 CHAPTER IV The Land of Ahu-Ahu 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 towards the horizon and never see a sail nor a distant trail of smoke to liven the dark blue desert of the Pacific. The cliffs themselves are changed, the reef of an ancient atoll, uprised in some convulsion of the earth to form a ring of coral limestone, sheer precipice 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, this 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, rudder, 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 a living commune nightly with the old dead who lie in the moire. It was an hour before sunset when we sighted the land. The merest blue irregularity on the horizon visible from once perched 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 bulricks with eyes alight. The island had not been visited for six months. We carried a cargo of extraordinary variety, hardware, bolts of calico, soap, lumber, jewelry, iron roofing, cement, groceries, phonograph records, and 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, and staple luxuries of modern Polynesia, and, most important of all, six heavy bags of mail. As we drew near the island toward midnight, I gave up the attempt to sleep in my berth and went on deck to spread a mat besides Tari, our supercargo Hu-Leaft of the main mast, 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 flow 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 commutalsong. It was a species of chant with responses for 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, Carre are no alas, terry turn to me. They sing well, he said, those 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 of breeze. It would tell you you were in the islands if you were set down here blindfolded 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 a one-time voyage, chanting a song of thanksgiving to the gods who have brought us safely home. He isn't by no means the traditional supercargo of a trading schooner. Yes, terry, 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 in Nukatari, 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, Perin, Reketanga, Tupai, the atolls of the Palamutu, he speaks a dozen of the island dialects can join in the singing of the Yudhis 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 clothes 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 Galapali, 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 Terry his DCM, and there they were at the dock when the transport offloaded. 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 get 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 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, you swept his hand through this soft darkness, the beauty, the sense of remoteness, the vague and agreeable melancholy of these places. Then I, like the way the years slipped 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 fruitful 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 kinds 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 that the Kanakas are 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. Another point of view is to alien, to 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 have much faith, trace them back along the path of successive migrations through Indonesia to Northern India or the land of the Kushites. In any case, I believe that the blood we term Caucasian flows in their veins. The legacies of ancestors separated from the parent stocks so long ago that mankind had not yet learned the use of iron. And they are old, these island tribes, who were discovering new islands in the Pacific in the days when our forefathers were the horns or bulls upon their heads. Don't judge them in the present, or even in a 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 today, a tragedy and 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 seem 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. Her redditary 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 had been and what I had 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 Rakamona, who lived twenty-eight generations, seven hundred years ago, and is buried in the big marie 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 Rakamona, 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 thing she told me without accepting her own explanation. Strange if there were a germ of truth in the legend. Of how the old seagoing canoes were navigated, the priests in a state of trance directing the helmsmen, which weighed a steer for land. There's another old woman on Aahu, Aahu, whose yarns are worth hearing. Many years ago a Yankee wailing 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 Aahu, Aahu 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 of his welfare. Several months after his departure, the tragedy occurred described in detail by the obliging and sympathetic dweller in the Maury. It was a kind of vision, as told to me, singularly vivid for an effort of pure imagination. The open Pacific, heaving gently, ruffled by a light air. Two boats from rival vessels pursuing the same whale, the Portuguese harpooners standing in the boughs of one, erect an 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 tangy. One might have thought, in an excellent tale, concocted to save the face of a deserted wife, if the same vessel had not called at Aho Aho 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 A.I. Toaki, 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 had promised to go fishing on the reap when the tide served an hour after midnight. You know how the spirits of the dead were believed to flee westward to Habaiki, 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 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 fron dropped in the distance. I was still lying awake when my fishing companions came to get me, little ahead of time for, like me, they had been unable to sleep. We would wait on the reef, they'd suggested, while it was sure to be cool until the tide was right. We were sitting on a 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 Artugov 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 tortoise, 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 a breast of us, moving with the rush of a swift motorboat and passed on out to sea. I was too amazed to think clearly until I heard one of the boys whisper to another. Koumeita ita kareke. 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. It was late. The singing died away. The lights in the village went out one by one. The passage in the Ahoahu reef is a bad place by daylight. The chances were that no canoes would risk it till dawn. Terry 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. An unpleasant contrast to the usual ennoblin 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 Terry. 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 gift for which she waited with sparkling eyes. On his rambles about the island, little girl followed Terry with a 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, Tyche, my Terry, and he waited while his small follower managed some difficult pile of coral in the rear. Their friendship had only Terry'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, the 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 Aho Aho, equally fascinating and long drawn out. It is not difficult to reconstruct this scene in imagination. Terry, comfortable and bare feet, and Apakura 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. Terry 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 Terry. 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, exclaim the astonished Terry, to whom in truth the idea had not occurred? Yes, why not? You need a wife. Now that the little affair of Tukanahne has blown over. But think, mama, I am forty and the child is sixteen and is not fitting. Young wives are best if they are faithful. Epicurl will never look at another man. I will think it over, said Terry. 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 Terry 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 companion way. All at once he saw the helmsman. An ahu ahu boy he had known since childhood. Lift his eyes from the bandical and grin from ear to ear. At the same moment Terry felt a hand slip into his own, and heard a small familiar voice say, and here it was Apakura. More serious than usual and a little frightened, but not to be put off longer. They were married into a heady 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 dawn, in the east the sky was flushing behind scattered banks of trade wind clouds, tinted in wonderfully delicate shades of terracotta. 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 to 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 plumbed 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. Apokuro 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. Terry was awaiting the coming of the traders for the schooner was stocked with the good Tahiti rum, and the rites of welcome would take place on board. There they are, he said, pointing to two white figures, waiting gingerly across the shallow lagoon to the reef. You're going to meet a pair of rare ones. They've been harddoers 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. Terry chuckled. No use trying to hurry them, he told me. They're discussing the loss of the Esperanza. She went ashore here in the late 90s, a full rigged ship. Peter was one of her crew. Charlie had just come here to trade and saw the whole thing. They've spent 20 years thrashing out the question of whether or not the wreck might have been avoided every morning after breakfast. Charlie 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. Charlie's an American and old man now, close to seventy. He put in thirty years on Hiva'oa in the Marquises 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 in 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 Pappiti, 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, stooping, Charlie 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 and 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, Charlie took off his tunic of white dill, and as he sat there in his singlet I saw that his arms and chest, like his face, were tanned to an incredible dull brown, and that patterns of 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. Yee! He said slowly in native fashion. I remember him well. He came to Hivaora, with the casco. A funny fellow he was, then. 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. I 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 inn, garrulous old age, seized his glass and held it up. Hurrah! he explained. Down she goes, draw, Charlie, and Tari murmured, Cheerio! At the end of two hours Charlie'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 man. I've got to go ashore. Akatora 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 wedding. The people crowded about Tari, laughing, shaking his hand, speaking all at once, an unmistakable warmth of welcome. The settlement reached by short. Steep trail lies at the base of a break in the cliffs, at the door of her mother's house. Apocura Metis 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 scars of old coral cuts. A twisting path, cobbled and wide enough to walk to a breast, led us to the summit. The stones were worn smooth by the passage of bare feet, for accepting 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 embedded 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 Makatera 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 path, sparsely wooded and cultivated in spots where a thin soil has gathered in the hollows. We halted under one of 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 firm covered, draining in every direction toward the foot of the Makariel, 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 dykes, 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 and 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 tromps I came upon a large house built of bamboo and pandalus. 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 kindness 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 distorted heap of manuscript. Otherwise the place was unfurnished except for books, ranged and crude bookcases, tear upon tear, stacked here and there, in precarious piles, standing in rows along the floor. I'm 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 in 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 Magorician, on the other hand one finds, everywhere in the western islands, the traces of their passage, far out in the Orient, in isolated groups of the coast of Sumatra, about Java, and the Celebris, in the Arufa 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 that 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 Rautanga, it is Vain. In Tehiti, Bahain. In Marquis, Vihin. In Hawaii, Bahaini. In Samoan, Bahfain. The same route runs through the dialects of Papua. In Matu, woman is Hibain. In Carpocounu, Bahain. In Amorne, Bahain. And in Matugu, it is Va. Which, in this part of the Pacific, means variously female, seed, and rain. I can 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 Tehiti, they have another word. Mahana. In New Guinea, 3,500 miles away, and with all Melanesia between, the tribes of South Cape call the sun Mahana. What a puzzle it is. Though it may be the merest coincidences that Ra, as a flavor of Egypt, I wonder if there could be a connection. I used to know a girl in Tehiti who 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 Aho Aho 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 were interested in ghosts, you had better change your mind. I have a fine collection here. The house is built on the site of a tumbled down Mahare. There is our white rooster, the spirit of an old sheep, 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 Marika, and the prospect of crossing the dykes among the taro and scaling the cliff by dark drove me at last to take reluctant leave. Labs 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. Tarry was alone on the verandahs, 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 hymns, and put away the family Bible. Now she has gone to the house of one of her pals for a session with old Rakamona. Like the land itself, the people are relics of an elder time, pure heathen at heart. CHAPTER V. A MEMORY OF MAUKEY. We cited Mauke 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 Peru. 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-biscuit, and gazing ahead for the expected land. The day broke wild and gray, with clouds scuttling low over the sea, in squalls of rain. Since we had left Majina the day before it had blown heavily from the southeast. A big sea was running, but in spite of sixty tons of cobra the schooner was reeling off the knots in racing style, running almost free, with the winds well aft of the beam, rising interminably in 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 Maoki, which gave us the chance of rising Mialto, or Aitu, if we missed the first island. But ocean currents are on certain 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 a 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 two starverts so near that we could see the white breakers on the reef, was Mawki. 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 mannion. 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 be 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. Arore, he sang out, dwelling long on the last syllable of this Cook Island version of Hard Aloe. The schooner rounded into the wind with a ponderous deliberation calculated to make the nerves of a fairweather sailor twitch. She seemed to hesitate, like a fat and fluttering grandmother, at last after an age of bobbing and ducking into the head seas while boom tackles were made fast and head sails back. She made up her mind and felled 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 steerage away. The skipper sniffed a pretty sniff. They are old friends. If this damn fine schooner was yours, he observed, without turning his head. She had been piling 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 and 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 sketches 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 his cabin-boy on vessels plying the great lakes. He drifted further west to become a rider of the range. Finally he reached San Francisco and took to the sea. He has been a sailor, an Alaska fisherman, enabled body seamen on square rigors sailing strange seas. He has seen Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope. He speaks of the ports of India, China, Africa, the Chavis 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 meresques 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 carousel 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 islands of savage loveliness, rising from a warm blue sea, shadowy and mysterious valleys strewn with old relics of a forgotten race, the dark eyes of a girl in Toei Haie. 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 hint 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, and 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. Nukohiva knew him for a time, but the gloom and tragedy of that land, together with an episode of domestic infidelity, were overpowering to a man of his temperament. From the Marquesi 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 roll. 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 birth as superintendent of a small plantation. With a native wife and the Irishman's knack for language, 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 counts in part for his success with labour, 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 criticise 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 bookshops in San Francisco, or Liverpool or Singapore, and gathered a little forecast the 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 strong accent of South Boston, and the manner of a professor of etymology, some question of Mori, 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 Manukayan or Rotongan or New Zealand, Mori. 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 the Ng. In place of them there is simply a catch between two vowels. If you know Rotongan and understand the system of change, you can get on all right in Tahiti. Take our word on a Tongi. To play a musical instrument. Tongi means whale or wheat. Aka is the old causative prefix. The combination means cause to wheat. Now let's figure that word out in Tahitian. First we've got to take out the K and the 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. Va-tahiti 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'Reilly. For the love of Mike, I'd tell her, don't you know my name yet? It's Riley, not O'Reilly. 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 O-tahiti? That O is simply a special form of the verb used before personal pronouns and proper names. The old navigators, when their 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'Reilly 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 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 atoll. Riley boards the schooner with his wife and takes passage to Pappiti 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-month supply of medicine provisions and reading matter. He is the only white man on atoll. One would suppose such a life, dearly 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 man 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. In all 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 navy wife. Sometimes he says he works himself into such a pink of condition that he aches to pick a fight with a first comer. But I fancy he finds trouble enough to satisfy another man. Once a huge Selman 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 220-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 Pamuntas took a grudge against the manager and invited his time with a cunning of a wild animal. A chance came one afternoon when Riley was asleep in the shade behind his house. The Pamuntan 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 toughen 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 the 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 whiskey, his second to send for the foreman. The Pamuntan boy had disappeared, overcome by foreboardings of evil. He had taken canoe and paddled off to hide himself on an unclear 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, deathly afraid at first, solemn and revived, 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. The tuna 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 Pamuntan 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 enclosed by an oval sweep of reef along which are scattered islets of varying eyes. Many people must have lived on it in the past, everywhere their 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, them, and in the end a schooner took them away. The outland Cook Islands are places full of interest. I determined, when I began this letter, to give you a real account of Makoi. The island itself is people, the number of tons of copper 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 at Makoi was a ticklish business. Like Mangania, Mitero, and A2, 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, F, built a sort of platform around the island. Low and sure, and highest as it seems usually the case. Just before it drops off into the sea. Branching across the outer ridge, the surf fills a narrow belt of shallows, between it and the shore. The result is a miniature addition 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 of 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 coast 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 whale boat, 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 gone off safely from the boat passage, it was best to return the same way. The boat steered disagreed. It was all very well to put out from the passage with the 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 Stearman 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. Yorsman backed water gently. The boat steered, 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 shoots, 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 and almost painful acceleration. All of us, saving the watchful eye in the stern, were waiting for a signal which would make the oarsman leap into activity. The passengers clenched their teeth and gripped the rail. Suddenly came a harsh shout. Six oars struck the water at once, a 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 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 humerus turned down 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 hold the boat from slipping off into the sea. We stopped her just under brink. Her keel grated on the coral. Another sea was coming at us, towering high above our heads. Slowly the supercargo and I leaped aboard in response to a sharp command. The boys held her stern 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 widely 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 Riby. 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 refer the surname if it can be pronounced. If not, they try the given name and Charlie becomes Terry or Johnny Tione. If this fails or 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 Mr. or Sir. At first one is inclined to believe that there is the beautiful and ideal democracy, the realization of the communist dream. And there are other things which lead to the same conclusion. Servants, for one example, are treated with extraordinary consideration and kindness. 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 their ultimate perhaps than our own idealist 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 or 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 on 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 to 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, where were built a battered galvanized iron, long, graceful hulls fashioned from the trunks of trees, joined in pairs by timbers of ironwood laid across the gunnels, and lashed down with scented. They were beautifully finished, scraped smooth and decorated with carving. In these craft my companions told me the men of Maki still voyage to Aitu and Minoto as they had done for generations before Cook sailed through the group. There is an ancient feud between Maki and Aitu. It is curious how hard such grudges die. The men of Aitu were the most warlike of all the Cook Islanders. Even in these times of traitors and schools of missionaries no firearms are allowed on the island. Time after time in the old days they raided Maki stealing at by night upon the sleeping villages, entering each house to feel the heads of 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 Aitu. Terrible scenes have been enacted under the old ironwoods of Maki. 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 accepting perhaps the people of Aitu, Taki, were cannibals as fierce as the memories of New Zealand or the tawny savages of the Marques. Why should Aitu Taki have bred a gentler and finer people? The group is not widely scattered as islands go. There must have been fighting and intermarriages 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 mangane is typically the most distinct recognizable at once by his dark skin, his wide, ugly mouth, his uncouth and savage manner. The full-blooded Roar Tongan, who will soon be a rarity, is another type, handsome in a square-cut, lionly way, with less energy and far more dignity of presence. The people of Aitu Taki 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 of 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 photographs in the evening and drink excellent whiskey with soda from a sparkling 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 in 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 Maki were drawing 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 turned to our host and winked at 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 from the Holocaust 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 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 that Tommy's a trick that brought them together like brothers. I have tasted orange beer at all stages. Even the rarer 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 two enthusiastic devotee with a headache of unusual severity. We found fifteen or twenty men assembled under an old uttutri. A dance ended as we do near and the cup was being passed to five-gallon kerosene tins with the top cut off and filled with the bright yellow beer. Stood in the center of the group. Women are never present on these occasions which corresponds in a way to center the 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 song. Riley was welcomed with shouts. He was in a gay mood and when we 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 Hera, Oya, and Ura. First the man's part, then the woman's, while the men of Maki 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 wiggle and flutter of the hands, what old Bly called with the delightful righteous gusto, the wanton gestures of the Hebrae. Riley had told his friends on the beach that he was on the lookout for labour. 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 planners of the group declare that labour 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 oarsman took their places. Friendly hands shot us out on 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. End of Chapter 5