 CHAPTER XII I was beginning this letter with a little fun at your expense. You would have been mystified, perhaps convinced, that my haunted friends at 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 seance, 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 an old rackamona from Earth's sleeping-place in the marée, the unnatural voice proclaiming the coming of the spirit. When I would have told how a message from the visitor was announced for the strange white man, vouched for by the mother of a pakura, I see an island, the ghostly voice might have gone on. A little island, surrounding a great lagoon, it is Nakahina in the far-off South Sea of atolls. A schooner lies in 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 towards 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 sees her to pull her up. The women crowd about the stranger. Aye, they are good to look upon these girls of Nakahina. To throw their necklaces over his head and crown him with the wreath of flowers and shell. His face grows red, the old man 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 loud. One after another, pushing and pulling to be first. The girls scrabble 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 Averrath on desk there, over from Tahiti to Baikantel, before his departure the Alwet had turned up from the Pomotas, bringing word of your reception on Nakahinaya. I fancy you haven't had much time in your progress to 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 Rorotonga. 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 Averrath, 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 Averrath on the appointed day and found the government boat already anchored in the roadstead of the town. An anchorage dredded 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 Pappati. Averrath is a small ocean metropolis, the capital of a group, but it interested me to see 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 soul 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 beating with the hand, but the huge old-time drum, suspended from the limbs of trees, interested me most of all. Imagine, a five-foot section of the trunk of a big baritanga 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 stuck 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 as far and near, rising, falling, throbbing, from Aragoni, from Tikavya, and from Nagatania, once 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 merciless syncopation of ragtime. One feels in it an appeal to the primitive emotions, at once vague and charged with many fear and madness are there, with cruelty, lust, triumph, and a savage melancholy. Except in the case of the contingent from Maniki, and at all far off to the north, there was a 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 the race, basically the same, whether called hula, hurra, or hurra. But their motions were awkward and stiff, without the abandoned and gracial 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 Rorotarygans have not wholly forgotten the past. The dance was followed by speeches and the speeches by feasts, all very conventional and uninteresting. I wonder if you are heartily fed up on big 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 three to five a.m. are often the one's most profitable to spend on the reef, and the evenings are occupied with a search for hermit crabs. You've probably made the acquaintance of the hermit crab, but in case you've 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've been obliged to study him, at least superficially, by the fact that he is the deity preferred by all the fish in 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 cacarara, the large red one found in deep water, and the black harry 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 rotongan society was known by the same name, meaning, I suppose, that all 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 existence. I doubt this theory. For while there are plenty of the little cacarara in 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 formable relative, the cararaca 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 wedding 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 refutes, a dead fish on the beach, the fallen fruit of a pandurus, a coconut, opened by a rat or a flying fox, and containing a few shreds of meat. The size of their cararacara 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 stock 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 in eyes, peering about in a ludicrously apprehensive manner. Finally he gathers courage and starts off for the bush at his curious rolling-gate. One might suppose the humric crab, the least social of living things, but in reality he is gregarious and seems to enjoy the company of his friends. They wander in little bands, 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, afraid a 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 a 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 shabbled 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 and felt transmitted to me a tiny thrill of horror that 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 Bill 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. Calm, calm, you've been seeing things. He must have taken a shortcut 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 the 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. He will be amused when you see his first attempts to walk without his shell, which weighs three or four times as much as the tenet. It is precisely as a man might act, set down on some planet where gravity is weaker than on earth, naked, helpless, and worried. Trace Trinicot. 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 make 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 Seas 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 query is beginning to emerge from the bush for the evening dip, and those that have passed will leave sporing the soft coral sand. Here is the track of a small one winding toward the water in eccentric curves and zigzags. What you will find him, motionless in the torchlight, hoping to escape notice. He goes into the pale with a cling. 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, corrugated like the trail of a miniature whipet tank. Before it leads to the lagoon, no sign of him at the water's edge. He is doubled back. Lift up the rotten coconut frond, and oh, God, black, hairy, armed with a vicious pair of claws. You can hear him raging in the pale, a noise halfway between a wine and a growl, a crab with a voice. A stroll of an hour or two along the beach usually procures enough bait for days fishing and one turns inland to follow the road home. Sometimes when the new room has set behind the abura, peaks, and thick darkness settles over the bush. When the surf murmur is almost inaudibly 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 veranda. The feel of the air was like a caress, neither hot nor cold, and perfumed with a sense of strange flowers, wax and terry tahiti, sweet and heady, frangolini, langiois, queen of the night. In the mango tree behind the house a mayan twitted, a drowsy overture to one of their abrupt, nocturnal choruses. They are quaint birds to minus. 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 breadcrumbs 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 foliage tree, orange mango or alligator pair. 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 fond 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 Peru tight around one's waist. Each man carried a pair of old shoes where 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 the path leading down an avenue of coconuts, the slender bulls illuminated by the glare of torchlight. In five minutes we were under the dark iron woods at the water's edge where the canoes were hauled up. Not waiting for us the boys plunged into the lagoon. Half swimming, half waiting 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 comers, faintly visible in the starlight, were curling with the spinning reports of field artillery. Swimming down on the reef until the coral beneath us seemed to tremble at each shot. 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 palaces. When the water was only knee deep we moored the canoe to a coral mushroom and went overboard in bare legs and tucked up peruse, waiting slowly about twenty feet apart. The lagoon was 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 wearily. 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 this surface, lead deep down and out into the caverns lining the edges of the pass. The haunts of octopus and the man-eating rock-god called Tonu. A faint ripple revealed a big blue parrot-pish, sulking in the shadow of a boudre. One of the native boys slipped his spear close before he thrust with a skill that needs years of to acquire. He killed the fish with a stab just where they had joined the body in, strung it on a strip of hibiscus bark at his waist. These lagoons swarm with strange forms of life, unknown in northern waters. Until one learns one way about, there is a certain amount of danger in wading through the shallows along a 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 Nu, 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, one stepped on, that is apt to kill or cripple for life. The Tatora, 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 bare-legged. One must be on the alert every moment, torch blazing, spear-poised. One moment you jump on a mushroom of coral to provide 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 that ugly little brute. He was only a foot long, a marble of protective coloring, irregularly spotted and blotched, so as to be nearly invisible against the 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 clot banks along the eastern horizon flushing pale rows, 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 loved to be on the water at dawn, so when I had landed him I paddled out to the pass to fish for tituria. The current was slack and a not-a-breath of wind stirred in 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 seemed 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, swinny parrotfish bright blue and long as a man's arm. Tapa-tupu, spangled orange and black, stopping to nibble at the coral. Slender pipe-fish, swift and uneven, fish of extraordinary form and coloring, indescribable, perhaps undescribed. At last I saw what I was after, a school of titera, 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 a conformation of a mackerel and related, I should say, to the Pampano of American waters. The younger ones, eight to ten inches long, and approaching 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 titera, in the Cook Islands, Perpero in Titian, and on the east. The fully grown fish, which attains a weight of a hundred pounds or more, is called runa. 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 grills, and the younger one a par. One's outfit for this kind of fishing consists of a pale 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 attract the fish and keep them about the canoe. When a glance through the water-glass shows that the fish you want have gathered beneath you, a pebble is attached to the line by means of a special hitch, which can be undone by a jerk. Now re-lure the line over the side until the bait is in the required position. A sharp pull frees the sinker. And you're 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 on 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 luring my line to try for third. When the small fry gobbling my chum suddenly scattered and disappeared, next moment a monstrous titera, almost the urn-a-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 orderer 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 of the South Seas pronounced it of the very first order. He would enjoy knowing him. He has been in this part of the world since the seventies. Supercargo, Skipper, Trader-on-Ion seldom visited, even today. Now he has 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 Arirai. The tolls are by nature lonely places. But of all the tolls in the Pacific, Arirai, is perhaps the loneliest, never visited, far off from any group, out of the paths of navigation. Not very many years ago, Arirai was a bit of a 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 beaches, of dazzling coral sand. At the time, as for centuries before, the seabirds nestled undisturbed on the outlets within the reef, where all day long the water flashed blue in the sunlight and a trade wind hummed a song of loneliness among the palm tops. Then a day came when two Frenchmen, rude traders and planters of coconuts in the tomatou, spoke of Arirai. Here was an island capable of a 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. He needed a white man, but white men willing to undertake a task of such poignant loneliness were not to be found every day in Papati. As it chanced, their man was at hand. The natives call 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 a commission in the Confederate Navy. All strong and fine presence with a full blonde beard and eyes of reckless blue, a great singer and dancer, always the merriest and a feast, and the idol of the women, remarkable linguist and storyteller, drunken, brave, witty, and unprincipled. Tino was of a type which thrives in Polynesia. When they offered him the position of superintendent at Arirai, 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 camphor wood 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 easygoing philosophy and lack of worry over a situation scarcely respectable in the eyes of Papati's businessmen were calculated to so distrust. In the case of Arirai, 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 to be 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 Ariris lagoon to land Tino in a score of raritarian 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 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, rose, 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 a special work of his own. Let them be those most skilled at 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 toe and puka, and seven months time with the help of his men, Tino cut down trees, sought out timbers, and planking, and built up forty-foot cutter, sturdy, fast, and sea-worthy. Her mast was the smoothed-down trunk of an old coconut palm. Her sails of patchwork of varied fabrics, her cordage of scented, twisted, and braided coconut fiber. The work of women incredibly skillful and patient. For anchor she carried a grooved coral boulder, 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 baited 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 and fifteen days. I forgot to say that before his departure he had ordered the top of a tall palm chopped off, and on his stout flank-bowl had hoisted a homemade addition 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 Aureyrie, in the name of the British Empire, and petitioned that a fifty years lease of the island at nominal rate be given to 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 sextet 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 un-worried. Even Captain Slocum said to have navigated thousands of miles of ocean with no other chronometer than a Connecticut alarm clock performed no matter-feet. 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 that he spent a week and left loaded down with provisions and drinking-nuts and accompanied by five of the younger and pre-girls of the village. This time all went smoothly. A plural honeymoon party enjoyed a merry voyage to Aureyrie, where Tino established his large and amicable family and proceeded to the less-diverting business of planting coconuts a year past. 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 lycee. 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 Frenchman fumed. But they were too shrewd not to recognize defeat. The years passed in peaceful and idyllic fashion. The 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 their the unfamiliar experience, the schooner entered the lagoon and dropped anchor opposite the settlement. Her boat, trimmed and smartly manned as a yacht's gig, brought ashore the first missionary to set foot in Aureyrie. 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 Tumini, 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 weaknesses. The thing is so natural, so human. Body illness and a spiritual reform have always gone hand in hand. But his word had been given in good faith. He finished the church in schoolhouse, he had promised, and a due time installed a teacher among his flock. The supreme irony of the fair comes at this point. For the native teacher on the lookout for a flirtation was in discreet enough to select Mininini as the object of his attention 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 besides four of mine who wouldn't have mattered, and then he picked on Mininini. Why, damn it all, man. I was a bit fond of that old girl. The teacher paid dearly for his indiscretion. Tino lashed him to a post in the sun, where he probably would 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. There's your bleeding missionary roared out, as he hurled a strungly 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 the story, except that Tino died not long ago, happy, rich enough, and surrounded by a numerous tribe of grandchildren. End of chapter 12. Chapter 13 of Fairy Islands of the South Seas. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Mike Vendetti, MikeVendetti.com. Fairy Islands of the South Seas by James Norman Hall and Charles Nordhoff. Chapter 13. At the House of Tarii. You will not find, ah-hu-ah-hu, under that name on any chart, and it would be equally useless to search for a Nuka-turi. Yet both islands exist, and I like their ancient names better than the modern ones. Glanchester maps, and you will see the eastern Pacific dotted with islands, bearing names like Jarvis, Maldon, and Starbuck. Names would suggest no more than the thought of some wandering skipper, immortalizing himself by adding new dangers to the chart. Then think of Nuta Tarii, the immortal name of an island known wherever the old Polynesians gathered to tell their tales. Nuka-tarii, the object of the Warfleet's voyage. It needs a dull imagination, not to feel a stir. It was on Nuka-tarii that I found that curious fellow Tarii 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 waiting a chance to photograph the skyline of the island. And when, one afternoon, the clouds about the peaks disappeared, 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 Nuka-tarii 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 before shore 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 Perrin Island, nine degrees south of the equator. But though it must be well known in scientific quarters, the odd, non-migratory 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-backed ridge behind the plantation, the dogs put up a duck almost under our feet. I found a nest while hidden in the fern, a beautifully constructed affair, edged with a combing up-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 agerness 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. Caught to camera instinctively and I rose, buttering to the surface, where I managed to balance it on the flat bottom of the canoe. Then as the water was not deep, I had on nothing but a singlet and a peru. I swam down to get the tripod and started for sure, 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 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 sides and 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 Taari. She had been washing clothes at the mouth of the 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 the 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. Eh, Taari! Eh, Taari! Haari, my ikani! 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 knew Taari rather well and have spent a good deal of time within a few miles of where he lives, yet I had been to 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 found pleasanter than the more strained and effusive society of civilized places. In every part of the world, of course, this track will 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 got 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 platter 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 like Tari the better for not having asked me to his house. Now the 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 octetouille mats, gave me a garden of small flowering trees. Fragrant pie, Tari Tahiti, made of mori, queen of the night, Tari showed me to a corner-room, and mixed a rum-punch while his wife put buttons on a bright 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 in for the islands, from the Pamoutas, from Maritina, from Ayatuki, and Manikis. There were fans from Maniki, woven in patterns of dyed pandas, and savage island fans decorated with human hair. Ranged on a series of shelves, I found a notable collection of penes, the taro-mashers of eastern Polynesias implements in which the culture of each group expresses itself. I was able to recognize the pestle of manganine, eight-sided and carved with almost geometrical perfection, from a stalactite of pink lime, a marquisean penu of dark volcanic stone, with its curious, faily candle, the implement of old Tahiti gracefully designed and smoothly finished by a people far removed from savagery, the rare and beautiful penu of Mahpeti. Unobtainable today, 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 Tokitiki, from Magnia, an odd thing which for want of a better name might be called a Peace Edds. It is a slender little tower of carved wood set with tears of windows and surmounted by a stone Edds' head, lashed on with wraplings of Senate, above which extend a pair of pointed ears. The carving in the close-grained yellow wood of the puna is exquisitely done. I recognized the standard patterns of the islands, the shark's teeth, the dropping water, and the intricate Tokitiki tangata. The significance of the Peace Edds was religious and ceremonial. The story goes that, when at the end of a period of fighting two Magian clans decided to make peace, the Eddads played a leading role 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 window-like openings on its sides. Tari had real Edds' as well, the tools with which trees were chopped down and canoes hauled out, stone implements of a perfection. I have never seen elsewhere, carved out of the basaltic rock, hard and closest steel, smooth by processes at which one can only guess, sharp and symmetrical as the product of modern machines. The marquaging curiosities interested me most of all. Relics of the dark valleys which harbored the most strangely fascinating of all the island people. There were ornaments of old men's beards arranged in little Senate-bound tufts, cringled in yellowish white, baked gloves 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 tamannu adorned with the rich and graceful designs for 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 Topee, to scenes of a strange beauty on which mankind will never look again. Someday, perhaps in a future less remote than we liked fancy, nature's careless hand being once more set the stage for similar experiment, but the people sequestered in these gloomy islands will be of another blood, and the result can never be the same. The Marquesians themselves, if one is to believe the students of antique mankind, were the result of a racial retrogression. Their continental forebearers knew iron and pottery and the culture of rice, things lost in the eastward push which brought them to the nine islands of Eva. One curious trinket, labelled 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 this section showed it to be the tooth or tusk of some large animal. Where could the Marquesian 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 in a mortal 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 sort of a norwhale, 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 wailing vefzel, 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 walruses off Cape Lisborne or in the katsibu sound, and as was the habit of whalers some of the tusk 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-wheel. It is not difficult to imagine the rest, a lantern-jawed Yankee harpooner perhaps, trading his walrus tusk for a canoe-load of fruit for the favors of an exceptionally pretty girl. I was examining a paddle from Manahiki, a graceful narrow-bladed thing, carved out of porcupine wood and set with diamonds of mother-of-pearl. When Tyree came in. Pretty bad, 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 half? Everything has a meaning and 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, a saige. Than anything else. It is a weapon primarily. A thrust of it would kill a naked man. The Manahiki peoples spend a lot of their time in canoes on the open sea, after bonito by day and flying fish by night. Many's waters swarm with sharks. They have developed a paddle into a weapon of defense. The Samoans carried a special shark club for the same purpose. I ask 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 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 water 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 chance to be more than usually hungry. The really hungry shark is a raving 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 penurin, lagoon, suddenly one of the boys gave a shout and began to struggle with something in the waste deep water, clouded with blood by the time I got there. The small tiger shark, scarcely a yard long, had gouged a piece of flesh out of his leg, and continued to attack until a big canaca seized it by the tail and waited to the beach, holding the devilish little brute, snapping its jaws and writhing frantically at arm's length. As he reached the dry sand and native allowed his arm to relax for an instant, the shark set its teeth in his sight and tore out a mothful that nearly cost the man his life. The voice of a puke was summoning us to eat. K'ai ha'ye, she called, ha'ri mai ka'oroa. Tariz, 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 nearby. 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. Tariz followed my glance and smiled as he caught the eye of his wife. "'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 a generation the women of her family have been forbidden to eat in the presence of men. And the old tapoo ties 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 feet. It is best to let them follow their own customs. She likes to sit on the floor there and order her cousin about. When they're finished they'll adjourn to the cookhouse for dinner and discuss you until your ears tingle. Us keeping down here is a funny, haphazard business, hopeless if one demands what one had at home. It'd be unpleasant 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 there 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 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 sane 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 re-invite all the relatives to a real umakai. In return for all this, they look after my fifty acres of coconuts, make macopra, do my housework, cooking, and laundry, and provide me with all the native food I can use. What strikes me is 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, midnight, 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 Apgura took away the remnants of a dish of raw fish and brought us a platter heaped with roast bread-food, taro, yams, and sweet potatoes served in with a picture of teriyakare, 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 mori 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 chance to be born white, whose voice is most frequently heard, disclaiming on the subject of color. Everywhere on 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 the Polynesian a rather fine piece of work. He 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 dream 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 parade hummed through the palm-trops, 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 bribrant, with the current life, now mouldering alike in forgotten graves. They would be a strangely assorted company, tarry's ghosts. Men of all races, scholars, soldiers, sportsmen, skippers of trading vessels, pearl-divers of their tolls, nurses of the Red Cross, Englishmen 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 may be, no man could say that tarry had not lived. I wondered what the verdict would be when in the days to come he cast up the balance of his life. Apagura ceased her plating, 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 fathom, 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 poghree, 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 goodwill. Think of the work that goes into one of these hats. First of all, far off in the mountains, the stocks of the Aho, Eridus, Verhidus, must be gathered. These are split, then thoroughly dried, and the two have 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 Aho, 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 plated into a 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 any 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 ring the soapy clothes. When dinner was over, Terry was filling his pipe in the living room. I took up the lamp for a glance at the titles of his shelves of books. Side by side with the transactions of the Polynesian society and the modern works of S. Percy Smith and MacMillan Brown, I found Mariners Tonga, Abraham Fornder's account of the Polynesian race, its origin and migration. William Bly's voyage of the South Seas for the purpose of conveying the breadfruit 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, crossed the room to glance over my shoulder at the quaint title page. It was evident that he loved his books. Tahiti is the most interesting well-lions, he said, as we sat down. And the best accounts of old Tahiti are those of Bly and Ellis. Bly wrote from the standpoint of a wordly 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 and 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. The 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, and 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 implacable cost. Make the ways 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. Elos and his kind were no more than the inevitable instruments of a harsh providence. Elos's book was published in 1831. 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 materials, markets for our surplus-manufactured goods. What have we done for the natives in return? What have 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 Elos wrote, the benefits of civilization end here. Infanticide is now a punishable crime and really practiced, for 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 hope 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 left in skin deep. His observance of the Sabbath day, a survival of the old tempu, his church going and singing of him, 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 auri. You have seen something of the outer islands, for the people are half-savage even today, still swayed by what we call heathen superstition. Now consider Tahiti, where the people for more than a hundred years have been subjected to the exhortations of an intensity almost unparalleled, if it is possible to inject our religion into their bullet. It must have been accomplished into 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 the heathen superstition is far from dead to day. Before the schooners took to Penuri Lagoon, we used to spend the hurricane season in Papati. 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 varainu and ghostly temba pula of their ancestors. If a girl falls ill, the native doctor, a lineal descendant of the heathen priest, has called in. What have you done during the past week, he asks? You spoke harshly to that old woman. 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 well instance of the doctor's skill. 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? Evidently the grave was opened and the body found to be lying face down. When turned on her back, and again covered with the earth, the lady is content and sees as her disruptible 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 a strange on Tahiti and Moria. You must have heard of what the natives call Varaino, 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 Varaino are thought to lie in wait whenever a man or woman is dying, struggling fiercely with one another in the 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 Varaino. You can see what a garbled business it is. The spirits and earth spirit enters the corrupted body and walks abroad at night. On one subject the natives all agree. The struggles of the praying 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 and educated and sceptical Englishman, in whose words I have the utmost confidence, was the witness of one of these blood-splashing affairs. He lived on Mura just across from Tahiti, Hapiti. Was it village, I think? One afternoon he whistled to his fox terrier and strolled to a nearby house, where the body of an eighty-an-old fellow he had liked, Lien State, surrounded by mourning relatives. As he stood on the veranda the dog began to growle furiously. And at the same moment the oldest man present, a sort of a doctor in 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 towards the rear of the building. The people gathered outside in a bit of a panic, the fox terriers seemed to have gone mad on the porch, alternately cowing and leaping forward with frenzied growls towards some invisible thing. Until at once there was a great racket of overturned furniture inside the house. In the next moment the Englishman saw doubts of what looked like blood splashing over the outer wall and 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 Pappati, where he got the hospital feeble to examine it. It was human blood beyond a doubt. Let me make of that. The other evening when I was having a yarn with Apakura she told me about another kind of veroenol who figures as the villain in the tale of a Polynesian Cinderella. May interest you. A great many years ago on Ahuahu there was a man named Tantu, one of Apakura's family, renowned fighting man who dabbled in sorcery when there were no wars to be fought. Tall, handsome and famous, it was no wonder that Tantu 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 tapah, and went to live in the hut, accompanied by their little sister, Terrena, who was to act as a drudge about the house. Young Terreara had no designs on Tantu, and she possessed no finery to make herself beautiful in the eyes, but one day when she was gathering wood in the bush she 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 machivious earth spirit which haunted the vicinity and visited them in the guise of Tantu. 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 printing themselves before their little sister. Tantu loves us, they told her. He comes every day when you are off gathering wood. But that is impossible, said Terreara, where Tantu is my lover. He meets me each day in the forest. The older girls laugh scornfully at this, but Terreara said no more until she met her lover in the evening, when she told him what her sisters had said he laughed. It is Varaino he informed her, a machivious spirit whose true appearance is that of a hideous old man. Tomorrow I will prove to your sisters that it is not I who visit them. That night Tantu set 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 Tantu and Terreara stole up to the house where the spirit in the form of a splendid warrior was talking and laughing with the two sisters. Tantu cast the net. Next moment the spirit was howling and struggling in the magic meshes, unable to escape, moaning as it tripled and changed into the appearance of an old man, gray-bearded, trembling and hideous. The two sisters shrank back in loathing and mortification, while Tantu told them that he had chosen Terreara to be his wife. As he finished his story, Tyree rose, crossed the room to a bookshelf in return to hand me a volume-bound and worn yellow leather. I am 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. Bly's Account of the Voyage of the Bounty published at Dublin in 1792. Propbed up in bed with a lamp burning on the table beside me, I opened Bly'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 Picatron Island. I have been made familiar by a volumous and sentimental literature, but I had never before come across the story of Bly'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 Kamikake, the fabled Hawaiian voyager who discovered in the southern group the fountain of eternal youth. Knowing something of the island as it is today, I listened with interest when Terry remarked, Civilization has barely scratched the inner life of Tahiti. Bly was a close observer, blessed with insight and a pleasant sense of humor. During the time of his visit the people were untouched by European influence. It is interesting to check his observation against what any traveller 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 Pomer, of which the chief too, called Utu by Cook, Tina by Bly, was the founder owed its rise to power largely to the friendship of the English. Bly often entertained Tina and his wife, Idea, on board the bounty. They must have been amusing parties. Tina 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, to any of my guests. As the women are not allowed to eat in the presence of the men. Idea dined with some of her companions about an hour after word in private, except that her husband, Tina, favored them with his company and seemed to have entirely forgotten that he had already dined. In his rambles about the island, Bly noticed precisely what strikes one today, in any house we wish to enter, we always experienced a kind reception. And without officiousness, the Othitians 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 the ceremonious kind of refusal, which expects a second invitation. Bly 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 today, among the people so free from ostentation as the Othitians, and the manners are so simple and natural, the strictness with which the funxilios 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 eerie, it has not suffered to live. Bly's observation 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 of the middle by dinner by calling out King George Erie, no Britie, and would banter me if the glass was not filled to the brim. Nothing could exceed the mirth and joylity of these people when they met on board. One day Tengah told Bly of an island to the eastward of Ory four or five days sail, and that there were large animals upon it with eight legs. The truth of this account he very strenuously assisted upon and wished me to go thither with him. As I was at a loss to know whether or not, Tengah 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 the species of wit which we call humbug, that it is frequently difficult to distinguish whether they are in jest or in nursed. On another occasion while walking near a place of burial, Bly was surprised by a sudden outcry of grief. As I expressed a desire to see the distressed person, Tengah 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 a moderate fit of laughter, and while we remained, appeared much diverted at our visit. I told Tengah the woman had no sorrow for her child, otherwise her grief would not have so easily subsided, on which he jocularly 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 their fond parents, 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 caste. 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. He said when a man died in Otehili, Han was carried over to the Tupapau 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, not less than two people together should go into the surgeon's cabin for some time. I thought of Terry and his tales of Vera O'Neill. Four generations of schools and churches have failed to work on metamorphosis. 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 for the never-adjusted mosquito net and blew off the lamp. End of Chapter 13