the mountains, but as we drew near
the place something within me made me hesitate and
I grew afraid.  In the end I deceived that man who
was my friend, telling him that I could not find the way.
He was indeed a wise man; another would have
mocked me for a liar and a teller of idle tales, but he
only smiled, looking at me kindly—he knew that my
words were true and that I feared to betray the
sleeping place of the Old Lord."

Maruae rose to his feet with the sigh of a man who
has eaten well and is deprived of his rightful siesta.
He shouldered his ponderous load of *fei*—which I could
scarcely raise from the ground—and led the way
toward the sea, while I followed, bearing the remnants
of the pig.  It was noon when we reached the flatlands
of the coast.

A quarter of a mile above the house of Airima we
stopped to watch a large canoe, loaded with a mound
of seine, gliding up the river, followed by a fleet of
smaller craft.  An old woman stood in the bow,
directing the proceedings with shrill volubility; she
was the proprietor of the net, a village character at
once kindly and tyrannical—widow of one chief and
mother of another.  As her canoe drew abreast of us
she gave the command to halt and spread the net.
The river at this point is almost without current, very
still and clear; Maruae and I sat on the high bank,
too tired to do more than play the part of spectators.

They grounded the big canoe just below where we
sat, putting one end of the seine ashore and paddling
slowly across the river while the net was laid out in a
deep, sagging curve downstream.  One after another
the smaller canoes were beached, and the people, half
naked and carrying spears, ran along the bank to take
to the water a few hundred yards above.  The river
was alive with them, splashing and shouting as they
drove the fish toward the trap.  Next moment the
bright shoals began to appear beneath us, the sunlight
glinting on burnished sides as they darted this way
and that by hundreds, seeking a way of escape.  A run
of mullet flashed downstream, saw the net, turned, and
were headed back toward the sea.  A series of cries
went up—"*Aué!  Aué!*"—as fifty or sixty of the
beautiful silvery fish leaped the line of floats and
dashed away to safety.  The old headwoman, dressed
in a Mother Hubbard of respectable black and a
rather handsome hat, was swimming easily in three
fathoms of water; nothing escaped her watchful eye.

"*E ara!*" she shouted, angrily; "the best fish are
getting away!  Hurry, you lazy ones—splash the
water below the net, or we shall not have a mullet left!
Remember that when the haul is over he who has not
worked shall have no fish."

As the line of beaters drew near, the men in the big
canoe paddled upstream and across behind them,
throwing out net as they went, until the frightened
fish and a score of swimmers were encircled.  The two
ends of the seine were now close together on the bank,
and half a dozen men began to haul in with a will, their
efforts causing the circle to narrow slowly and steadily.
Looking down from the high bank, one could see
children of ten or twelve, stark naked, and carrying tiny
spears in their hands, swimming like frogs a fathom deep
in the clear water, pursuing the darting fish.  Now and
then a youngster came to the surface with a shrill cry
of triumph, holding aloft the toy spear on which was
transfixed a six-inch fish.  The people of the islands,
as a rule, are neither fast nor showy swimmers; one
can see prettier swimming any summer afternoon on the
Long Island shore, but the Polynesian is at home in the
water in a way the white man can never match.  I
watched an old woman, all of seventy and wearing a
black blouse girded tightly to her waist with a *pareu*,
treading water at the lower end of the net, where the
fish were beginning to concentrate.  She was as much
at her ease as though she had been lying on her veranda
exchanging gossip with a neighbor.  Each time she
thought the headwoman's eyes were turned away she
reached over the net, seized a fish, and stuffed it into
her blouse, until a flapping bulge hung down over her
*pareu*.  But old Tinomana's eyes were sharp.  "Enough,"
she cried, half laughing and half in anger, "*aué, tera
vahine e!* Perhaps she thought to get a string of fish,
too, for that worthless son-in-law of hers!"

At length the seine lay in two great piles on the
beach, and only a bulging pocket, filled with a pulsating
mass of silver, remained in the river.  Under the
direction of Tinomana the fish were divided into little
piles, strung on bits of hibiscus bark, and apportioned
among the people, according to the size of their families
and the amount of help they had given in the haul.
For herself she reserved a considerable share, for her
household was large, and as the owner of the net she
was entitled to a full half—more than she loaded into
the big canoe.

It was early afternoon when we laid down our
burdens in the cook house and stripped for a swim.
The others were awakening from their siesta; a flock
of brown children, all vaguely related to the family of
Airima, followed us to the river, carrying miniature
surf boards.  Next moment they were in the water,
splashing and shouting as they paddled downstream
toward where the surf broke on the bar.  Tehinatu,
the pretty sister of Maruae, passed us with a rush and
leaped feet first from the high bank.  She rose to the
surface thirty yards away, shouting a challenge to
catch her before she could reach the opposite shore.
Her brother and I dove together, raced across the river,
and had nearly overtaken the girl when she went under
like a grebe.  I was no match for her at this game;
under water she could swim as fast as I, and was a
hundred times more at home.  I gave up the pursuit
and landed for a sunning among the warm rocks of the
point.

Out where the seas reared for the landward rush the
black heads of children appeared and disappeared;
I could hear the joyous screams of others, flattened on
their boards and racing toward me, buried in flying
spray.  The old woman I had seen helping herself to
fish was coming down the river, paddling an incredibly
small canoe, laden with an enormous bunch of bananas
and four kerosene tins of water.  She lived a mile down
the coast and, like many of her neighbors, braved the
surf daily to supply her house with fresh water from the
river.  The gunwale of her canoe seemed to clear the
water by no more than a couple of inches; I watched
with some anxiety, thinking of the feelings of an
American grandmother in the same situation.

She ceased to paddle at the river mouth and watched
her chance, while the frail dugout rose and fell in the
wash of half a dozen big seas.  Then in a momentary
lull she dug her paddle into the water.  I sat up to
watch; a boy standing in the shallows near by
shouted encouragement.  At first I thought that she
had chosen her moment well.  The canoe passed the
white water, topped a little wave without swamping,
and was seemingly out of danger; but suddenly a
treacherous sea sprang up from nowhere, rearing a
tossing crest.  It was too late to retreat—certain
disaster lay ahead.  Stoically, without a sign of dismay,
the paddler held her craft bow on; the canoe rose
wildly against the foaming wall, seemed to hang for an
instant almost vertically, and then canoe, cargo, and
old woman disappeared in the froth.  The boy screamed
in ecstasy as he galloped through the shallows to lend
a hand.  The other children ceased their play and soon
the canoe and its recovered cargo were brought ashore.
They emptied the dugout and filled the tins with fresh
water; I heard the old woman laugh shrilly as she
wrung her clothes on the beach.  Presently, coached
by a dozen amused spectators, she made a second
attempt, and passed the surf without a wetting; when
I saw her last she was paddling off steadily to the west.

I was dozing among the rocks when a ringing whistle
startled me and I looked up to see a bird like a large
sandpiper alight on the beach and begin to feed,
running briskly after the receding waves or springing into
the air for a short flight when threatened by a rush of
water.  It was a wandering tattler, and no bird was
ever better named.  Solitary in its habits, except in
the breeding season, when it resorts to northern lands
so remote that its nest and eggs are still (I believe)
unknown, it travels south at the approach of winter,
making lonely passages across some of the widest
stretches of ocean in the world ... to Hawaii, to the
Galapagos, to the Marquesas, and probably to the
remote southern islands of Polynesia.  What obscure
sense enables the migrating bird to follow its course
far out of sight of land?  In France, I have flown side
by side with wild geese, heading steadily southward
above a sea of clouds.  It seemed to me that—like the
pilot of an airplane—they might guide themselves,
in a general way, by the sun, the stars, or the look of the
land below—an idea borne out by the fact that geese
become lost and confused in a fog.  But in considering
a bird like the carrier pigeon or the tattler, all such
theorizing comes to an end.  No general sense of north
and south could guide the tattler to the lonely landfalls
of the South Pacific; his wanderings—like the
migration of the golden plover, or the instinct of the
shearwater, which sends him unerringly, on the darkest night
of storm, to his individual burrow in the cliff's—must
be classed among the inexplicable mysteries of nature.

.. vspace:: 2

On the road which passes close to the house of Airima
I found Tehinatu in conversation with the driver of a
Chinese cart.  She was bargaining for a watermelon; the
Chinaman stood out for three francs—she offered two.
"Enough of talking," she said, firmly; "the melon is
the best you have, but it is green.  I will give two
francs."

"*A toru toata*," muttered the proprietor of the
melon, indifferently.  ("*Toata*" means a franc, but is
obviously a corruption of quarter, for the dollar passed
current here long before the money of France.)

"Look at my clothes," pleaded the deceitful girl,
changing her tactics suddenly.  "I am a poor woman
who cannot afford to pay the prices you expect from
the chief.  Come, dear *Tinito*, give me the melon for
two francs."

The Chinaman shrugged his shoulders and glanced
at me.  The glint in his narrow eye might have meant,
"Ah, these women—what's the use!"  He sighed; for
a moment, while Tehinatu looked at him pleadingly,
he was silent.

"Take the melon," he said, "and give me two francs;
I must be on my way.  But do not think you have
deceived me, cunning woman; I know that you are
not poor, for only yesterday your brother sold the copra
from your land."

Without a sign of embarrassment the girl opened her
hand and held up a hundred-franc note.  "Ah, you
are rich," remarked the Chinaman, as he undid an
oilcloth wallet and stripped the change from a substantial
roll of bills.  "I knew it.  Are you not ashamed to
practice such deceit?"  But Tehinatu only tucked the
melon under her arm with a triumphant smile.

It is a curious study to watch the contact of Chinese
and Polynesian, races separated by the most profound
of gulfs, yet possessing the meeting ground of a
common love of bargaining.  All through the French
islands you will find Chinamen, scattered singly or in
little groups—through the windward and leeward
Societies; the Marquesas; among the distant atolls
of the Paumotu; in the remote Gambiers; in Tupuai,
Rurutu, and lonely Rimatara.  They are keepers of
small stores, for the most part, where you may see them
interrupted at their eternal task of copra making to
exchange a box of matches for a single coconut or to
haggle for a quarter of an hour over a matter of five
sous.  Patient, painstaking, and unobtrusive—existing
in inconceivable squalor, without the common pleasures
which enable most of us to tolerate our lives—they
seem to be impelled by motives far more profound
than the longing for material gam, by a species of
idealism equally incomprehensible to the native and to
the visitor of European race.  It is not beyond
possibility that in the course of a few more generations it
will be the native islander who lingers here and there,
isolated in communities principally Chinese; for the
islanders, superb physically, are the least prolific of
men, while the weedy little *Tinito*, who brings his own
women with him, or succeeds, with his own peculiar
knack, in obtaining women from a population which
regards him with amused contempt, surrounds himself
with children in as short a time as nature allows.  I
have sometimes thought that the secret of the Chinaman's
dogged and self-denying labors might lie here—traceable
to his cult of ancestor worship: to become a
revered ancestor one must have children, and in order
to bring up properly a large family of children one
must spend one's life in unceasing toil.

I doubt that Europeans in large numbers will ever
be tempted to make the islands their home; the life is
too alien, the change too great.  As things are, the
relation of Polynesian and Chinese amounts to a
subtle contest for the land—a struggle of which both
parties are aware.  The native, incapable of abstract
thought, feels and resents it vaguely; to the Chinaman,
whose days are spent in meditation undisturbed by the
automatic labors of his body, the issue is no doubt
clear cut.  The native is by far the more attractive
of the two—clean, kindly, selfish, jolly, childish, well
bred, and pleasing to the eye; but the Chinaman
possesses the less attractive qualities which make for
the survival of a race—the industry, the unselfishness,
the capacity to live for an idea—and in the end, if
only by force of numbers, he will win.  Looking into
the future, one can see the Eastern islands populated
by Chinese, as our own islands of Hawaii have been
peopled with immigrants from Japan.  "They are
dying, anyway, and they won't work," the commercial
gentleman will tell you; "here is rich cane land, needing
only labor to produce bountifully—and the world needs
sugar."  Perhaps this view is correct—for myself, I
feel that the question is debatable.  There are certain
parts of the world—like our American mountains,
deserts, and lonely stretches of coast—which seem
planned for the spiritual refreshment of mankind;
places from which one carries away a new serenity and
the sense of a yearning for beauty satisfied.  Ever
since the days of Cook the islands of the South Sea
have charmed the white man—explorers, naturalists,
traders, and the rough crews of whaling vessels; the
strange beauty of these little lands, insignificant so far
as commercial exploitation is concerned, seems worthy
of preservation.  And the native, paddling his
outlandish canoe or lounging in picturesque attitudes
before his house, is indispensable to the scene.  If the
day comes when his canoe lies rotting on the beach and
his house is tenanted by industrious Chinese—though
the same jagged peaks rise against the sky and the
same sea thunders lazily along the reef—when the
anchor drops and the call comes to go ashore, I, for one,
shall hesitate.

In the Cook group, six hundred miles west of Tahiti,
the prospect is less depressing, for the British have
adopted a policy of exclusion and made it impossible
for the native to sell his land.  The Cook-Islander,
reinforced here and there with a dash of white blood,
and undiscouraged by a competition he is not fitted
to meet, seems to be holding his own.  The reason is
clear—the native has been little tampered with, left in
possession of his land, and protected rigidly against
epidemics like the influenza of 1918, which ravaged
the island populations wherever infected vessels were
permitted to touch.  Imported disease, exploitation
of the land, and coolie immigration—these are the
destroying forces from which the native must be
preserved if a shadow of the old charm is to linger for the
enjoyment of future generations of travelers.

Following Tehinatu toward the house, I thought to
myself how wonderfully the island charm had been
preserved here on the peninsula of Taiarapu.  We were
within fifty miles of Papeete, where business is carried
on, and steamers call, and perspiring tourists walk
briskly about the streets; yet here, in this lonely
settlement by the lagoon, civilization seemed half a
world away.  When I walked abroad the sight of a
white man brought the people to their doors, and
bands of children followed me, staring and bright
eyed, with interest.

On the veranda children surrounded us while the
girl cut and distributed thin slices of her melon.  There
is a fascination in watching these youngsters, brought
up without clothes and without restraint, in an environment
nearly as friendly as that of the original human
pair.  Once they are weaned from their mothers'
breasts—which often does not occur until they have
reached an age of two and a half or three—the children
of the islands are left practically to shift for themselves;
there is food in the house, a place to sleep, and
a scrap of clothing if the weather be cool—that is the
extent of parental responsibility.  The child eats when
it pleases, sleeps when and where it will, amuses itself
with no other resources than its own.  As it grows older
certain light duties are expected of it—gathering fruit,
lending a hand with fishing, cleaning the ground about
the house—but the command to work is casually given
and as casually obeyed.  Punishment is scarcely known;
yet under a system which would ruin forever an
American or English child the brown youngster
flourishes with astonishingly little friction—sweet
tempered, cheerful, never bored, and seldom quarrelsome.
The small boy tugs at the net or gathers bait
for the fishermen, seemingly without a thought of
drudgery; the small girl tends her smaller sister in the
spirit of playing with a doll.  Perhaps the restless and
aggressive spirit which makes discipline necessary in
bringing up our own children is the very quality
that has made the white race master of the world;
perhaps the more hostile surroundings of civilization
have made necessary the enforcement of prohibitory
laws.

I filled my pipe and lay smoking on a mat, with an
eye on the youngsters at their play.  For the time
being, a little girl, at the most attractive period of
childhood, was the center of interest.  One of her
front teeth was loose; she had tied a bit of bark to it
and was summoning up courage for a determined pull.
A boy stole up behind her, reached over her shoulder,
and gave the merciful jerk; next moment he was
dancing around her, waving the strip of bark to which
the tooth was still attached.  The owner of the tooth
began to sob, holding a hand over her mouth, but her
lamentations ceased when a larger boy shouted,
seriously, "Give her the tooth and let her speak
to the rat!"  The small girl trotted to the edge of the
bush, where I heard her repeat a brief invocation before
she flung the tooth into a thicket of hibiscus.  I knew
what she was saying, for I had made inquiries concerning
this children's custom—probably as old as it is
quaint.  It is a sort of exchange; the baby tooth is
thrown among the bushes and the rat is invoked to
replace it with one as white and durable as his own.
The child says:

   |  "Thy tooth, thy tooth, O rat, give to the man;
   |  The tooth, the tooth of the man, I give to the rat."
   |

No doubt the games of children everywhere are very
much the same; in the islands, at any rate, an American
child would soon find itself at home.  The boys walk
on stilts, play tag, blindman's buff, prisoner's base,
and a game called *Pere Pana*, like what we called Pewee
when I was a youngster in California—almost exactly
as these things are done at home.  The girls play
cat's cradle, hopscotch, jackstones, and jackstraws—often
joining in the rougher games of their brothers.
One curious game, evidently modern, and perhaps
originated by the children of missionaries, is called
*Pere Puaa Taehae* (the Game of the Wild Beast).  The
boys and girls, who pretend to be sheep, stand in line
one behind the other, clinging together under the
protection of the mother ewe at the head of the line.
Presently the wild beast appears, demanding a victim
to eat.  "You are the wild beast?" the sheep ask.
"Yes," he replies, "and I want a male sheep."  He
then waits while the sheep—in whispers inaudible to
him—decide on which boy (for the beast has his
choice of sexes) shall be sacrificed.  When the decision
is made the mother at the head of the line says, "You
want a male sheep?"  At that, all the others chant in
unison, "Then take off your hat, and take off your
clothes, and strike the hot iron."  The last word is the
signal for the victim to make a dash for safety; if he
can get behind the mother before the wild beast catches
him the performance is repeated until the beast
succeeds in catching another boy or girl, who then becomes
the *Puaa Taehae*.

The twelve-year-old daughter of Maruae—for Airima
was a great-grandmother, not an uncommon thing in
this land of rapid generations—had been talking for
several days of piercing her ears in order to install a
pair of earrings to which she had fallen heir.  This
evening she had finally mustered courage for the
ordeal; I watched her hesitating approach and saw
her hand Tehinatu the necessary instruments—a cork,
a pair of scissors, and a brace of sharp orange thorns
from which the green bark had been carefully stripped.
Whatever her color, woman's endurance in the name
of vanity is proverbial; the child made no outcry as
the thorn passed through the lobe of her ear, sank
into the cork, and was snipped off, inside and out,
close to the skin—the remaining section to be removed
a fortnight later, when the small wound had healed.
As Tehinatu smiled at me and flourished the scissors,
to which clung a drop of blood, I heard a shrill call
from the cook house, "*Haere mai tamaa!*"  It was
supper time.

Some of the children, in answer to the call, straggled
toward where Airima squatted beside her oven; others,
already stuffed with odds and ends of fruit, went on
with their play.  Maruae beckoned to me as he passed.
The meal was a casual affair; one helped oneself
without ceremony, squatting to exchange conversation
between bites, or walked away, food in hand.  There
were pork, cold fish, baked taro, and sections of
cream-colored breadfruit, ripe and delicately cooked.

The sun had set when we finished, and as the sky
gave promise of a clear night I spread a mat on the
river bank.  Bedtime in these places comes when
drowsiness sets in; as I fell asleep the clouds veiling
the highlands of Tahiti Nui were still luminous in the
afterglow.

It was midnight when I awoke.  In the house,
faintly illuminated by the light of a turned-down
lamp, the family of Airima slept.  The air was warm
and scented with the perfume of exotic flowers.  The
river was like a dark mirror reflecting the stars; even
the Pacific seemed to sleep, breathing gently in the
sigh of little waves, dallying with the bar.  Presently
I became aware of subdued voices—Airima and Tinomana,
the chief's mother, were seated on the rocks
below me, fishing with long rods of bamboo for the
*faia* which runs in with the night tide.  They were
recalling the past, as old ladies will.

"The women of Tahiti," remarked Tinomana, "are
not what they were when I was young; nowadays you
may travel from morning till night without seeing a
really beautiful girl."

"Those are true words," said Airima; "*Aué*, if you
had seen my eldest daughter, who died when she was
fifteen!  She was lovely as the *itatae*, the white tern
which hovers above the tree tops.  Her eyes were
brown and laughing, her hair fell in ringlets to her knees,
her teeth were small white pearls, and her laughter
like the sound of cool water running in a shady place.
Alas, my Vahinetua!  She was our first-born; my
husband loved her as he loved none of the others.  A
strange, dreamy child....  I used to watch her when she
thought herself alone.  Sometimes, I know not why,
the tears came to my eyes as I saw her gazing into the
sky while she chanted under her breath the little old
song the children sing to the tern:

   |  "O Itatae, sailing above the still forest, where shall
   |        you fly to-night?
   |  Downwind across the sea to Tetiaroa, the low island ...
   |

"As she grew older a wasting illness fell on her; the
doctors could do nothing to stop her coughing; my
husband even took her to the white doctor in Papeete—it
was on his recommendation that we took her to sea.
We were in Mangareva, far off in the Gambier Islands,
when I saw that the end was near.  My husband was
not blind—he headed back for Tahiti at once, giving
up the rest of his trip.  Vahinetua was never more
beautiful than on the last morning of her life—cheeks
flushed and eyes shining soft and clear as the first star
of evening.  We were nearly home—off Maitea, the
little island which lies between Tahiti and Anaa; she
died in my arms and I covered her with the bright
patchwork *tifaefae* her own hands had sewn.  'Our
child is dead,' I told the captain, her father, as I came
on deck.  He said nothing, but put a hand on my
shoulder and pointed toward the masthead, where I
saw a small white tern hovering above us.  I cannot tell
you how, but I knew at once the soul of my daughter
was in that pretty bird.  It flew with us all day, and
at evening, as we entered the harbor of Papeete, it
turned back and disappeared in the night.  For many
years thereafter, each time my husband passed Maitea
homeward bound, the white bird was waiting for him
at the place where my daughter had died...."

The voices of the old women murmured on, recalling
the joys and sorrows of other days.  Suddenly, in a
mango tree behind the house, a rooster crowed, answered
far and near by others of his kind.  As the last
drawn-out cry died in the silence of the night I yielded
to an overpowering drowsiness and fell asleep.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`Tahitian Tales`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XV


.. class:: center medium bold

   Tahitian Tales

.. vspace:: 2

The evening was very warm and still.
The sea rumbled faintly on the reef, half
a mile offshore, and behind us—above
the vague heights of the interior—a
full moon was rising.  The palms were
asleep after their daily tussle with the trade—fronds
drooping and motionless in silhouette against the sky.
We had spread mats on the grass close to the beach;
Tehinatu lay beside me, chin propped in her hands—she
had been bathing, and her dark hair, still damp,
hung in a cloud about her face.  Her grandmother,
Airima—the woman of Maupiti—sat facing us, cross-legged
in the position of her people.  Now and then a
fish leaped in the lagoon; once, far down the beach,
a ripe nut thudded to the earth.

"If you two like," said old Airima, "I will tell you
the story of my ancestor, the Lizard Woman."

The girl smiled and raised her head in the little
gesture which corresponds to our nod.  "That is a good
tale," she declared, "and true, for I am named after
that Lizard Woman who died so many years ago."

The woman of Maupiti lit a match to dry a leaf of
black tobacco over the flame; when she had twisted
it in a strip of pandanus and inhaled deeply of the
smoke, she spoke once more.  Her voice was flexible
and soft with a sweet huskiness—an instrument to
render the music of the old island tongue—its cadences
measured or rapid, falling or rising with the ebb and
flow of the tale.

"In the old days," Airima began, "so long ago that
his name is now forgotten, there was a king of Papenoo,
a just man, successful in war and beloved by his people.
His wife was a daughter of Bora Bora—the most
beautiful woman of that island; she was the delight of
his heart, and they had many children.  When she fell
ill and died, a great sadness came over the king; he
could do nothing but brood over his loneliness.  In
his dreams he saw the face of his wife; life was hateful
to him; even his children, shouting and playing about
the house, grew hateful in his eyes.  A day came
at last when he could endure the sight of them no
longer, and a plan to be rid of them took form in his
mind.

"There had been a storm and he knew that the
waves would be running high at a place where there
was a break in the reef.  'Come,' he said to the women
of his household, 'bring my children to swim—it will
hearten me to see them sporting in the surf.'  But
when they came to that beach and the women saw
the great waves thundering in through the pass, they
were afraid, for even a strong swimmer could not live
in such a sea.  Then the king, whose hope was that
his children might drown, bade them forget their fears.
One after another the young boys and girls went into
the sea and were swept out by the undertow—fearless
and shouting.  The waves broke over them and at
times they disappeared; the women began to cover
their faces, for they thought, 'Those pretty children,
so dear to us, are as good as dead.'

"Then the watchers saw a strange thing—a true
thing, told me by my grandfather, who had learned
it from the lips of his ancestors.  Beyond the breaking
of the surf, the children began to sport in the water,
diving and leaping higher and higher into the air.
Their skins grew black and glistened in the sunlight;
their arms turned to fins and their feet became like the
tails of fish; the gods of those days had taken pity on
their innocence and made of them the first dolphins—the
playful children of the sea.  And the king was glad,
for he saw that his children would not die, and he knew
that they could no longer come to his house to bring
back bitter memories.

"As the years went on, the daughters of many
chiefs were brought to the king, but no woman found
favor in his eyes; his heart was always heavy and no
man saw him laugh.  Sometimes he walked alone in
the mountains where men do not go even to-day, for
he feared nothing—-neither the ravening spirits of the
dead, nor the Lizard People, who in those days lived
in the interior of the island.  Fifty generations of men
have lived and died since our ancestors came to this
island; they found the Lizard People already in
possession of the land.  Ta 'a ta Moo, they called
them—half human, half lizard; able to climb among
the cliffs where no man could follow.  The human
warriors were more powerful in battle, and as time
went on the Lizard Folk were driven into the fastnesses
of the mountains.  Now the last of them is dead, but
if you doubt that they once lived, go into the hills and
you will see the remains of their plantain gardens high
above cliffs no human creature could scale.  My own
people are traveling the same path—soon the last of us
will also be dead, and the white man will glance at
the scattered stones of our *maraes* to make sure that
once upon a time we lived.

"But I was telling you of the king.  One day, as
he wandered alone in the mountains, a Lizard Woman
was lying in the fern beside the trail—a head woman of
her people, skilled in magic and able to read the future.
This king was a tall man, very strong and handsome;
as he passed without looking down, she seized his foot
gently.  At that he looked down and his heart swelled
with love of her.  He dwelt with her in the mountains,
and when at last he came down to the sea his people
had given him up for dead.

"In due time a son was born to that Lizard Woman—a
strong and beautiful boy, the image of the king his
father; she reared him alone in the mountains and
grew to love him better than her life.  But when she
looked into the future her tears fell.  When the child
was twelve years old she led him to the mouth of her
valley and talked long with him, telling him what he
was to do, before she turned away and went back to
her own place, weeping.  Taking thought of her words,
the boy went alone to the village of the king.  His
dress was the skin of lizards.

"When he came to that Place he said to those about,
'Take me to the king, my father.'  But when they
repeated his words, the king said, 'It is false; I have no
wife and no child.'  Then the child sent back word
asking the king if he had forgotten walking one day
in the mountains many years before.  With that the
king remembered his love for the Lizard Woman and
bade his men bring the boy to him.  And when he
saw the strong, fearless child and heard his people
exclaim at the beauty of the boy and the wondrous
likeness to himself his heart softened and he said,
'This is indeed my son!'

"The years passed, and the heart of the Lizard
Woman—sad and alone in the mountains—grew ever
more hungry for her son, until at length her life became
intolerable without sight of him.  She stole down from
the hills by night and went softly about the village,
weeping and lamenting because her son was not to be
seen; the people trembled at sight of her in the
moonlight and at the sound of her weeping, and the king
feared her, for he knew that she was powerful in
magic, and thought that she had come to take her son
away.  In his fear he took canoe with the young man,
and they went down the wind to Tetuaroa, the Low
Island, where he thought to be safe from her.  But
the Lizard Woman, by her magic, knew where they had
gone; she looked into the future and saw only sadness
and death for herself.  What must be cannot be
avoided.  She leaped into the sea and swam first to
Raiatea, where she had lands and where the bones of
her ancestors lay in the *marae*.  When she came to
that shore she knew that her death was near and that
she would die by the hand of her own son.  Close by
the beach she stopped to weep, and the place of her
weeping is still called Tai Nuu Iti (the Little Falling
of Tears).  Farther on her path, she stopped again
to weep still more bitterly, and to this day the name
of that place is Tai Nuu Rahi (the Great Falling of
Tears).  When she had been to her *marae*, she plunged
again into the ocean and swam to Tetuaroa—in all the
islands there was no swimmer like her; because of his
mother, her son was named Au Moana (Swimmer in
the Sea).

"The king and the king's son saw Tehinatu coming
far off—for Tehinatu was the name of that Lizard
Woman—and they felt such fear that they climbed
to the top of a tall palm.  Then, knowing the manner
of her death, she came out of the water—weeping all
the while—and began to climb the palm tree.  The
two men trembled with fear of her; they threw down
coconuts, hoping to strike her so that she would fall
to the earth.  But though she was bruised and her eyes
blinded with tears, she climbed on until she was just
beneath them, clinging to the trunk where the first
fronds begin to branch.  She stopped to rest for a
moment, and as she clung to the palm, allowing her body
to relax, her son hurled a heavy nut which struck her on
the breast.  She made no outcry, but her hands let go
their hold and she fell far down to the earth.  But the
men still trembled and were afraid to come down
out of the tree, for she struck in a swampy place and
was long in dying; all afternoon she lay there, weeping
and lamenting, until at sunset the spirit left her body.
When she was dead, they took her to Raiatea and
buried her in her *marae*.  After that the two men
returned to Papenoo, and when the king died the
son of the Lizard Woman reigned long in his stead,
these are true words, for the blood of Swimmer in
the Sea, born of the Lizard Woman, flows in my
veins."

Old Airima ceased to speak.  From the coconut
shell at her side she took a lump of black native tobacco
and began to tear off a leaf for a fresh cigarette.  Her
granddaughter turned on one side—head resting on a
folded forearm—and looked at me.

"Aye, those are true words," she said; "for is my
name not the same as that of the Lizard Woman?
During a thousand years, perhaps more—*mai tahito
mai*: since the beginning—the women of our family
have been called Tehinatu.  You yourself, though we
call you Tehari, have a real name among us—Au
Moana, after her son.  These names belong to us; no
other family does well to use them."

The flare of a match illuminated for an instant the
wrinkled and aquiline face of Airima.  As she tossed
the glowing stick aside, the moonlight smoothed away
the lines; I was aware only of her black eyes,
wonderfully alive and young.

"Tell him of Poia," she suggested, "and the dead
ones in robes of flame."

"*Aué*," said the girl; "that is a strange tale, and it
came about because of a name."  She sat up, shaking
the hair back over her shoulders.

"The woman who saw these things," she went on,
"was another of our ancestors.  She was called Poia, a
name her grandfather had given.  She lived at Tai Nuu
Iti in Baiatea, where Tehinatu first stopped to weep.

"One day, in midafternoon, Poia was sitting in the
house beside her mother, busy with the weaving of a
mat.  All at once a darkness closed in before her eyes
and she felt the spirit struggling to leap from her body.
It was like the pangs of death, but at last her spirit
was free and with its eyes she saw her body lying as if
in sleep, and perceived that there were strangers in the
house—two women and a man.  The women were very
lovely, with flowers in their hair and robes of scarlet
which seemed to flicker like fire.  They were Vahinetua
and Vivitautua, ancestors dead many years before,
who loved Poia dearly.  The man was likewise dressed
in flaming scarlet, and he wore a tall headdress of red
feathers.  He was Tanetua, another of Poia's ancestors.
The three had come from the *marae* to seek Poia, and
they spoke to her kindly, saying, 'Come with us,
daughter.'  And though she felt shame when she
looked down at her dull dress and disordered hair, she
followed where they led.

"They took her to the *marae* of Tai Nuu Rahi, and
there Poia saw a huge woman waiting for them.  The
right side of that woman was white, and the left side
black; when she saw them coming she fell on her
knees and began to weep for joy.  'Is it you, Poia?'
she cried.  'Then welcome!'  As Poia stood there,
marveling, the stone of the *marae* opened before her
like the door of a great house, and Vahinetua and
Vivitautua said to her, 'Go in.'  The door gave on a
chamber of stone—the floor was of stone, and the
ceiling and the walls.  They passed through another
door into a second empty room of stone, and thence
into a third, and there Poia chanced to look down at
herself.  She had become lovely as the others; her
hair was dressed with flowers and her robe was scarlet,
seeming to flicker like fire.  While she was looking
at herself, no longer ashamed, the two women said
to her: 'You must stay here, for you belong to us.
We are angry with your grandfather because he called
you Poia.  That is not all of your name—your true
name is Tetuanui Poia Terai Mateatea.  That name
belongs to us, and you must have it, for you are our
descendant and we love you.'

"She did not know that this was her name; she
thought it was only Poia.  In spite of their kindness
she was frightened and told them that she wished to
go home.  They took her to the door of her house and
left her there; and she found herself lying with the
half-woven mat in her fingers.  Her mother, who was
sitting beside her, only said, 'You have slept well.'  But
Poia, in fear and wonder at what she had seen, said
nothing to her mother, not even when the two went to
bathe.

"The next day, in midafternoon, Poia again felt the
darkness close in before her eyes, the pangs of death
as her spirit struggled and at last escaped from the
body.  But this time she found herself gloriously
clothed and beautiful at once.  All went as before
until they came to the third chamber of the *marae*;
there were leaves spread on the floor of that place
as if for a feast, but the only food was purple flowers.
The others sat down and began to eat, and Poia
attempted to do likewise, but the taste of the flowers
was bitter in her mouth.  Again the two women said,
'You belong to us; you must not be called Poia, but
Tetuanui Poia Terai Mateatea.'  And they coaxed
her to stay with them, but she wept and said that she
could not bear to be separated from her husband,
whom she loved.  As before, they were kind to her and
took her to her house, where she awoke as if from
sleep, and said nothing.

"It was the same the next day, but this time, when
they had come to the third chamber of the *marae*,
Vehinetua and Vivitautua said: 'Now you must no
longer think of returning.  You are ours and we wish
you to stay here with us.'  Poia wept at their words,
for she began to think of the man she loved.  'I must
go,' she said; 'if I had no husband I would gladly
remain with you here.'  At last, when her tears had
fallen for a long time, the three dwellers in the *marae*
took her home; they bade her farewell reluctantly,
saying that next day she must come to them for good.

"This time Poia awoke in great fear, and she told
the story to her mother when they went to bathe
together.  Her mother went straight to the grandfather,
to tell him what she had seen and ask him if her true
name was Poia, as he had said years before.  Then the
old man said that he had done wrong, for the name
was not only Poia, but Tetuanui Poia Terai Mateatea,
a name which belonged to Vahinetua and Tanetua
and Vivitautua.  And these three came no more to get
Poia; they were content, for they loved her and
wanted her to have their name."

As she finished her story, Tehinatu lay down once
more, resting her head on her grandmother's knee.
My thoughts were wandering far away—across a great
ocean and a continent—to the quiet streets of New
Bedford, set with old houses in which the descendants
of the whalers live out their ordered lives.  In all
probability the girl beside me, Polynesian to the core
and glorying in a long line of ancestors whose
outlandish names fell musically from her lips—had cousins
who lived on those quiet streets; for she was the
granddaughter of a New Bedford whaling captain, the
husband of Airima—a Puritan who ate once too often
of the *fei*, and lingered in the islands to turn trader
and rear a family of half-caste children, and finally
to die.  The story is an old one, repeated over and
over again in every group: the white cross; the
half-white children at the parting of the ways; their turning
aside from the stony path of the father's race to the
pleasant ways of the mother.  And so in the end the
strain of white, further diluted with each succeeding
generation, shows itself in nothing more than a name
... seldom used and oftentimes forgotten.  It is
Nature at work, and she is not always cruel.

"Is it the same with names in your land?" Airima
was asking.  "Are certain names kept in a family
throughout the years?"

"It is somewhat the same," I told her, "though we
do not prize names so highly.  My father and
grandfather and his father were all named Charles, which
you call Tehari."

"Among my people," she said, "the possession of a
name means much.  As far back as our stories go,
there has been a man named Maruae in each generation
of my father's family.  Some of these Maruaes
were strange men.  There was Maruae Taura Varua
Ino, who fished with a bait of coconut for the spirits
of men drowned in the sea; and another was Maruae
Mata Tofa, who stole a famous shark—the adopted
child of a man of Fariipiti.  That was a good shark;
it lived in the lagoon, harming no one, and every day
the man and his wife called it to them with certain
secret words.  But Maruae coveted the shark, and he
prepared an underwater cave in the coral before his
house.  Then, when the cave was ready, he hid in the
bushes on the shore of the lagoon while the man was
calling his shark, and in this way Maruae learned the
secret words of summons.  When the man and his
wife had gone, Maruae called out the words; the shark
appeared close inshore and followed him to the cave,
where it stayed, well content.  And that night he
taught it new words.  Next day the man and his wife
called to their shark; and when it did not come they
suspected that Maruae had enticed it away.  After
that they went to the house of Maruae and accused
him of the theft; but he said: 'Give the call, if you
think I have stolen your shark.  I have a shark, but
it is not yours.'  They called, but the shark did not
come, for he had taught it new words.  Then Maruae
called and the shark came at once, so he said, 'See, it
must be my shark, for it obeys me and not you.'  As
he turned away to return to Fariipiti, the other man
said, 'I think it is my shark, but if it will obey you and
no other, you may have it.'

"Some days later, a party of fishermen came to
Maruae's cave, where the shark lived.  They baited a
great hook and threw it into the water, and as it sank
into the cave they chanted a magic chant.  Then the
shark seized the bait, and as they hauled him out they
laughed with joy and chanted, '*E matau maitai puru
maumau e anave maitai maea i te rai*.'  This chant is
something about a good hook and a good line, but the
other words are dead—what they mean no man knows
to-day.  That night there was feasting in the houses
of the fishermen, but next morning, when Maruae
went down to the sea and called his shark, nothing
came, though he stayed by the lagoon, calling, from
morning till the sun had set.  After that he learned
that his shark had been killed and eaten, and from
that day none of Maruae's undertakings prospered;
finally he pined away and died."

Tehinatu stirred and sat up, eyes shining in the
moonlight.  The subject of sharks has for these people
a fascination we do not understand, a significance
tinged with the supernatural.

"They did evil to kill that shark," she said, "for all
sharks are not bad.  I remember the tale my mother
told me of Viritoa, the long-haired Paumotuan
woman—wife of Maruae Ouma Ati.  Her god was a shark.
It was many years ago, when the vessels of the white
men were few in these islands; Maruae shipped on a
schooner going to New Zealand, taking his wife with
him, as was permitted in those days.  That woman
was not like us; she understood ships and had no fear
of the sea; as for swimming, there were few like her.
When she came here the women marveled at her hair;
it reached to her ankles, and she wore it coiled about
her head in two great braids, thick as a man's arm.

"The captain of that schooner was always drinking;
most of the time he lay stupefied in his bed.  As they
sailed to the south the sea grew worse and worse, but
the captain was too drunk to take notice.  The men
of the crew were in great fear; they had no confidence
in the mate, and the seas were like mountain ridges all
about them.  The morning came when Viritoa said
to Maruae: 'Before nightfall this schooner will be at
the bottom of the sea; let us make ready.  Rub yourself
well with coconut oil, and I will braid my hair and
fasten it tightly about my head.'  Toward midday
they were standing together by the shrouds when
Viritoa said, 'Quick, leap into the rigging!'  That
woman knew the ways of the sea; next moment a
great wave broke over the schooner.  The decks gave
way, and most of the people—who were below—died
the death of rats at once, but Viritoa and her husband
leaped into the sea before the vessel went down.

"A day and a night they were swimming; there
were times when Maruae would have lost courage if
Viritoa had not cheered him.  'Put your hands on
my shoulders,' she said, 'and rest; remember that I
am a woman of the Low Islands—we are as much
at home in the sea as on land.'  All the while she was
praying to the shark who was her god.  The storm
had abated soon after the schooner went down; next
day the sea was blue and very calm.  Presently, when
the sun was high, Viritoa said to her husband, 'I think
my god will soon come to us; put your head beneath
the water and tell me what you see.'  With a hand on
her shoulder, he did as she had told him, gazing long
into the depths below.  Finally he raised his head,
dripping, and when he had taken breath he spoke.
'I see nothing,' he said; 'naught but the *miti hauriuri*—the
blue salt water.'  She prayed a little to her god
and told him to look again, and the third time he
raised his head, with fear and wonder on his face.
'Something is rising in the sea beneath us,' he said as
his breath came fast—'a great shark large as a ship
and bright red like the mountain plantain.  My
stomach is sick with fear.'  'Now I am content,' said
the Paumotuan woman, 'for that great red shark is
my god.  Have no fear—either he will eat us and so
end our misery, or he will carry us safely to
shore.'  Next moment the shark rose beside them, like the
hull of a ship floating bottom up; the fin on his back
stood tall as a man.  Then Viritoa and her husband
swam to where he awaited them, and with the last of
their strength they clambered up his rough side and
seated themselves one on each side of the fin, to which
they clung.

"For three days and three nights they sat on the
back of the shark while he swam steadily to the
north-east.  They might have died of thirst, but when there
were squalls of rain Viritoa unbound her hair and
sucked the water from one long braid, while Maruae
drank from the other.  At last, in the first gray of
dawn, they saw land—Mangaia, I think you call it.
The shark took them close to the reef; they sprang
into the sea and the little waves carried them ashore
without a scratch.  As they lay resting on the reef
the shark swam to and fro, close in, as though awaiting
some word from them.  When she saw this, Viritoa
stood up and cried out in a loud voice: 'We are
content—we owe our lives to thee.  Now go, and we
shall stay here!'  At those words the shark-god turned
away and sank into the sea; to the day of her death
Viritoa never saw him again.  After that she and her
husband walked to the village, where the people of
Manitia made them welcome; and after a few years
they got passage on a schooner back to Maruae's own
land."

The soft voice of the girl died away—I heard only
the murmur of the reef.  Masses of cloud were
gathering about the peaks; above our heads, the moon was
sailing a clear sky, radiant and serene.  The world was
all silver and gray and black—the quiet lagoon, the
shadowy land, the palms like inky lace against the
moonlight.  Tehinatu stifled a little yawn and stretched
out on the mat with the abrupt and careless manner of
a child.  Her grandmother tossed away a burnt-down
cigarette.

"It is late," said the woman of Maupiti, "and we
we must rise at daybreak.  Now let us sleep."





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.. _`Anchored off the Reef`:

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   Becalmed at Pinaki

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   Woodcut

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   CHAPTER XVI

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   Anchored off the Reef

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On the third day of the homeward voyage
the wind died away, and in the middle of
the afternoon it fell dead calm when we
were less than a mile distant from the
atoll of Pinaki.  With the exception of
a small group of Papeete traders, I don't suppose there
are a dozen white men who have ever heard of the
place; and those who have seen it or set foot upon it
must be fewer still.  It lies toward the eastern extremity
of the Low Archipelago, and is one of four small atolls,
all within a radius of thirty miles of one another.  On
charts of that segment of the eastern Pacific these
four islands are barely discernible, and Pinaki, the least
of them, appears but little larger than the dot of the "i"
in Whitsunday, its English name.

The current carried us slowly along the north-westerly
side of the island.  It was intensely hot.
Teriaa, nephew of Miti, the skipper, was sluicing the
blistered deck, but the water steamed out of the
scuppers, and in a moment the planking was as dry and
as hot to the touch as before.  He soon left off and took
refuge in the whaleboat, which he covered with a piece
of canvas.  I crawled in with him, but the suffocating
shade was less endurable than the full glare of the sun.
Tane, the other sailor, a man of fifty, was below.  He
had remained there most of the time since our departure
from Rutiaro, sleeping on a greasy mat, indifferent to
the cockroaches—the place was alive with them by
night—or the copra bugs, which were a nuisance at
all hours.  The stench from the little cabin, filled
almost to the ceiling with unsacked copra, was terrible;
and it was not much better on deck.  I took shelter
beside Miti, who was sitting in the meager shade of
the mainsail.  Presently, pointing casually toward the
shore, he said: "You see him?  What he do there?"

I saw the man plainly enough, now that he was
pointed out to me, standing with his arms folded,
leaning lightly against a tree.  I was limited to a hasty
glance through my binoculars, for he was looking
toward us; but I saw that he was unmistakably white,
although his skin seemed as dark as that of a native.
He was barefoot, naked to the waist, and for a nether
garment wore a pair of trousers chopped off at the
knee.

I, too, wondered what a white man could be doing
on an uninhabited island.  Miti knew no more of the
atoll than that it was or had formerly been uninhabited.
It belonged, he said, to the natives of Nukatavake,
which lay nine miles to the northwest.  We could see
this other atoll as we rode to the light swell, a splotch
of blue haze a nail's breadth wide, vanishing and
reappearing against the clear line of the horizon.  In
two hours' time the current had carried us to the lee
side of the island.  It ran swiftly there, but in a more
northerly direction, so that we were forced out of the
main stream of it, and drifted gradually into quiet
water near the shore.  An anchor was carried to the
reef and we brought up to within thirty yards of it.
With another anchor out forward, the schooner was
safely berthed for the night.

I went ashore with the two sailors for a fresh supply
of drinking coconuts, but I gave no help in collecting
them.  A fire was going on the lagoon beach, and
there I found the solitary resident frying some fish
before a small hut built in the native fashion.  He
might have been of any age between thirty-five and
forty-five; was powerfully built, with a body as finely
proportioned as a Polynesian's.  His voice was pleasant
and his manner cordial as he gave me welcome, but a
pair of the coldest blue eyes I have ever seen made
me doubt the sincerity of it.  I felt the need of making
apologies for the intrusion, adding, lamely, "I haven't
seen a white man in three months, and our skipper
speaks very little English."

"I was about to look you up," he said.  "I can't
say that I'm lonely here.  I manage to get along
without much companionship.  But to be frank, I'm
hungry for tobacco.  There's none left at Nukatavake, and
I've been sucking an empty pipe since last November.
You haven't a fill in your pouch by any chance?"

I would have given something for his relish of the first
pipeful, or the fifth, for that matter.  Finally he said:
"I imagine you are in for several days of Pinaki.
You have noticed the sky?  Not a sign of wind.  I
can't offer you much in the way of food; but the
fishing is good, and if you care to you are welcome to
stop ashore."

I accepted the invitation gladly; but as I walked
back to the schooner for a few belongings and some
more tobacco I questioned the propriety of my decision.
My prospective host was an Englishman by his accent,
although, like my friend Crichton at Tanso, he was
evidently long away from home.  He struck me as
being a good deal of the Crichton type, although he
differed greatly from him outwardly.  I remembered
that Crichton, too, had been pleasant and friendly,
once the ice was broken between us; but the prospect
of an early parting and the certitude of our never
meeting again had been the basis for the friendship
in so far as he was concerned.  This other Englishman
was not living on an uninhabited atoll because of a
liking for companionship.  I was debating the matter
of a return to shore when Tane crawled out of the
cabin to make preparations for supper, and as he was a
sufferer from elephantiasis, the sight of his immense
swollen limbs and his greasy, sweating body decided
me.  Papeete was far distant, and I would have
enough of Tane before we reached the end of the
journey.

Supper was ready by the time I reached the hut.
It consisted of fish deliciously broiled, coconuts, and
hard biscuit.  Over it I gave my host an account of my
stay at Rutiaro and of the unsuccessful experiment in
solitude.

"Yes," he said, "they are rather too sociable, these
natives.  The people of Nukatavake used to bother me
a good deal when I first came here.  I thought nine
miles of open sea would keep them away; but they
often came over in sailing canoes—a dozen or two at a
time when the wind favored; and they would stay
until it shifted back into the southeast.  I didn't
encourage them.  In fact, I made it quite plain that I
preferred to be alone.  The island is theirs, of course,
and I can't prevent them from coming during the
copra-making season; but they no longer come at other
times.  Nine months out of the year I have the place
to myself.  But they are damnably inquisitive.  I
don't like Kanakas in the aggregate, although I have
one or two good friends among them."

The dying fire lit us to bed about midnight.  I lay
awake for a long time after my host was sleeping.  We
had talked for three hours, chiefly about the islands.
In fact, all that he told me of himself was that he was
fond of fishing.

There was not a hint of a breeze the next day, nor the
next, nor the day after that.  The sea was almost as
calm as the lagoon, and the *Potii Ravarava* lay motionless
at anchor as though frozen in a sheet of clear ice.
Miti and the two sailors remained on board most of
the time, sleeping during the heat of the day under a
piece of canvas rigged over the main beam, and at
night fishing over the side in dreamy contentment.
If they came ashore at all it was only for a few
moments, and they never crossed to the lagoon beach.
During these three days I remained the Englishman's
guest, and although I was out of patience with myself
for my curiosity, it grew in spite of me.  What under
the sun was the man doing here?  Evidently he had
not come to an atoll, as my friend Crichton had, to do
his writing and thinking undisturbed.  Crichton had
books, a practical interest in planting, and a cultural
interest in Polynesian dialects.  He would muse for
hours over a word in one dialect which might or might
not bear a remote resemblance to some other word in
usage a thousand miles away.  The study fascinated
him.  As he once told me, it gave his imagination
room to work in.  I have no doubt that he made up
for himself stories of the early Polynesian migrations
vastly better than any romances he might have read.
This other Englishman had no books; not so much
as a scrap of writing paper.  At least I saw none in
his house, which was as bare as it was clean.  There
was a sleeping mat in one corner; a chest and some
fishing gear against the wall; picks and shovels in a
corner; a few old clothes hanging from nails driven
into the supports, and absolutely nothing else.  How
did he put in his time?  Fishing was a healthy interest,
but it was not enough to keep a man sane for a period
of seven years.  He let that bit of information slip
in one conversation I had with him.

He was not a taciturn chap.  After our first evening
he talked quite freely about his earlier adventures.
He had spent three years in northern Australia, prospecting
for gold, and he gave me an intensely interesting
account of the aborigines there—of their marvelous
skill at following a trail, no matter over what sort of
country.  I had heard that these people were
biologically different from the rest of humankind and that
their blood would not cross with white blood.  This
was not the case, he said.  He had known white men
animal enough to take the Australian blacks for wives,
and had seen the children which they had by them.
From Australia he had gone to New Guinea, still
prospecting for gold, although at times he sought relief
from the disappointment of it by making expeditions
with the natives in search of bird-of-paradise feathers.
But "gold" was the word that rang through all his
talk.  Several times it was on the tip of my tongue
to say, "But there's no gold at Pinaki."  I was able
to resist the temptation, remembering his remark about
the damnable inquisitiveness of the people of
Nukatavake.  Then, on the morning of my third day on the
island, an incident occurred which made the situation
clear.

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.. _`The Englishman's Story`:

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   CHAPTER XVII


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   The Englishman's Story

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I rose at dawn, but my host was out
before me.  He had left two fish cleaned
and ready for cooking on a plate outside
the door.  Having breakfasted, I started
on a walk around the atoll, which I
estimated I could accomplish in about an hour.  I
expected to meet the Englishman somewhere on the
way, and I did find him on the opposite side of the
lagoon.  The shore was steep-to there.  He had a
steel-tipped rod in his hand and was diving off a ledge
of rock, remaining below for as long as a full minute.
He waved when he saw me, but kept on with his work.
In about a quarter of an hour he came over to where I
was standing.

"Tiresome work," he said.  "I need a blow."  Then,
"You see, I've been doing a bit of digging here."

I had walked along the lagoon beach and had not
noticed before the series of trenches higher up the
land.  I should think he had been digging!  I
inspected the ditches under his guidance.  There were
three at least a quarter of a mile in length each and
from three to four feet deep.  These ran in parallel
lines and were about four paces apart.  Fifteen to
twenty shorter trenches cut through them at right
angles.

The sun was well above the horizon.  We lit our
pipes and sat down in the shade.  After a few moments
of silence he said: "I suppose you know what I'm doing
here?  If you have been in Papeete you must have
heard.  There is no secret about it—at least not any
longer."

I said that I had left Papeete shortly after my
arrival.  I had spent several idle afternoons on the
veranda of the Bougainville Club, but in the talk which
went around there I didn't remember having heard of
Pinaki.

"So much the better," he said.  "Yes, seven years is
a long time, and I'm not keen about feeding gossip;
but when I first came down here there was a clacking
of tongues from one end of the group to the other.  I
believe I have since earned the reputation of being
rather queer.  I thought you must know.  The fact
is I'm looking for treasure.  Would you care to hear
the story?"

"Very much," I said, "if it won't bore you to tell it."

"On the contrary, it will be something of a relief.
Seven years of digging, with nothing to show for it,
must strike an outsider as a mad business.  Sometimes
I'm half persuaded that I am a complete fool to
go on with the search.  But you can't possibly know
the fascination of it.  It seems only yesterday that I
came here.  As you see for yourself, it's not much of
an island.  And to know that there is a treasure of
more than three million pounds buried somewhere in
this tiny circle of scrub and palm—"

"But do you know it?" I asked.

"I'm as sure of it as that I am smoking your tobacco.
That is, I am sure it was buried here.  Whether it has
been removed since, I can't say, of course.  The
natives at Nukatavake remember a white man whom
they called Luta, who came here about twenty years ago
and remained for something over a month.  One of the
four men who stole the gold and brought it to Pinaki
was a man named Luke Barrett, and it may have been
he who came back, although he was supposed to have
been killed in Australia forty years ago.  It is the
uncertainty which makes this such killing work at
times.  But when I think of giving it up—you would
have to live with the thought of treasure for seven
years, and to dream at night of finding it, before you
could understand."  He rose suddenly.  "If you don't
mind a short walk, I will show you something rather
interesting."

We went along the lagoon beach for several hundred
yards, then crossed toward the ocean side.  Near
the center of the island we came upon an immense
block of coral broken from the reef and carried there
by some great storm of the past.  Cut deeply
into the face of the rock I saw a curious design:

.. _`design`:

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   design

I asked what it meant.

"Man, if I knew that!  I believe it's the key, and
I can't master it!  But we may as well sit down and be
comfortable.  If you would really care to hear the
story from the beginning it will take the better part
of an hour.  I'll not give you all the details; but
when I have finished you will be in a position to
judge for yourself whether or not I was mad in
coming here.

"Have you ever read Walker's book, *Undiscovered
Treasure*?  It doesn't matter, except that you have
missed a very entertaining volume.  It is a pity that
old work is out of print.  Nothing in it but bare facts
about all sorts of treasure supposed to have been
buried here and there about the world.  You might
think it would be dry, but I found it better company
than any romance I've ever read.  However, that has
nothing to do with this story, except in an indirect
way.  I first read the book as a boy and it started me
on my travels.

"To me the facts about this Pinaki treasure are as
interesting as any of Walker's.  He, of course, knew
nothing about it, for it had not been stolen when his
book was published.  Four men had a hand in the
business: a Spaniard named Alvarez; an Irishman
named Killorain; and two others of uncertain
nationality, Luke Barrett, whom I spoke of a moment ago,
and Archer Brown.  They were a thieving, murdering
lot by all accounts—adventurers of the worst sort;
and in hope of plunder, I suppose, had joined the
Peruvian army during the war with Chile in eighteen
fifty-nine to sixty.  Their hopes were realized beyond
all expectations.  They got wind of some gold buried
under the floor of a church, and the strange thing was
that the gold was there and they found it.  It was in
thirty-kilo ingots, contained in seven chests, the whole
lot worth in the neighborhood of three and a half
million pounds.  How they managed to get away with
it I don't know; but I have investigated the business
pretty thoroughly and I have every reason to believe
that they did.  They buried it again in the vicinity
of Pisco, and then set out in search of a vessel.
Alvarez was the only one of the four who had any
education.  They had all followed the sea at one time or
another, but he alone knew how to navigate.  The
others could hardly write their own names.  At
Panama they signed on as members of the crew of a
small schooner, and as soon as they had put to sea
knocked the captain and the two other sailors in the
head and chucked them overboard.  They returned
to Pisco, loaded the gold, and started for Paumotus.

"This was in the autumn of eighteen fifty-nine.  In
the December following they landed at Pinaki, where
they buried the treasure.  The island was uninhabited
then as now, and they crossed to Nukatavake to learn
the name of it.  The natives were shy, but they
persuaded one man to approach, and when they had the
information they wanted, shot him and rowed out
to their boat.  If you should go to Nukatavake you
will find two old men there who still remember the
incident.

"Then they went to Australia, scuttled their vessel
not far from Cooktown, and went ashore with a story
of shipwreck.  They had some of the gold with them—not
much in proportion to the amount of the treasure,
but enough to keep four ordinary men in comfort for
the rest of their lives.  It soon went, and the four
were next heard of at the Palmer gold fields.  Alvarez
and Barrett were both supposed to have been killed
there in a fight with some blacks.  Brown and Killorain
had not mended their ways to any extent, and both
were finally jerked up for manslaughter and sentenced
to twenty years' penal servitude.  Brown died in
prison, but Killorain served out his term, and finally
died in Sydney hospital in nineteen twelve.

"Most of these facts—if they are facts—I had from
Killorain himself the night before he died.  I met him
in a curious way; or, better, the meeting came as the
result of a curious combination of circumstances.
You may have noticed the scar on my side?"

I had noticed it, a broad gash puckered at the edges
where the flesh had healed, tapering to a point in the
middle of his back.

"It was not much of a wound," he went on, "but it
gave me a deal of trouble at the time.  I got it in New
Guinea in nineteen eleven, when I was prospecting for
gold in the back country.  I was a long way from a
settlement, and one day a nigger took it into his head
to stick me with a spear.  I suppose he wanted my
gun and ammunition, for I had little else excepting my
placer outfit.  I let him have one bullet from my Colt
just as he was about to dive into the bush, and for
all I know he may be lying there to this day.  I have
that little frizzly headed native to thank for my
knowledge of the Pinaki treasure.  Sometimes I am sorry
that I killed him; but at other times I feel that shooting
was altogether too easy a death for the man really
responsible for bringing me here.  I was in a bad way
from the wound.  Infection set in, and I had to nurse
myself somehow and get down to a place where I could
have medical attention.  I managed it, but the ten
days' journey was a nightmare.  I was nothing but
skin and bone when I left the hospital, and New
Guinea not being a likely place for a convalescent, the
doctor recommended me to go to Australia.

"I had a small bag of dust, the result of a year and
a half of heart-breaking work in the mountains.  Most
of it went for the hospital bill, and when I reached
Sydney I had very little left.  I was compelled to put
up at the cheapest kind of a boarding house, although
the woman who kept it was quite a decent sort.  Her
house was in a poor quarter of the town and her
patrons mostly longshoremen and teamsters.  It was a
wretched life for her, but she had two children to
support and was making the best of a bad job.  I
admired her pluck and did what I could in a small way
to help her out.

"One evening I was waiting for supper in the kitchen
when some one rapped.  Before I could go to the door,
it opened, and an old man came stumbling in, asking
for something to eat.  I thought he was drunk and
was about to hustle him back the way he came when
I noticed that he was wet through—it was a cold,
rainy night—and really suffering from exposure and
lack of food.  I made him remove his coat—he had
nothing on under it—but not without a great deal of
trouble, and he insisted on drying it across his knees.
He was a little wizened ape of an Irishman, about five
feet three or four in height, with deep-set blue eyes,
bushy eyebrows, a heavy, discolored mustache, and a
thick shock of white hair—altogether the most
frightful-looking little dwarf that ever escaped out of a
picture book.  He was tatooed all over the arms and
chest—Hands Across the Sea, the Union Jack, a
naked woman—several other designs common in
waterfront tatooing parlors.

"His body was as shriveled as a withered apple, but
his little bloodshot eyes blazed like bits of live coal.
Except for the fire in them, he might have been a
hundred years old and, as a matter of fact, he wasn't
a great way from it.  Eighty-seven, he told me, and
that is about all he did tell me.  He gorged some food
and was all for getting away at once.  But it had set
in to rain very hard and I persuaded him to wait until
the worst of it was over.  He was very suspicious at
first.  I believe he expected me to call a policeman.
Later he thawed a little, and became even talkative
in a surly way when I told him, with the landlady's
consent, that he might stay the night if he had no
place else to go.  Wouldn't hear of it, though.  He
said he had a job as night watchman at Rush-cutters'
Bay.  That might or might not have been true.  At
any rate, I went with him to the car line—the boarding
house was a good mile from Rush-cutters' Bay—and
gave him a couple of shillings, as a loan, I said.  He
could return it sometime.  Just before I left him he
asked for my name and address, mumbling something
about doing me a bit of good one of these days.  He
was insistent, so I gave it to him, but not at all
willingly.  He had frightened Mrs. Sharpe, the landlady,
just by the way he looked at her, and I didn't want
him coming back.

"He didn't come back.  That was in May, nineteen
twelve, and I heard nothing more of him until September.
I was still at the boarding house, getting slowly
better, but not yet good for anything.  I kept out of
doors as much as possible, took long walks in the
country and along the waterfront looking at ships.
When I came in one evening Mrs. Sharpe told me that
an attendant from the Sydney hospital had called
twice during the day.  An old man named Killorain, a
patient at the hospital, wanted to see me.  The name
meant nothing to me and I couldn't imagine who the
man could be.  The attendant called again later in the
evening.  Killorain was about to die, he said, and
wouldn't give them any peace until I was brought to
see him.

"It was getting on toward midnight when we reached
the hospital.  The old man was in one of the public
wards.  I recognized him at once, although he had
shriveled away to nothing at all.  It was impossible
to forget his eyes, once you had seen them.  He was
dying—no doubt of it, but I could see that he wasn't
going to die until he was ready.

"'Sit down close here,' he said.  'I'm glad you
came.  You did me a good turn once and I haven't
forgot it.  Few good turns I've had in my life.  Not
so many but what I can remember the lot.'  The night
nurse had approached quietly and was standing on the
other side of the bed.  All at once he saw her.  'Hey,
you!' he said.  'Grease off out of this!  Stand over
there on the other side of the room where I can watch
you!'  When she had gone he rose from his pillow and
looked cautiously around the room.  The beds on
either side of him were empty.  There was a patient
in the one across the aisle, but he was sleeping.
Killorain watched him for a moment to make sure of this.
Then he motioned me with his finger to come still
closer.  'Listen!' he said.  'I've cut more throats in
my time than you might think.'  Sounds a bit stagey,
doesn't it?  But these were his exact words.  Nothing
remarkable about them, of course.  Throat-cutting is
still a fairly thriving business.  I waited for him to go
on.  He again looked up and down the room, and then
asked me to hand him the coat which was lying across
the foot of the bed.  It was the same coat he had been
wearing in May, when he came to the boarding house.

"'When they brought me here,' he said, 'they took
my clothes, and I've had some trouble getting this
back.'  The attendant had told me as much.  The old man
had raised the very devil of a row until it was found.
He asked me to rip open the lining of the right sleeve
and to give him the paper I would find there.  It was a
soiled, greasy sheet of foolscap, pasted on a piece of
cloth.  'Once,' he went on, 'you gave me two shillings
for car fare to Rush-cutters' Bay.  It probably wasn't
any hardship on you, but never mind about that.
You said I could pay it back if I'd a mind to.  Well,
I'm going to pay it back with a bit of interest.  I'm
going to give you this paper, and it's as good as three
million pound notes of the Bank of England.'

"I thought, of course, that he was completely off his
chump, and the fear that I would think so was
uppermost in his mind.  He kept repeating that he was old
and worn out, but that his mind was clear.  'Don't you
think I'm balmy,' he said.  'I know what I'm talking
about as well as I know I'm going to die before
morning.'  He gave me a circumstantial account of the
whole affair.  I have outlined it briefly.  There were
many other interesting facts, but it is not worth while
to speak of them here.  As he talked, the conviction
grew upon me that he was perfectly sane and was
telling the truth.  He went over the chart with me.
It had been made by Alvarez, the scholar of the party,
he said.  There had been a good deal of quarreling and
fighting later for the possession of it.

"Before I left him he made me promise that I would
go to Pinaki.  He wouldn't rest easy in his grave, he
said, unless he knew that I was looking for the treasure.
'It's there, and it will always be there if you're bloody
fool enough to think I'm queer.  It ain't likely I'd
lie to you on my deathbed.'  Rest easy in his grave!
There was an odd glimpse into his mind.  He wasn't
worrying about his crimes, and there were enough of
them, according to his own confession.  It was the
thought of the gold lying forever forgotten which
worried him.  He could rest quietly if he knew before
he died that some one else was fighting and throat-cutting
over it.  I asked him why he hadn't gone back
for it himself.  He told me that of the fifty-three years
since it had been buried he had spent forty in prison
and the rest of the time he was trying to earn or steal
the money to buy a schooner.  I told him that I would
come back to see him the following day.  'You needn't
bother,' he said.  'I'm finished.'  And it was true.
He died three hours later.

"I tried to forget the incident, but it was one of those
things which refuse to be forgotten.  It was always in
the back of my head.  I decided to check up Killorain's
story where I could.  I made inquiries in Peru,
and found that the gold had actually been stolen.  The
dates and circumstances coincided with his account.
A friend in the customs at Cooktown confirmed for me
the story of four shipwrecked sailors who landed in
February, eighteen sixty, from a ship called the *Bosun
Bird*.  I had a small piece of property on the outskirts
of Cooktown which I had bought years ago.  With the
money realized from the sale of it I took passage for
Tahiti on my way to Pinaki.

"That voyage was the longest one I have ever made.
By that time the thought of those seven chests of gold,
all in thirty-kilo ingots, was with me twenty-four hours
out of the twenty-four.  Yes, even at night.  I slept
very little, and when I did it was to dream of hunting
for the treasure; of finding it.  I became suspicious of
a villainous-looking old man who was traveling third
class.  I thought he might be Brown or Luke Barrett.
Perhaps they were not dead, after all.  At Papeete I
told no one of my purpose there, with the exception of
one governmental official.  If the treasure should be
found the French government would have a claim to
certain percentage on uncoined gold, and I meant to be
aboveboard in my dealings with it.  This official was
sworn to secrecy, but the business leaked out eventually
and created a great deal of excitement.  I was
immensely annoyed, of course, for I had guarded the
secret as well as old Killorain ever had.  However, I
had in my pocket all the necessary papers, drawn up
accurately, witnessed, signed, and sealed.  I went on
with my preparations, and finally, in February, nineteen
thirteen, I was put ashore from a small cutter, not four
hundred yards from where we are sitting.

"I started the search before the cutter was two miles
on the return voyage.  For two months I slept in the
open—had no time to build a house—and ate tinned
food which I had brought with me.  Killorain's chart
was of but little use.  It made reference to trees which
had long since rotted away or had been cut down by
the natives of Nukatavake.  The marks which I found
corresponded precisely with those on the chart, but
several of the most important ones were missing."

The treasure hunter rose.  "Well," he said, "there's
the end of the story.  You know the rest of it."

"But I don't know the rest at all!" I said.  "You
have left out the most interesting part.  Tell me
something of your life here."

"You have seen three days of it.  It has gone on for
seven years in the same way."

"You were diving just now in the lagoon.  Do you
think the gold may have been buried there or that the
land has fallen away?"

"My dear fellow, I'll not weary you with an account
of what I think.  It's rather warm here.  Shall we go
back to the house?"

I was hoping for a week of calm, and when we went
to bed that evening there was reason to believe we might
have it.  A few hours later, however, I was awakened
by the Englishman.  "There's going to be a bit of a
blow presently," he said.  "Your skipper has just sent
for you.  He wants to get away at once."

The stars had been blotted out.  The wind was
soughing in the palms, and the waves slapping briskly
on the lagoon beach.  Our farewell was a brief one.

"When shall you come to Tahiti?" I asked.

"Not until I have found what I'm looking for."

"Well," I said, "I hope that will be soon."

But if he holds fast to his resolve my belief is that
it will be never.





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.. _`Aboard the "Potii Ravarava"`:

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   Conclusion

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   Woodcut

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   CHAPTER XVIII

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   Aboard the *Potii Ravarava*

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I was awaiting Hall's arrival in Tahiti,
confident that sooner or later he would
keep a vague rendezvous set months
before.  I knew that by this time he
must have penetrated far into the sea
of atolls, traveling in the leisurely manner of these
latitudes, transferring from one schooner to the next
and stopping over—for weeks at a time, perhaps—in
the tranquil and lonely communities he had grown to
love.  Once or twice—when a dingy Paumotu schooner,
deep laden with copra and crowded with pearl divers
eager for a whirl of gayety in the island capital, crept
into the pass—I had word of him, but there was no
hint of return.

It was a month of calms: long days when the lagoon,
unruffled by the faintest cat's-paw, shimmered in the
blinding sunlight, while the sea outside seemed to
slumber, stirring gently and drowsily along the reef.
Once, at midday, a three-masted schooner with all sails
furled and Diesel engines going, came in to waken the
town with the hoarse clamor of her exhaust.  An hour
later I met her skipper on the street.

"Your friend Hall is homeward bound," he told
me.  "I spoke the *Potii Ravarava*, a bit of a
thirty-ton native schooner, off Nukatavake, and he was
aboard of her—she ought to be in some time this
week."

The days passed in the rapid and dreamy fashion
peculiar to the South Seas.  From time to time I
thought of Hall and his diminutive schooner drifting
about becalmed among the coral islands, or perhaps
only a score of miles off Tahiti, helpless to reach the
sighted land.  The *Potii Ravarava* was a full week
overdue when the calm weather came to an end.  The
heat was intense that afternoon, and toward sunset
towering masses of cloud began to pile up along the
horizon to the north.  The sky grew black; there was
a tense hush in the air, vibrant with the far-off rumble
of thunder.  When I strolled out along the waterfront
the people were gathering in anxious groups before their
houses; I heard snatches of talk: "Have you noticed
the glass?  Things have an ugly look....  Hope it
doesn't mean another cyclone....  The town will
catch it if the sea begins to rise."

I had heard of the hurricane of 1906, when the sea
rose and reached clean into the harbor, driving the
population of Papeete to the hills.  On Motu Uta, an
islet in the bay, a white man was living with his
Paumotuan wife.  When the angry seas began to race in
over the reef without a pause, sweeping the islet from
end to end, the watchers ashore gave the pair up for lost.
But the woman was a Low-Islander, and just before
dawn, when the coconut palm in which she had taken
refuge was swept away, she swam six hundred yards
to shore and landed through a surf a sea otter would
have hesitated to attempt.  Next day they found the
drowned and battered body of her husband drifting
with dead pigs and horses and a litter of wreckage from
the lower portions of the town.

Possibly Tahiti was in for another hurricane.  When
I glanced at my barometer after dinner, it was falling
with ominous rapidity, and at bedtime the glass stood
lower than I had seen it in the South Seas.  In the
small hours of the morning a servant came to waken
me.  There was a new sound in the air—the uproar
of surf breaking on the inner shore of the lagoon.

"The sea is rising," said Tara; "the waves are
breaking under the *purau* trees, and if you do not come
quickly to help me our canoe will be washed away."

The stars were hidden by black clouds, and though
scarcely a breath of air stirred, the level of the lagoon
was four feet above its normal limit, and the sheltered
water, usually so calm, was agitated by a heavy swell.
Then the rain came—drumming a thunderous monotone
on my tin roof—and after the rain the wind.  At
dawn, though a seventy-mile gale was blowing out of
the northeast, it was obvious that ali danger of a
hurricane was past.  At midday the glass began to rise
and before dark the wind was falling away perceptibly.

More than once during the night I had thought of
Hall out somewhere on the wild and lonely sea to the
east.  The *Potii Ravarava* was reputed an able little
boat—with proper offing she would probably come
through worse than this.  But she had no engine, and
if she had been caught in the Paumotu—the Dangerous
Archipelago, where unknown currents and a maze of
reefs make navigation ticklish in the best of
weather—there was cause for anxiety.

The storm blew itself out in two days' time, and on
the evening of the third day I was standing on the
water front with a group of traders and schooner
captains.  They were speaking of the *Potii Ravarava*,
by this time the object of mild misgivings, when one of
the skippers gave a sudden shout.

"There she is now!" he announced and, looking up,
I saw a deeply laden little schooner, with patched
grayish sails, rounding the point of Fareute.  Presently she
turned into the wind, dropped anchor, and sent a boat
ashore—a few moments later I was welcoming Hall—very
thin, raggedly dressed, and brown as a Paumotuan.
His eyes were smiling, but they had in them a look
unmistakable when once seen—the expression of a
hunger greater than most of us have known.

"Hello!" he said.  "Come along to the hotel—it
must be dinner time.  By Jove!  I feel as though I
could eat a raw shark!"

When he had eaten two dinners complete—from soup
to black coffee, and beginning with soup again—he lit a
cigarette and told me the story of his return from the
Low Islands.

"It was all right," he began, "until we left Hao.  The
palm tops were still in sight on the horizon when the
breeze died away, and we drifted for seven whole days in
a broiling, glassy calm.  It was a curious experience,
but one I would not care to repeat.

"You've seen the schooner—she's not much bigger
than a sea-going canoe.  There were four of us
aboard—Miti the skipper, a Paumotuan and a seaman by
instinct, though he knows nothing of latitude of
longitude; two sailors, one of whom has a horrible case
of elephantiasis; and myself.  We had a tremendous
load of copra for so small a boat; the hold was crammed
with it and the cabin stuffed to the ceiling.  Opposite
the companionway they had left out a few bags at the
top, giving a space two feet high and just wide enough
for two men to sleep side by side in case of rain or bad
weather.  Our stove was merely a box of sand in which
a fire could be lighted, set in a little box of a galley
tacked to the forward deck.  If we had had anything
to cook, the galley might have been useful; but Miti
had given away nearly all of the ship's provisions to
his relatives on Hao.  They gave him a feast while
some copra was being loaded, and when the job was
finished he gave a feast in return.  The two sailors
looked sour while they watched the people opening
their biscuit and salmon and bully-beef, but, after all,
the prevailing winds are fair, and normally the passage
to Tahiti wouldn't take more than ten days.  Miti
overdid the giving-away business, however.  When we
took stock of our *kaikai* on the first day of the calm I
found he had saved only half a tin of biscuit and a few
cans of salmon.  In addition to this, we had a parting
gift of a sack of drinking nuts and a couple of dozen
ripe nuts some one was sending to Tahiti for seed.  I
had grown fed up on the sort of water these schooners
carry—stale, and full of wriggling young mosquitoes—and
by great good fortune I had a three-gallon demi-john,
sent by Tino, of the *Winship*, which I filled with
fresh rain water at Hao.

"My demijohn lasted precisely a day and a half.
All hands drank out of it, but I did not complain of
their lavishness—there was supposed to be a barrel
of water somewhere below.  Those were thirsty days.
We rigged up an awning with part of an old mainsail;
I spent most of my time lying in the hot shade, reading
the one book I had with me—Froissart's *Chronicles of
England, France, and Spain*.  The days seemed
interminable....  The starlight paled; the sun rose to
glare down hour after hour on the face of a motionless
and empty sea, and set at last on a horizon void of
clouds.  Sometimes I dozed; sometimes I watched the
reflections of the bowsprit.  It was painted gray,
with a bright-red tip—and, seen in the faintly heaving
water, it looked like a long, gray snake spitting fire as it
writhed in graceful undulations.  The sufferer from
elephantiasis turned out to be an extraordinary man;
it was not worth while to keep watches during the calm,
and, as there was no work of any importance, he retired
to the stifling cubby-hole among the copra sacks and
slept—slept from dawn to darkness and from dark to
dawn again.  Now and then, at long intervals, he
appeared on deck; once I went aft for a look at him,
lying naked except for a *pareu*—mouth open and
swollen limbs sprawled on the uneven surface of the
copra.  Miti and Teriaa showed a different side of
native character.  The schooner belonged to the captain,
and keeping her trim gave him the same delight a
man feels in buying pretty clothes for his mistress.
The young sailor was Miti's nephew, and the pair of
them worked tirelessly in the sun, scraping her rail
and topsides in preparation for a fresh coat of paint.
It was strange, when I was deep in Froissart's sieges and
battles and stories of court life, to glance up from my
book and see the vacant rim of the horizon, the
silhouette of the foremast against a hot blue sky, and the
two Kanakas endlessly at work—scrape, scrape, scrape;
an exchange of low-toned remarks; a chuckle as they
heard the gentle snores of the sleeping man below.

"Nearly every day our hopes were raised by deceitful
cat's-paws, heralded by far-off streaks of blue.  Some
died before they reached us; others, after a preliminary
rustle and flutter, filled our sails and set the schooner
to moving gently on her course ... only to die away
and leave the sea glassy as before.

"On the second day the sharks began to gather in
their uncanny fashion, as they always do about a
vessel becalmed or in distress.  I spent hours watching
them—ugly blots in the clear blue water, waiting
with a grim and hopeful patience for some happening
which would provide them with a meal.  They circled
about the schooner in deliberate zigzags, or lay motionless
in the shadow of her side, attended always by their
odd little striped pilot fish.  I learned to recognize one
ponderous old gray shark; he had a brace of pilot fish,
one swimming on each side of his head—and he wasn't
afraid of us in the least.  Sometimes he lay for an hour
within a yard of the vessel's side; I could see the
texture of his rough skin and the almost imperceptible
motion of fins and tail.  I can understand now the hatred
sharks inspire in men who follow the sea—it wasn't
long before I decided to try to kill the big, insolent
brute.  We hadn't as much as a hook and line on
board, but finally, with a file and the point of a rusty
boat hook, I improvised a makeshift sort of spear.
Armed with this, I waited by the rail until my victim
came in range, and then lunged down with all my
strength.  The spear glanced off his tough hide; he
swam away in a leisurely manner, turned, and a moment
later was again beneath me.  This time I struck him
fair on the back, but it was like trying to kill an elephant
with a penknife.  I think the point of my boat hook
punctured him, but he only circled off again and
returned to give me another chance.  In the end I gave
up and left him in possession of the field.

"The nights, when the air had cooled and the stars
were blazing overhead, were so beautiful that one hated
to fall asleep.  Reflection made sky and sea alike—dark
backgrounds for the myriad lights of the
constellations.  Lying on deck while the others slept, I
used to regret that I had not learned something of
astronomy—the average native sailor knows more
about the stars than I.  Orion I knew; the Pleiades,
which the natives, with a rather pretty fancy, call
Matariki, the Little Eyes; and the Scorpion, believed
in heathen times to be the great fish hook of Maui,
flung into the sky by the god, when he had finished
pulling up islands from the bottom of the Pacific.
Each night I watched the rising of the Southern Cross,
and low down in the south I saw the Magellanic clouds,
streamers of star dust, like vapor impalpable and remote.
In spite of my companions, sleeping quietly on deck,
those nights gave me a sense of overwhelming loneliness:
the languid air; the solitary ship, immobile on
the face of a lifeless sea; the immense expanse of the
universe, ablaze with the light of distant suns....

"When our water gave out I began to prefer the
nights to the days.  My demijohn, as I told you,
lasted only a day and a half.  After that we used the
drinking nuts, and not until the last of them was gone
did anyone think of investigating the water cask.
There was consternation when we discovered that it
contained only three or four inches of rusty water—either
it leaked or the skipper was remarkably careless.
Hoping all the time for a breeze or a squall of rain,
we began on the half sack of ripe nuts—thin, sharp
stuff for drinking, but the lot of them went in a day.
Then we went on rations, dealt out from the barrel with
a soup spoon.  Finally the barrel was dry, and we
went two days with nothing of any kind to drink.  It
was no joke—if you've ever had a real thirst, you'll
know what I mean.  The natives stood it wonderfully
well; Miti did not once complain, though he remarked
to me that when he got ashore he was planning to
"drink too much coconut"!  The victim of *feefee*
continued his slumberous routine—I wondered if he
were dreaming of rustling palms and shaded, gurgling
rivulets.  It was my first experience of thirst; odd
what an utter animal one becomes at such a time.
Waking and sleeping, my head was filled with dreams
of water, brooks, rivers, lakes of cool, fresh water, in
which to bury one's face and drink.  I dreamed of
locks and highland burns in Scotland; of the gorge of
Fautaua on Tahiti, where only a few months before I
had stood in the mist, listening to the roar of the
Cataract.

"Well, it wasn't much fun—another day or two might
have been unendurable.  We had one comfort, at any
rate—if you're thirsty enough, you don't worry about
eating.  By the time we had finished the salmon and
biscuit we had ceased to bother about food.  On the
last night of the calm none of us slept, unless it was
the sailor in his den among the copra sacks.  At dawn
Miti touched my shoulder and pointed to the south,
where the paling stars were obscured by banks of cloud.
An hour later the rain water was streaming out of the
scuppers and spouting off one end of our awning into
the barrel, hastily recoopered in case of leaks.  When
the squall passed and the sun shone down on a
dark-blue leaping sea we were running before a fine breeze
from the southeast.

"Now that our thirst was satisfied and we had
plenty of water in reserve we discovered suddenly
that we were starving.  Miti prowled about below
and came on deck with a package of rice, stowed away
during some previous voyage.  It was a valuable find,
for we had nothing else to eat.  There was copra, of
course, which the natives will eat in a pinch, but the
rancid smell of the stuff was too much for me.  The
wind held, and finally a day came when the skipper
announced that we ought to raise Tahiti soon.  About
midday his nephew, who was perched in the shrouds,
sang out that he had sighted land.  I had a look and
saw on the horizon a flat blur, like the palm tops of
a distant atoll.  As we drew near the land rose higher
and higher out of the sea—it was Makatea, and we
were more than a hundred miles north of our course.
No meal I have ever eaten tasted so good as the dinner
Miti's relatives gave us that night!

"We got away next morning, with a liberal stock of
provisions and an additional passenger for Tahiti—a
philosophic pig, who traveled lashed under one of the
seats of the ship's boat.  For three hours we ran before
a fresh northwesterly breeze, but about nine o'clock
the wind dropped and soon the sails were hanging limp
in a dead calm.  I began to suspect that the man
with the swollen legs was a Jonah of the first order.
This time, however, the calm was soon over; heavy
greenish-black clouds were drifting down on us from
the north; the sunlight gave place to an evil violet
gloom.  Miti and his two men sprang into a sudden
activity; they battened down the forward hatch, put
extra lashings on the boat, double-reefed the foresail,
and got in everything else.  Then, in the breathless
calm, a downpour of rain began to lash the sea with a
strange, murmuring sound.  I thought of an ominous
old verse:

   |  "If the wind before the rain,
   |  Sheet your topsails home again;
   |  If the rain before the wind,
   |  Then your topsail halyards mind.
   |

"It was a disagreeable moment.  Even the pig felt
it, for when the sailors moved him to a place in the bow
of the dory he refrained from the usual shrill protest.
One detail sticks in my memory—when the skipper
had taken his place at the wheel he gave a sudden
order; the man with the swollen legs shuffled hastily to
where the boat was lashed down and pulled out the
plug from its bottom.  Then came the wind.

"It swept down on us from the north-northeast,
from the quarter in which hurricanes begin—and the
first furious gust was a mild sample of what was to
come.  When Miti got her laid to, heading at a slight
angle into the seas, I realized the splendid qualities of
the little *Potii Ravarava*.  No small vessel could have
kept her decks dry in the sea that made up within an
hour.  The captain never left the wheel, and I doubt
if there's a finer helmsman in the South Seas, but
before noon the galley—with our entire supply of food
was swept clean overboard, and time after time the
lashed-down boat was filled.  The pig had worked
himself free except for one hind leg, tied to a bottom
board with a rough strip of hibiscus bark, and as the
water drained out slowly through the unplugged hole
astern the agitated surface would be broken by his
snout, emitting sputtering screams.  He lived through
it, by the way.

"All of us, I believe, thought that we were in for a
hurricane.  Every hour the violence of the wind
increased; it was a gale from the north-northeast—the
wind called by the ancient Polynesians the Terrible
Maoake.  It seemed to rush at us in paroxysms of
fury, tearing off the entire crests of waves and hurling
solid water about as though it were spray.  The
forward hatch leaked badly; when I think of that
storm my memory is filled with a nightmare of endless
pumping.

"A day and a night passed, and dawn found us riding
a mountainous sea, but the wind was abating and our
decks were dry.  The victim of elephantiasis had been
taking spells with me at the pump.  He is a man,
that fellow, in spite of his loathsome infirmity.  The
pump began to suck up bubbles and froth.  Miti's eyes
are sharp.

"'Enough pumping,' he shouted.  'Go and sleep, you two!'

"We obeyed the order with alacrity.  Sleeping on
deck was out of the question; without an instant of
hesitation I crawled in among the copra sacks beside
my repulsive companion.  When I awoke it was
evening and we were running, with a heavy following
wind.  Miti was still at the helm; red eyed from
want of sleep, but whirling the spokes dexterously as
each big sea passed beneath us and gazing ahead for
the first glimpse of Tahiti.  The clouds broke just
before dark, and we had a glimpse of the high ridges
of Taiarapu, dead ahead.  We got sail on her at that,
and stood off to the northwest, past the Bay of Taravao
and the sunken reefs of Hitiaa.  Toward morning we
raised Point Venus Light, but the wind failed in the lee
of the island, and it took us all day to reach Papeete
harbor."

.. vspace:: 2

Hall finished his story in the dark.  The last of the
diners had gone long since, and, save for ourselves, the
broad veranda was empty.

"What are your plans?" I asked.  "Our year in the
South Seas is up.  Where are you going now?"

"I have no plans," he said, "except that I doubt
if I shall ever go north again.  I may be wrong, but
I believe I've had enough of civilization to last me the
rest of my life.  We are happy here.  Why should
we leave the islands?"

I fancy the South Seas have claimed the pair of us.

.. vspace:: 3

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   THE END

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   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

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.. class:: center large bold

   Faery Lands of the South Pacific

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   Drop-capital Letters

.. vspace:: 2

.. _`Chapter I - I`:

.. figure:: images/img-cap-01-i.jpg
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   :align: center
   :alt: Chapter I - I

   Chapter I - I

.. vspace:: 1

.. _`Chapter II - R`:

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   :alt: Chapter II - R

   Chapter II - R

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   :alt: Chapter III - T

   Chapter III - T

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   :alt: Chapter IV - I

   Chapter IV - I

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   :alt: Chapter V - W

   Chapter V - W

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   :alt: Chapter VI - C

   Chapter VI - C

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   :alt: Chapter VII - P

   Chapter VII - P

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   :alt: Chapter VIII - I

   Chapter VIII - I

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   :alt: Chapter IX - T

   Chapter IX - T

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   :alt: Chapter X - F

   Chapter X - F

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   :alt: Chapter XI - T

   Chapter XI - T

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   :alt: Chapter XII - I

   Chapter XII - I

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   :alt: Chapter XIII - Y

   Chapter XIII - Y

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   :alt: Chapter XIV - I

   Chapter XIV - I

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   :alt: Chapter XV - T

   Chapter XV - T

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   :alt: Chapter XVI - O

   Chapter XVI - O

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   :alt: Chapter XVII - I

   Chapter XVII - I

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   :alt: Chapter XIII - I

   Chapter XIII - I

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