 Preface—The Islands of the South Seas are places of an interest curiously limited. The ethnological problem presented by the native is interesting only to men of science. Commerce is negligible, there is little real agriculture, and no industry at all. There remains the charm of living among people whose outlook upon life is basically different from our own. Of living with a simplicity foreign to anything in one's experience, amidst surroundings of a beauty unreal both in actuality and in retrospect. It is impossible to write of the islands as one would write of France or Mexico or Japan. The accepted viewpoint of the traveler is not applicable here. A simple attempt to impart information would prove singularly monotonous, and one is driven to essay a different task—to pry into the life of the mingling races hoping to catch something of its significance and atmosphere. Using such an attempt it is necessary at times to dig deeper than would be consistent with good taste if names were mentioned. And for this reason, in the case of certain small islands, the ancient Polynesian names have been used instead of those given on the chart. All of the islands described are to be found in the Panamuto Society and Herbie Groups, JNH CBN, Tahiti, April 10, 1921. CHAPTER 1 I don't remember precisely when it was that Nordof and I first talked of this adventure. The idea had grown upon us, one might say, with the gradual splendor of a tropical sunrise. We were far removed from the tropics at the time. We were, in fact, in Paris, and had behind us the greatest adventure we shall ever know. On the Place de la Cogoncorde, among the Champs-de-Chilets, stood rank on rank of German cannons, silent enough now but still menacing their muzzles tilted skyward at that ominous slant one comes to know so well. For a month we had seen them so. Children perched to stride them on sunny afternoons, rolling pebbles down their smooth black throats, veterans in soiled and faded horizon blue, with the joy of this new quiet world bright on their faces, opening breach blocks, examining mechanism with the scale of long use at such employment. With a kind of wandering hesitation in their movements, too, as though at any moment they expected those sinister monsters in the fantastic colors of Harlequin to spring into life again. Those were glorious days. Never again, I think, will there be such a happy time as that in Paris. The boulevards were crowded, the tables filled under every awning in front of the cafés, and yet there seemed to be a deep silence everywhere, a silence intensified by the faint rustling of autumn leaves and the tramping of innumerable feet. One heard the sound of voices, of laughter, of singing, the subdued, continuous rumble of traffic, but not a harsh cry, not a discordant note. All the world seemed to be making a holiday at the passing of a solemn, happy festival. Well, we had kept it with the others, Nordof and I, and I have the memory of it now, to be enjoyed over and over again as the years pass. But there was danger that we might outstay the freshness of that period. We were anxious to avoid that for the sake of our memories, if for nothing else. While we were not yet free to order our movements as we chose, we pretended that we were, and so one rainy evening in the December following the armistice, we decided to call that chapter of existence closed, and to go forward with the making of new plans, for we meant to have further adventure of one kind or another, adventure in the sense of unexpected incident rather than hazardous activity. That had been a subtle thing between us for a long time. We had no craving for excitement, but turned to plans for uneventful wanderings, which we had sketched in broad outlines months before. They had been left of necessity vague. But now that any of them might be made realities, now that we had leisure and a reasonable hope of the fulfillment of plans, well, we had cause for a contentment which was something deeper than happiness. The best of it was that the close of the war found us with nothing to prevent our doing pretty much as we chose. We might have had houses or lands to anchor us, or promising careers to drag us back into the bewilderments of modern civilization. But fortunately, or unfortunately, there were none of these plans. The chance of war had given us of freedom far beyond any one's dessert. We had some misgivings about accepting so splendid a gift, which the event sometimes proves to be the most doubtful of benefits, viewed in the light of our longings, however our capacity for it seemed incalculable. And so, by degrees, we allowed our minds to turn to an old allurement, the South Pacific. It became irresistible the more we talked of it, longing as we then were for the solitude of islands. The objection to this choice was that the groups of islands which we meant to visit have been endowed with an atmosphere of pseudo-romance, displeasing to the fastidious mind. But there was not the slightest chance of our being pioneers wherever we might go. We could not hope to see with the eyes of the old explorers who first came upon these far-off places. We must expect great changes. But much as we might regret for the purposes of this adventure that we had not been born two hundred years earlier, comfort was not wanting to our situation. Had we been contemporaries and fellow explorers with Icarus and Cook or Bougainville, we should have missed the great war. We came within view of Tahiti one windless February morning. Such a view as Pedro Fernandez de Curos himself must have had more than three hundred years before. The sky to the West was still bright with stars, and but barely touched with the very ghost of light, giving it the appearance of a great water, with a few clouds, like islands, immeasurably distant. About an hour later the islands themselves lay in full sunlight, jagged peaks falling away in steep ridges to the sea, against sheer walls still and shallow in upland valleys. One could see a few turns, but there was no other movement, no sound, nor any sign of a human habitation. Nothing to shatter the illusion of primitive loveliness. It was illusion, of course, but the reality was nothing like so disappointing as I had feared it would be. Outwardly, two hundred years of progress have brought no great amount of homework. There is a little port, a busy place on boat days, but when the steamer has emptied the town of her passengers, the silence flows down again from the hills. Off the main harbor front through a fair street lie empty to the eye for half hours at a time. Chinese merchants sit at the doorways of their shops waiting for trade. Now and then broad pools of sunlight flow over the gating flower-dresses of a group of native women. Scarcely to be seen otherwise as they move slowly through tunnels of moist green gloom, or a small schooner, like a detailed gifted with sudden mobility in a picture, will back away from shore, cross a harbor bright with reflections of clouds, and stand out to sea. In a stillness of the noon siesta, one hears at infrequent intervals the resounding thud of ripe fruits as they tear their way to the ground through barriers of foliage, and at night the melancholy thunder of the surf on the reef outside the harbor, and the slithering of bare feet in the moonlit streets. Coming from a populous exile doubly attracted for that reason by the lure of unpeopleed places, Nordof and I sought here an indication of what we might find later elsewhere. The few thousand of natives, whites, orientals, have cast live in a charmed circle of lowland, running the sea. Conscious of their mountains, no doubt, but the whites without curiosity, the orientals without desire, the natives without remembrance. There must have been a maze of trails in the old days leading down from the rich valleys. Now they are overgrown, untraveled, lost. Since the old life is no more than a memory. One is glad for the desolation and grateful to the French lack of enterprise, which surely is the only way to account for it. No, we couldn't have chosen a better jumping-off place for our unpremeditated wanderings. We had the whole expanse of the Pacific before us, or better around us. And there was, as I have said, a harbor full of shipping. Boats with pleasing names like the Therese, the Avora, the Poriravana, the Keio, the Lien, and self-confident seagoing aspect. Some tidy and smart, with new paint and rigging. Others with decks warped and sides blistered, bottom foul with the accumulation of six-months' crews, reeking with the warm odor of copra. Boats newly arrived from remote islands with crowds of bare-legged natives on their decks, their eyes beaming with pleasure in anticipation of the delights of the Great Capital, outward bound to the Marquias, the Austriels, the Cooks, the Low Archipelago, despite the fact that it was the middle of the hurricane season. Among these latter there was one whose name was like a friendly hail from Gloucester, or Portland, Maine, but it was not this which attracted me to her. For all its assurance of Yankee hospitality, she was off to the Patumas, the cloud of islands, and longing to go there persisted in the face of a number of vague discouragements. There were no practical difficulties, easy enough to get passage by one schooner or another. Pamatoul Copra is famous throughout the Southern Pacific. There was a good deal of competition for it. Boats racing one another, for cargo to the richer islands. The discouragements weren't so vague, either now that I think of them. They came from men kindly disposed, interested in the islands in their own way. But their concerns were purely commercial. I heard a deal of talk about Copra, in kilos, in tons, in shiploads. Its market value in Pepiti, in San Francisco, in Marseille, until the stately trees which gave it lost or time, through old significance, talked to of coconut oil, and its richness in butterfat. Butterfat. There was a word to bring one back to a work-a-day world. To meet it at the outset of a long, dreamed-of journey was disheartening. It followed me with the shrill insistence of a creamery whistle, and I came very near, giving up my plans altogether. Nordhoff did not change his. He said that it was silly, no doubt, but he didn't like the idea of wandering, however lonely, in a cloud of butterfat islands. However we said good-bye, having arranged for a rendezvous at a distant date, and set out on diverging paths. I had to leave Christian, the English planter, out of this story altogether. He doesn't belong in a commonplace record of travels such as this one set out to be. He had very little to do with the voyage of the Calabas windship among the Attles. But when I think of that vessel he comes invariably into mind. I see him sitting on the cabin-deck with his freckled brown hands clasped about his knees, looking across a solitude of waters. And in my mental concept of the low archipelago he is always somewhere in the background, standing on the sun-stricken reef of a tiny atoll, his back to the sea almost as much a part of the lonely picture as the sea itself. But one can't be wholly matter of fact in writing of these islands. They are not real in the ordinary sense, they belong rather to the realm of the imagination. And it is only in the imagination that you can conceive of your ever having been there, once you are back again in a well-plowed sea-track. As for the people, rather native or alien, in order to focus them in a world of reality it is necessary to remember what they said or did, what they ate, what sort of clothing they wore, otherwise they elude you just as the islands do. This point of view isn't perhaps commonly held among the few white men who know them. Captains of small schooners, managers of trading companies, resident agents, whose interest, as I have said, is in what they produce rather than what they are. As one old skipper of my acquaintance put it, in speaking of the atolls, take them by enlarge. They are as much alike as the reef-points on that sail. Finley's South Pacific Directory, a supposedly competent authority, bears him out in this. They are all of similar character, adding for emphasis, no doubt, and they exhibit very great sameness in their features. He does, however, make certain slight concessions to what may be his own private conception of their peculiar fascination, this vast collection of coral islands. One of the wonders of the Pacific, and later in his account of them, the native name Pumatu, signifies a cloud of islands, an expressive term. But he doesn't forget that he is writing for practical-minded mariners who want facts and not fancies, however truthful these may be to reality. Now, there's Taikahu, one of them said to me, before I had been out there. That's a small atoll, and, you know, sort of square-like and so on. Some with passes and a good anchorage inside the lagoon. Others you got to lay outside and take your cargo off the reef, in a small boat. But to go back to Christianin, no one knew who he was or where he came from. The manager of the inter-island trading company had lived in Peppiti for years, and had never seen him until the day when he turned up at the waterfront, trundling a wheel-barrel, loaded with four crates of chickens and an odd lot of plantation tools and fishing tackle. Following him were two native boys carrying a weather-black and sea-chest, and an old woman with an enormous roll of bedding tied loosely in a pandanus-mat. That was about an hour before the schooner weighed anchor. He stacked his gear neatly on the beach and then went on board, asking for passage to Tanau. No, sir, the manager said in telling about it afterward. I never laid eyes on him until that moment, and I don't know any one who had. Where's he been hiding himself, and why, in the name of common sense, does he want to go to Tanau? There's no copra or pearl-shell there. Not enough any way to make it worth the man's while going after it. Tino, the supercargo, was equally puzzled. I know Tanau from the sea, he said, passed it once coming down from the Marqueas. When I was supercargo of the attire to Haiti, we were blown out of our course by a young hurricane. Didn't land. There's no one on the God-forsaken place. Now here's this Englishman or Dane or Norwegian, whatever he is, asking to be set down there with four crates of chickens with an old Kanaka woman for company. He shook his head with a give-it-up expression, getting a moment later. Well, you meet some queer people down in this part of the world. I don't believe in asking them their business, but it beats me sometimes trying to figure out what their business is. He was not able to figure it out in this case. The old woman was talkative, but the information he gathered from her only stimulated his curiosity the more. She owned Tanau, an atom of an atoll, miles out of the beaten track, even of the Pamoutou schooners. There had never been more than a score of people living on it, he said, and now there was no one. Christian had taken a long lease on it and was going out there, as he told me afterward, to do my writing and thinking undisturbed. I didn't know this until later, however, when I first heard him spoken of we were only a few hours out from Pappiti. We had left the harbor with a light breeze, but at four in the afternoon the schooner was laying about fifteen miles offshore, lazy jacks flapping against idle sails with a mellow, crusty sound. After a good deal of fretting at the fickleness of land breezes, Tan could turn to Christian. He was up forward somewhere, looking after his chickens. Didn't pay much attention then to what was being said, for I had just had one of those moments which come rarely enough in a lifetime, but which make up for all the arid stretches of experience. They give no forewarning. There comes a flood of happiness, which brings tears to the eyes. The sense of it is so keen, the sad part of it is, that one refuses to accept it as a moment. You say, by Jove, I'm not going to let this pass. And it has gone, as unaccountably as it came, half lost, through foreboding of its end. One prepares for it unknowingly, I suppose. Two months, sometimes years, of longing for something remote and beautiful, such as these islands, for example. And when you have your islands, the moment come, sooner or later, and you see them in the light which never was, as the saying goes, but which is the light of truth for all that. Brief as it is, no one can say that to reward is an apple. And it leaves an afterglow in the memory. Fading regret, fading very slowly. Which one never wholly loses, since it takes on the color of memory itself. Becoming a part of that dim world of worthwhile illusions, all of which has very little to do with what was passing aboard the Caleb S. Winship, except that I was prevented from taking an immediate interest in my fellow passengers. But this being my first near view of a Polynesian trading schooner, the scene on deck had all the charm of the unusual. Her skipper was a Pomotian, a former Pearl Diver, and the sailors six of them, including the mate, Tahitian boys. In addition to these were Critchton, the planter, the supercargo, master of three major languages, and a half dozen Polynesian dialects. The manager of the Inter-Ireland Trading Company, William, the engineer, Oral, the cabin boy, a Chinese cook, and two Chinese storekeepers. Evidence of the leisurely, persistent Oriental invasion of French Polynesia. Thirty navy passengers, a horse in an improved stall amid shifts, a monkey perched in the main mass, rigging. Critchton's four crates of chickens and five pigs. In addition to the passengers and livestock, we were carrying out a cargo flumber, corrugated iron, flour, rice, sugar, canned goods, clothing, and dry goods. Each of the native passengers brought with him as much dunnage as an Englishman carries when he goes traveling, and his food for the voyage. Limes, oranges, bananas, breadfruit, mangoes, canned meat. With all of this, a two months supply of gasoline for the engines, and fresh water and green coconuts for the passengers and crew. We made a snug fit. Even the space under the patient little native horse was used to stow his fodder for the long journey. The women, with one exception, were barefooted, bareheaded, but otherwise conventionally dressed according to European or American standards. This, I suppose, is an outrageous betrayal of a trade secret, if one may say that writers of South Sea narratives belong to a trade. Those seriously interested in the islands have, of course, known the truth about them for years. But I believe it is still a popular misconception that the women who inhabit them, no one seems to be interested in the men, are even to this day. Half savage, unselfconscious creatures who display attention of the others. And in a moment men, women, and children had gathered round. Laughing and shouting, throwing bits of coconut shell, mango seeds, banana skins faster than the monkey could catch them. The spontaneity of the merriment did one's heart good. Even the old men and women laughed, not in the indulgent manner of parents or grandparents, but as heartily as the children themselves, unconscious of the uproar, when the Chinese merchants was lying on a thin mattress against the cabin skylight. Although he was sound asleep, his teeth were bare and a grin of ghastly suavity, and his left eye was partly open, giving him an air of constant watchfulness. He was dreaming, I suppose, of Cobra, of pearl shell, in kilos, tons, shiploads of its market value and papidee, in San Francisco and Marseilles, etc. Well, the whites get their share of these commodities and the Chinaman theirs, but the natives have a commodity of laughter, which is vastly more precious, and as long as they do have it, one need not feel very sorry for them. Dusk gathered rapidly while I was thinking of these things. Heavy clouds hung over Tahiti and Muria, clinging about the shoulders of the mountains whose peaks rising above them were still faintly visible against the sombre glory of the sky. They seemed islands of sheer fancy, looked at from the sea. It would have been worth all that one could give to have seen them as diqueros saw them or cook or the early missionaries, to have added to one's own sense of their majesty. The solemn and more childlike awe of the old explorers, born of the feeling of utter isolation from their kind, with the presence of the unknown on every hand. It is this feeling of awe rarely to be known by travellers in these modern days, which pervades many of the old tales of wanderings in remote places, which one senses in looking at old sketches made from the decks of ships, of the shores of heathen lands. The wind freshened, then came a deluge of cold water, blotting out the rugged outlines against the sky. When it had passed, it was deep night. The forward deck was a huddle of shelters made of mats and bits of canvas. But these were being taken down now that the rain had stopped. I saw an old woman sitting near the companion way, her head in clear relief against a shaft of yellow light. She was wet through and the mild misfortune broke the ice between us. If one may use a metaphor very inept for the tropics. With her face half in shadow, she reminded me of a typical Anglo-Saxon grandmother, although no grandmother of my acquaintance would have sat unperturbed through that squall and indifferent to her wet clothing afterward. She didn't appear to mind it in the least, and now that it was over, pitched a paper of tobacco and a strip of pandalus leaf out of the bundle on which she was sitting. She rolled a pinch of tobacco in the leaf, twisting it into a tight corkscrew, and lit it at the first attempt. Then she began talking in a deep resonant voice, and by a simplicity and an extraordinary lucidity of gesture conveyed the greater part of her meaning even to an alien like myself. It was, not alas, a typical accomplishment. I have not since found others similarly gifted. She was Critcheton's landlady, the owner of Tannau. Pupri, she called him, because of his fair hair. I couldn't make out what she was driving at for a little while. I understood at last that she wanted to know about his family, where his father was, and his mother. I suppose she thought I must know him being a white man. They have queer ideas of the size of our world. He was young. He must have people somewhere. She, too, couldn't understand his wanting to go to Tannau. And I gathered from her perplexity that he hadn't confided his purposes to her, to any extent. I couldn't enlighten her, of course, and at length, realizing that she wrapped herself in her mat to preserve the damp warmth of her body, and dozed off to sleep. I went below for a blanket in some dry clothing, for the night air was uncomfortably cool after the rain. The cabin floor was strewn with sweeping forms. Three children were curled up in a corner like puppies, in a box of sawdust. Little brown babies lay snugly bedded on bundles of clothing, the mothers themselves sleeping in the careless, trustful attitudes of children. The light from a swinging lamp threw leaping shadows on the walls, flowed smoothly over brown arms and legs, was caught in faint gleams and masses of loose black hair. And to complete the picture and make it wholly true to fact, cockroaches of the enormous winged variety ran with incredible speed over the oil cloth of the cabin table, or made sudden flying sallies out of dark corners to the food lockers and back again. On deck no one was awake except Maui at the wheel. There was very little unoccupied space, but I found a strip against the engine room ventilator, where I could stretch out at full length. By that time the moon was up, and it was almost as light as day. I was not at all sleepy, and my thoughts went forward to the Pomotos, the Cloud of Islands. We ought to be making our first landfall within thirty-six hours. I didn't go beyond that in anticipation, although in the mind's eye I had seen them for months, first one island and then another. I had pictured them at dawn, rising out of the sea against a far horizon or at night, under the wan light of stars, lonely beyond one's happiest dreams of isolation, unspoiled, unchanged, because of their very remoteness. While I was soon to know whether or not they fulfilled my hopeful expectations, some one came apt, walking along the rail in his bare feet. It was Oro, the cabin boy, who was taken with an enviable kind of madness at the full of the moon. He looked carefully around to make sure that everyone was asleep, then stood clasping and unclasping his hands in estacy, carrying on a one-sided conversation in a confidential undertone. Now and then he would smile, and straight away become serious again, gazing with rapt, listening attention at the world of pure light, nodding his head at intervals in vigorous confirmation of some occult confidence. At length his figure receded, blurred, took on the quality of the moonlight. And I saw him no more. CHAPTER II. IN THE CLOUD OF ISLANDS. RAU, the old Pamoutan woman, and the owner of Tanau, was the last of her family. They were relatives by marriage, but none of them would consent to live on so poor a night all, and the original population, never large, had diminished through death and migration. Until at last she was left alone, living in her memories of other days, awed by the companionship of spirits present to her in strange and terrible shapes. At last she felt that she could endure it no longer. But it was many months before the smoke of one of her signal fires was seen by a passing schooner. She returned with it to Tahiti, and if she had been lonely before, she was tenfold lonelyer there, so far from the graves of her husband and children. It was at this time that Critchton met her. He had been living at Tahiti for more than a year on the lookout for just such an opportunity as Rau offered him. Although only twenty-eight, he was in the tenth year of his wanderings, and had almost disbared of finding the place he had so long dreamed of and searched for. During that period he had been moving slowly eastward through Borneo, New Guinea, the Solomons, the New Herbides, the Tongas, the Cook Group. In some of these islands the climate was too powerful an enemy for a white man to contend with. In others there was no land available, or they lacked the solitude he wanted. This latter embarrassment was the one he had met at Tahiti. The fact is an illuminating commentary on his character. Most men would find exceptional opportunities for seclusion there, not on the seaboard but in the mountains, in the valleys winding deeply among them, where no one goes from year's end to year's end. Even those leading out to the sea are but little frequented in their upward reaches. But Critchton was very exacting in his requirements in this respect. He was one of those men who make few or no friends, one of those lonely spirits without the ties or the kindly human associations which make life pleasant to most of us. They wander the thinly peopled places of the earth, interested in a large way at what they see from afar or faintly hear, but looking on with quiet eyes, taking no part, being blessed or cursed by nature but the love of silence, of the unchanging peace of great solitudes. One reads of them now and then in fiction, and if they live in fiction it is because of men like Critchton, their prototypes in reality, seen for a moment as they slip apprehensively across some by-path leading from the outside world. He had a little place at DeHedy a walk of two hours and a quarter, he said, from the government offices in the port. He had to go there sometimes to attend to the usual formalities, and I have no doubt that he knew within ten seconds the length of the journey which would be a very distasteful one to him. I can imagine his uneasiness at what he saw and heard on those infrequent visits. And after the war renewal of activity, talk of trade, development, progress, it startled him into a waiting, listening attitude. Returning home, maps and charts would be got out, and plans made against the day when it would be necessary for him to move on. He told me of his accidental meeting with Raouw, as he called the old Pumunian woman. It came only a few days after the arrival from San Francisco of one of the monthly steamers. A crowd of tourists, stopover passengers of a day, had somehow discovered the dim trail leading to his house. They were much pleased with it, he said, adding with restraint. They took a good many pictures. I was rather annoyed at this, although, of course, I said nothing. No doubt they made the usual remarks, charming, so quaint, etc. It was the last straw for Christian. So he made another visit to the government offices, where he had his passport visit. He meant to go to Marquita, a high phosphate island, which stands like a gateway at the northwestern approach to the low archipelago. The phosphate would be worked out in time, and the place abandoned, as other islands of that nature had been, to the seabirds. But on that same evening, while he was having dinner at a Chinaman's shop, Gilbert heard Rao trying to persuade some of her relatives to return with her to Tenau. He knew of the island. He is one of the few men who would know of it. He had often looked at it on his charts, being attracted by its isolated position. The very place for him. And the old woman, he said, when she learned that he wanted to go there, that he wanted to stay always, all his life, gripped his hand in both of hers, and held them, crying softly without saying anything more. The relatives made some objections to the arrangement at first. But the island, being remote, poverty stricken, haunted, they were soon persuaded to consent to a ten years lease with the option of renewal. Christian promised, of course, to take care of Rao as long as she lived, and at her death to bury her decently beside her husband. He proceeded at once with his altered plans. There were government regulations to be complied with. And these had taken some time. On the day when he was at last free to start, he learned that the Calabas Winship was about to sail on a three-month voyage in the low archipelago. He had no time to ask for passage beforehand. He had to chance the possibility of getting it at the last moment. It is not to be supposed that either the manager of the Interland Trading Company, or the supercargo of the Winship, would have consented to carry him to such an out-of-the-way destination had they known his reason for wanting to be set down there. It amuses me now to think of those two hard-headed traitors, men without a trace of sentiment, going one hundred and fifty miles off their course merely to carry the least gregarious of wanderers on the last leg of his long journey, to an ideal solitude. It was their curiosity which gained him this end. They believed he had some secret purpose, some reason of purely material self-interest and view. They had both seen to now from a distance and knew that it had never been worth visiting either for Pearl Shell or Cobra. It is hard to understand what miracle they believed might have taken place in the meantime. During the voyage I often heard them talking about the atoll, about Critchton, wondering, conjecturing, and always miles off the track. It was plain that he was a good deal disturbed by their hints and futile questionings. He seemed to be afraid that mere talk about Tenno, on the part of an outsider, might sully the purity of its loneliness. He may have been a little selfish in his attitude, but if that is a fault and a man of his temperament it is one easily forgiven. And what could he have said to those traitors? It was much better to keep silent and let them believe what they liked. It must not be thought that Critchton poured out his confidence to me like a schoolgirl. On the contrary, he had a very likable reserve, although a good half of it, I should say, was shyness. Then to he had almost forgotten how to talk except in the native dialects of several groups of widely scattered islands. In English he had a tendency to prolong his vowels and to omit continents, which gave his speech a peculiar exotic sound. He made no advances for some time, neither did I. For more than three weeks we lived together on shipboard, when ashore together at islands where we had put in for a copra, and all that while we did not exchange above two hundred words in conversation. There was so little talk that I can remember the whole of it, almost word for word. Once while we were walking on the outer beach at Recaraga, and at all of thirty-five inhabitants, he said to me, I wish I had come out here years ago. They appealed to the imagination, don't you think? All these islands. His volubility startled me. It was a shock to the senses. Like the crash of a coconut on a tin roof, heard in the profound stillness of an island night. There was my opportunity to throw off reserve, and I lost it, through my surprise. I merely said, yes, very much. An hour later we saw the captain, no larger than a penny doll, at the end of a long vista of empty beach, beckoning us to come back. We went aboard without having spoken again. It was an odd sort of relationship for two white men thrown into close contact on a small trading schooner in the loneliest ocean in the world, as Nordhoff put it. We were no more companionable in an ordinary sense than a pair of hermit-grabs. But the need for talking drops away from men under such circumstances, and neither was found the long silences embarrassing. The spell of the islands was upon us both. I can imagine Christians speaking of their appeal to the imagination, when we were in the midst of them. For our presence there seemed an illusion, a dream more radiant than any reality could be. In fact, my only hold upon reality during that voyage, was the Caleb S. Winship, and sometimes even that substantial old vessel suffered sea changes, was metamorphised in a moment, and it was hard to believe that she was a boat built by man's hands. Often, as she lay at anchor in a lagoon of dreamlike beauty, I paddled out from shore in a small canoe, and making fast under her stern, spent an afternoon watching the upward play of the reflections from the water, and the blue shadows underneath rippling out and vanishing in the light, like flames of fire. For me her homely, rugged, New England name was a pleasant link with the past. I like to read the print of it. The word Boston. Her old home port was still faintly legible through a coat of white paint. It brought to mind old memories and the faces of old friends hard to visualise in the surroundings without such practical help. Far below lay the floor of the lagoon, where all the rainbows of the world have authentic end. The water was so clear, and the sunlight streamed through it with so little loss in brightness, that one seemed to be suspended in mid-air above the forests of branching coral. The deep cool valleys and the wide sandy plains of that strange continent. Christian, I believe, was beyond the desire to keep in touch with the world he had left so many years before. His experiences there may have been bitter ones. At any rate, he never spoke of them, and I doubt if he thought of them often. People had little interest for him, not even those of the atolls which we visited. When on shore, I usually found him on the outer beaches, away from the villages, which lie along the lagoon. In most of the atolls, the distance from beach to beach is only a few hundred yards, but the ocean side is unfrequited and solitary. On calm days, when the tide begins to ebb, the silence there is unearthly. The wide shore, hot and glaring in the sun, stretches away as far as the eye can reach, empty of life except for thousands of small hermit crabs moving into the shade of the palms. They snap into their shells at your approach and make fast the door as their houses fall, with a sound like tinkling hailstones among heaps of broken coral. We waited along the shallows at low tide. When the wind was on shore and a heavy surf breaking over the outer edge of the reef, we sat as close to it as we could, watching the seas gathering far out, rising in sheer walls, fringed with windwhip spray which seemed higher than the island itself as they approached. It was a fascinating sight, the reef hidden in many places in a perpetual smoke of sunlight filtered mist, through which the oncoming breakers could be seen dimly as they swept forward, curled and fell. But one could not avoid a feeling of uneasiness, of insecurity, thinking of what had happened in those islands, most of them only a meter or two above sea level in the hurricanes of the past, and of what would happen again at the coming of the next great storm. We made thine falls at dawn in mid-afternoon, late at night, saw the islands in aspects of beauty exceeding one's strangest imaginings. We penetrated further and further, into the a thousand-mile area of atoll dotted auction, discharging our cargo of lumber and corrugated iron, rice and flour and canned goods, taking on, copra, carrying native passengers from one place to another. Sometimes we were out of sight of land for several days, beating into headwinds under a slowly moving pageantry of clouds which alone gave assurance of the rotundity of the earth. When the last land appeared, it seemed inaccessibly remote at the summit of a long slope of water, which we would never be able to climb. Sometimes, for as long a period, we skirted the shoreline of a single atoll, the water deepening and shoaling under our keel in splotches of vague or vivid coloring. From a vantage point in the rigging, one could see a segment of a vast circle of islands strung at half-hazard on a thread of reef which showed a thin, clear line of changing red and white under the incessant battering of the surf. Several times, upon going ashore, we found the villages deserted, the inhabitants having gone to distant parts of the atoll for the copramaking season. In one village we came upon an old man, two feeble, to go with the others, apparently sitting in the shade, playing a phonograph. He had but three records, a way to the forest, the dance of the nymphs, shoddish, and just a song at twilight. The discs were as old as the instrument itself, no doubt, and the needles so badly worn that one could barely hear the music above the rasping of the mechanism. There was a groove on the vocal record where the natal cot and the singer, a woman with a high quibbry voice, repeated the same phase when the lights are low, over and over again. I can still hear it, even at this distance of time and place, and recall vividly to mind the silent houses, the wide vacant street, right with fugitive sunshine, the lagoon at the end of it, modeled with the shadows of clouds. The sense of our remoteness grew upon me as the weeks and months passed. Once rounding a point of land, we came upon two schooners lying inside the reef of a small atoll. One of them had left Papati, only a short while before. Her skipper gave us a bundle of old newspapers. Glancing through them that evening, I heard, as in a dream, the far-off clamour of the outside world, the shrieking of whistles, the roar of trains, the strident warnings of motors. But there was no reality, no allurement in the sound. I saw men carrying trivial bundles with an air of immense effort, of grotesque self-importance, scurrying and breathless haste on useless errands, gorging food without relish, sleeping without refreshment, taking their leisure without enjoyment, living without the knowledge of content, dying without ever having lived. The pictures which came to mind as I read were distorted, untrue, no doubt, for by the time I was almost as much attracted by the lonely life of the islands as my friend Christian. My odd feeling of restlessness was gone. In its place had come a certitude of happiness, a sense of well-being, for which I can find no parallel this side of boyhood. It was largely the result of living among people who were as permanently happy, I believe, as it is possible for humankind to be, and the more remote the island, the more slender the thread of communication with civilization, as we know it, the happier they were. It was not in my imagination that I found this true or that I had determined beforehand to see only so much of their life as might be agreeable and pleasant to me. On the contrary, if I had any bias at first it was on the other side. Disillusionment is a sad experience, and I had no desire to lay myself open to it. Therefore I listened willingly to the less favorable stories of native character which the traitors and others who knew them had to tell, but summed up dispassionately later in the light of my own observations. It seemed to me that the faults of character, of which they were accused, were more like the natural shortcomings of children. In many respects the Pomotans, like other divisions of the Polynesian family, are children who have never grown up, and one can't blame them for a lack of the artificial virtues which come only with maturity. They are without guile. They have little of the shrewdness or craftiness of some primitive peoples. At least so it appeared to me, making us careful a judgment of them as I could. I have often noticed how like children they are in their amazing trustfulness, their impulsive generosity, and in the intensity and briefness of their emotions. The more I saw of their life, the more desirable it seemed that they might continue to escape any serious encroachments of European or American civilization. They have no doctors, because illness is almost unknown in their islands. Crime and sanity, feeble mindless, evils, all too common with us, are of such rare occurrence that one may say they do not exist. It may be said to, without overstatement, that their community life very nearly approaches perfection. Every atoll is a little world to itself, with a population varying from twenty-five to perhaps three hundred inhabitants. The chief, who was chosen informally by the men, served for a period of four years under the sanction of the French government. He has very little to do with the exercise of his authority, for the people govern themselves are law-abiding without law. When I first learned that there are no schools throughout the islands, I thought the French guilty of criminal neglect. But later I reversed this opinion. After all, why should they have schools? No education of ours could make them more generous, more kindly disposed to one another, more hospitable and courteous toward strangers happier than they are now. Certainly it could not make them less selfish, covetous, rapacious, for most of them are as innocent of those vices as their own children. In a few of the richer, more accessible islands, they are slowly changing in these respects owing to the examples set them by men of our own race. In another fifty years, perhaps they may have learned to believe that material wealth is the only thing worth striving for. Then will come pride in their possessions, and via those who have greater contempt and suspicion for those who have less, and so an end to their happiness. I had never before seen children growing up in a state of nature, and I made full use of the rare opportunity. I spent most of my time with them, played on shore with them, went fishing and swimming with them, and found in the experience something better than a renewal of boyhood because of a keener sense of beauty, a more conscious, mature appreciation of the happiness one has in the simplest kinds of pleasures. Sometimes we started in our excursions at dawn. Sometimes we made them by moonlight. I became a collector of shells in order to give some purpose to our expeditions along the reef. I couldn't have chosen a better interest, for they knew all about shells, wherein went to find the best ones, and they could indulge their love of giving to a limitless extent. In the afternoons we went swimming in the lagoon. There I saw them at their best and happiest, in an element as necessary and familiar to them as it is to their parents. It is always a pleasure to watch children play in the water, but those Pomotan youngsters with their natural grace at swimming and diving put one under an enchantment. Many of the boys had water glasses and small spears of their own and went far from shore catching fish. They lay face down on the surface of the water, swimming easily, with a great economy of motion, turning their heads now and then for a breath of air. And when they saw their prey they dived under it as skillfully as their fathers do and with nearly as much success. Seen against a bright floor of the lagoon with swarms of brilliantly colored fish scattering before them, they seemed doubtfully human, the children of some forsaken merman, rather than creatures who have needed of air to breathe, and solid earth to stand on. If education is the suitable preparation for life, the children of the Atolls have it at its best and happiest without knowing that it is an education. They are skillful and pursuits and learned in the interest which touch their lives, and one can voice them no better fortune, than that they may remain in ignorance of those which do not. Their parents, as I have said, are but children of mature stature, with the same gift of Frank generous laughter, the same delight in the new and strange, very little is required to amuse them. I had a mandolin which I used to take ashore with me at various Atolls after I had become convinced that their enjoyment of my music was not feigned. At first I was suspicious, for I had no illusions about my virtuosity, and even when I thought of it in the most flattering way their pleasures seemed out of all proportion to the quality of the performance. But there was no doubting the genuineness of it. The whole village would assemble to hear me play. I had a limited repertoire. But that seemed to matter very little. They liked to hear the same tunes played over and over again. I learned some of the old missionary hymns which they knew. From Greenland's icy mountains, oh happy day! We're marching to Zion and others. It was strange to find those songs belonging, fortunately to a bygone period in English and American life, living still in that remote part of the world, not because of anything universal in their appeal, but merely because they had been carried there years ago by representatives of the missionary societies. Many eccentric changes had been made in both the rhythm and the melody, greatly to the improvement of both, but no amount of changing could make them other than what they are. The uncouth expression of a narrow and ugly kind of religious sentiment. I don't think the Pomotians care much for them either. They always seem glad to turn from them to their own songs, which have nothing either of modern or old-time missionary feeling. A woman used to begin to singing in a high-pitched, nasal or throaty voice, which she modulated in an extraordinary way. Immediately other women joined in, then several men, whose voices were of tenor quality, followed by other men in basses and baritones. Chanting in two or three tones, which were rhythm and tone quality, were like the beating of kettle-drums. The weird blending of harmonies was unlike anything I had ever heard before. There is nothing in our music which even remotely resembles theirs, so that it is impossible to describe the effect of the full chorus. Some of the songs make a strong appeal to savage instincts. The less resolute of the early missionaries hearing them must have thrown up their hands and despair at the thought of the long, difficult task of conversion awaiting them. But if there were any irresolute missionaries, they were evidently overruled by their sterner brothers and sisters. On nearly every island there is now a church, either Protestant or Catholic. In the Protestant ones the native population practice the only true faith, largely to the accompaniment of this old barbaric music. Those unsightly little structures rock to the sound of exultant choruses which ought never to be sung within doors. The Pamotons themselves know best the natural setting of their songs, the Lagoon Beach with a great fire of coconut husk blazing in the center of a group of singers. I like to hear them, from a distance, where I could get their full effect. To look on from the schooner lying a few hundred yards offshore, all the inhabitants of the village would be gathered within the circle of the firelight, which brought their figures and the white, straight stems of the coconut palms into clear relief against a background of deep shadow. The singing continued far into the night so that I often fell asleep while listening and heard the music dying away, mingling at last with the intermodal booming of the surf. By degrees we work slowly through the heart of the archipelago, pursuing a general southeast early course, the islands becoming more and more scattered, until we had before us an expansive ocean, almost unbroken to the coast of South America. But to now lay at the edge of it, and at length, on a lowering April day, we set out on the last leg of our outward journey. The Calab S. Windship lay very low in the water. By that time she had a full cargo of copra, one hundred tons in the hold, and twelve stacked on deck. A portion of the deck cargo was lost that same afternoon during a gale of wind and rain, which burst upon us with fury and followed us with a seeming malignancy of attempt. We ran before it, far out of our course, for three hours. To me the weight of air was something incredible, an unusually vigorous flourish of the departing hurricane season. Water spouted out of the scuppers in a continuous stream, and loose articles were swept clear of the ship, disappearing at once in a cloud of blinding rain. There was a fearful racket in the cabin of rolling biscuit tins and smashing crockery. Then an eight hundred pound safe broke loose and it started to imitate Victor Hugo's cannon. Luckily it hadn't much scope and no smooth runway, so that it was soon brought to a halt by Rayu, the old Pamantum woman, who was the only one below at the time. She made an effective blockade of copra sacks and bedding, dodging the plunging monster with an agility surprising in a woman of sixty. But what I remember best was Tanei, a monkey belonging to one of the sailors, skidding along the cabin deck until he was blown against the engine room whistle, which rose just clear of the forward end of it. He wrapped his arms and legs around it in his terror, opening the valve in some way, and the shrill blast rose high above the mighty roar of wind, like the voice of a man lifted with awe-inspiring impudence in defiance of the mindless anger of nature. The storm blew itself out towards sundown, and the night fell clear, a night for stars to make one wary of thought. But the moon rose about nine, softening the pitless distances, throwing a veil of mild light across the black voids in the Milky Way, seen so clearly in those latitudes. The schooner was riding a heavy swell, and burdened as she was, rose clumsily to it, sticking her nose into the slope of every sea. Rayu was at her a custom place against the cabin ventilator, unmindful of the showers of spray maintaining her position on the sliding deck with the skill of three months' practice. The thought that I must soon bid her good-bye saddened me, for I knew there was small chance that I should ever meet her again. I envied Christian, his opportunity for friendship with that noble old woman, so proud of her race so true to her own beliefs, to her own way of living, her type is none too common among Polynesians in these days. One gets all too frequently an impression of a consciousness of inferiority on their part, a sense of shame because of their simple way of living as compared with ours. Rayu was not guilty of it, she never could be, I think under any circumstances. I learned afterwards of an attempt which had been made to convert her to Christianity during their stay at Tahiti. Evidently she had not been at all convinced by the priest's arguments, and when he made some sliding remark about the ghosts and spirits which were so real to her, she refused to listen any longer. Brightened though she was of spirits, she was not willing that they should be ridiculed. We cited her atola dawn, such a dawn as one rarely sees outside the tropics. The sky was overcast at a great height, with a film of luminous mist, through which the sun shone wanely, throwing a sheen like a dust of gold on the sea, masses of slate-colored cloud billowed out from the high canopy, overhanging a black fringe of land which lay just below the line of the horizon. The toll was elliptical in shape about eight miles long by five broad. There were seven widely separated islands on the circle of reef and one small mutu in the lagoon. We came into the wind about a half-mile offshore and put off in the whale-boat. The sea was still running fairly high, and the roar of the surf came across the water with a sound as soothing as the fall of spring rain, but it increased in volume as we drew in until the ears were stunned by the crash of tremendous comers which toppled and fell sheer over the ledge of the reef. It was by far the most dangerous-looking landing-place we had seen on the journey. There was no break in the reef, only a few narrow indentations where the surf spotted up in clouds of spray. Between the breaking of one sea and the gathering of the next, the water poured back over a jagged wall of rock, bared for an instant to an appalling depth. Only a native crew could have managed that landing. We rode comer after comer, the sailors backing on their oars, awaiting the word of the boat-steerer, who stood with his feet braced on the gunnels, his head turned over his shoulder watching the following seas. All at once he began shouting at the top of his voice. I looked back in time to see a wall of water. On the point of breaking rising high above us, it fell just after it passed under us, and we were carried forward across the edge of the reef, through the inner shallows to the beach. The two traitors started off at once on a tour of inspection, and we saw nothing more of them until late in the evening. Meanwhile I went with Rahu and critched in across the island to the lagoon beach where her house was. As in most of the atolls, the ground was nearly free from undergrowth, the soil affording nourishment only to the trees, and a few hearty shrubs, coconuts and dead fronds were scattered everywhere. A few half-wild pigs feeding on the shoots of sprouted nuts gazed up with an odd air of incredulity, of amazement as we approached, then galloped off at top speed and disappeared far in the distance. Rahu stopped when we were about halfway across and held up her hand for silence. A bird was singing somewhere. A melodious, varied song like that of the hermit thrush. I had heard it before and had once seen the bird a shy, solitary little thing, one of the few species of land birds found on the atolls. While we were standing there listening to the faint music, Critchton took me by the arm. He said nothing and in a moment withdrew his hand. I was deeply moved by that manifestation of friendliness, an unusual one for him to make. He had some unaccountable defect in his character which kept him aloof from any relationship approaching real intimacy. I believe he was constantly aware of it, and that he had made many futile attempts to overcome it. It may have been that which first set him on his wanderings, now happily at an end. It was plain to me the moment we set foot on the shore, that he would have to seek no further for asylum. Tanau is one of the undoubted ends of the earth. No one would ever disturb him there. He himself was not so sure of this, once I remember when we were looking at the place on the chart. He spoke of the island of Pitrin, the old-time refuge of the bounty mutineers. Before the opening of the Panama Canal it has been as far removed from contact with the outside world as an island could be. Now it lies not far off the route through the canal to New Zealand, and is visited from time to time by the crews of tramp steamers and schooners. Tanau, however, is much further to the north, and there is very slight possibility that its empty horizons will ever be stained by a smudge of smoke. As for an actual visit, one glance at the reef through the binoculars would convince any skipper of the folly of the attempt. Even our own crew of natives skilled at such hazardous work came to grief in their second passage over it. They had gone out to the schooner for supplies. Christian had ordered a few sacks of flowers, some canned goods, and kerosene oil. In coming back the boat had been swept broadside against a ledge of rock. It stuck there, just at the edge of the reef. And the sailors jumped out with the line before the next wave came, capsizing the boat and carrying it in shore. Bottom up. All the supplies were swept into deep water by the backwash and lost. There had been a similar accident at the other atoll. Flower and rice brought so many thousands of miles having been spoiled within a few yards of their destination. I remember the natives plunging into the water at great risk to themselves to save a few sacks of soggy paste in the hope that a little of the flower in the center might still be dry, and a Chinese storekeeper, to whom it was consigned standing on the shore wringing his hands in dumb grief. It was the first time I had ever seen a Chinaman make any display of emotion, and the sight brought home to me a conception of the tragic nature of such accidents to the inhabitants of those distant islands. Christian took his loss calmly, concealing whatever disappointment he may have felt. Raul was not at all concerned about it, and while we were making an examination of the house went out on the lagoon in a canoe and caught more than enough fish for supper. Then we found that all of our matches had been spoiled by seawater, so we could make no fire. Judging by the way Christian brightened up at his discovery, one would have thought the loss a piece of luck. He set to work at once to make an apparatus for kindling fire, but before it was finished Raul had the fish cleaned and spread out on a coverlet of green leaves. We ate them raw, dipping them first into a sauce of coconut milk, and for dessert had a salad made of the heart of a tree. I don't remember ever having eaten with heartier appetite, but at the same time I couldn't imagine myself enjoying an unrelieved diet of coconuts and fish for a period of ten years. Not for so long as a year in fact. Christian, however, was used to it, and Raul had never known any other except during her three-month stay at Tahiti, where she had eaten her strange hot food, which had not agreed with her at all, she said. Dusk came on as we sat over our meal. Raul sat with her hands on her knees, leaning back against a tree, talking to Christian. I understood nothing of what she was saying, but it was a pleasure merely to listen to the music of her voice. It was a little below the usual register of women's voices, strong and clear, but softer even than those of the Tahitians, and so flexible that I could follow every change in mood. She was telling Christian of the topoku of her atoll, which she dreaded most, although she knew that it was the spirit of one of her own sons. It appeared in the form of a dog, with legs as long and thick as the stem of a full-grown coconut tree, and a body proportionally huge. It could have picked up her house as an ordinary dog with a basket. Once it had stepped lightly over it without offering to harm her in any way. Her last son had been drowned while fishing by moonlight on the reef outside the next island, which lay about two miles distant across the eastern end of the lagoon. She had seen the dog three times since his death, and always at the same phase of the moon. Twice she had come upon it lying at full length on the lagoon beach. It's enormous head, resting on its paws. She was so badly frightened, she said, that she fell to the ground incapable of further movement. Sick at heart, too, at the thought that the spirit of the bravest and strongest of all her sons must appear to her in that shape. It was clear that she was recognized for each time the dog began beating its tail on the ground as soon as it saw her. Then it got up, yawned and stretched, took a long drink of salt water, and started at a lope up the beach. She could see it very poignly in the bright moonlight. Soon it broke into a run, going faster and faster, gathering tremendous speed by the time it reached the other end of the island. From there it made a flying spring, and she last saw it as it passed high in air across the face of the moon. Its head outstretched, its legs doubled close under its body. She believed that across the two-mile gap of water which separated the islands in one gigantic leap. That is the whole of the story as Critchton translated it for me. Although there must have been other details, Faroe gave her account of it at great length. Her earnestness of manner was very convincing and left no doubt in my mind of the realness to her of the apparition. As for myself, if I could have seen ghosts anywhere, it would have been at Tenow. Late that night, walking alone on the Lagoon Beach, I found that I was keeping an uneasy watch behind me. The distant thunder of the surf sounded at times like a wild galloping on the hard sand, and the gentle slapping of little waves nearby like the leaping tongue of the ghostly dog, having its fill of seawater. We left Tenow with a fair wind the following afternoon, having been delayed and getting away because of the damaged whale boat, which had to be repaired on shore. Tenow, the supercargo, insisted on pushing off at once the moment the work was finished. Critchton and Raul were on the other beach at the time, so that I had no opportunity to say goodbye. But as we were getting under way, I saw him emerge from the deep shadow and stand for a moment, his hand shading his eyes, looking out toward the schooner. I waved, but evidently he didn't see me, for there was no response. Then he turned, walked slowly up the beach, and disappeared among the trees. For three hours I watched the atoll dwindling and blurring until at sunset it was lost to view, under the rim of the southern horizon. Looking back across that space of empty ocean, I imagined that I could still see it dropping further and further away, down the reverse slope of a smooth curve of water, as though it were vanishing, for all time, beyond the knowledge and concern of men. My first packet of letters from Nordhoff was brought by the skipper of the schooner Aluet. He had been carrying it about for many weeks, and had it in the first place from the supercargo of another vessel, Medet Ratou, in the astral group. The envelope tattered and weather-stained spoke of its long journey in search of me. Before separating at Pepeet, we had arranged for a rendezvous, but at that time we still possessed American ideas of punctuality and well-ordered travel. Now we knew something of the casual movements of creating schooners, and have learned to regard the timely arrival of a letter as an event touching on the miraculous, the keeping of a rendezvous, a possibility too remote for consideration. One hears curious tales in this part of the world of the outcome of such temporary leave taking as ours was meant to be, husbands seeking their wives and wives their husbands, family scattered among these fragments of land, and striving for many months to reunite. I witnessed not long ago the sequel of one of these unsuccessful quests. A native from a distant group of islands set out for one of the atolls of the low archipelago. The home of his sweetheart, arrangements for the marriage had been made long before, but letters had gone astray, and upon his arrival the young man found that the family of his perspective, father-in-law, had gone to another atoll for the diving season. With no means of following he submitted to the inevitable and married another girl. Months later the woman of his first choice returned with her second choice of a husband, and the former lovers met, for the young man had not yet been able to return to his own island. Neither made any question of the other's decision, life is too short, and from the native point of view it is foolish to spend it in wanderings which, at the least, may never fulfill her purpose. Nevertheless, I shall make a search for Nordhof, a leisurely search, with some expectation of finding him. Our islands, like those of Mr. Conrad's enchanted heist, are bounded by a circle, two thousand or more miles across, and it is likely that neither of us will ever succeed in breaking through to the outside world if, indeed, there is an outside world. I am beginning to doubt this, for the enchantment is at work, as for Nordhof, his letters which follow, may speak for themselves. The sun was low when they yet steamed out through the pass and headed for the Cook Group, six hundred miles west and south. Dark clouds hung over Rhaeta, Rhaegi, Aetia, of Moray tradition, the land of the bright heavens, but the level sunlight still illuminated the hillsides of Taha, the lovely sister island, protected by the same great oval reef. Far off to the north, the peak of Bora Bora, towered abruptly from the sea. It was not yet the season of the trades in the northeast breeze which followed as brought a sweltering heat, intolerable anywhere but on deck. Worthington was sitting beside me, a lean man, darkly tanned, with very bright blue eyes. His feet were bare, he wore a singlet, trousers of white drill, and a manaheke hat, beautifully bladed or bleached, pandal-less sleeve. A hat not to be bought with money. The dinner gong sounded. I'm not going down to remark too hot below. I had something to eat in your Torah. How about you? I shook my head. It needed more than a normal appetite to drive me to the dining-salon. Banks of squall cloud, shading from gray to an unwholesome violet, were gathering along the horizon and the air was so heavy that one inhaled it with an effort. This is the worst month of the hurricane season Worthington went on. It was just such an evening as this, last year, that the waterspout nearly got us the night we sighted Mata'ora. I was five months up there, you know, marooned, when Johnson lost the old Hattotu. I was pretty well done up last year when I heard that the Hattotu was in the Bora. I decided to take a vacation and go for a six weeks cruise with Johnson. Ordinarily he would have flayed up, in Pepe-ti, until after the equinox, but the company had sent for him to make a special trip to Byrun. He had a wretched passage north, a succession of squalls and broiling coms. The schooner was in bad shape, anyway, rotten sails, rigging falling to pieces, and six inches of grass on her bottom. On a hot day she had a bouquet all her own. The sun distilled from her a blend of cockroaches and mildewed cobra that didn't smell like a rose garden. On the thirteenth day the skipper told me we were two hundred miles from Pengaron and so close to Mata'ora that we might sight the palm tops. I'd heard a lot about the place. It has an English name on the chart. How isolated it was, what a pleasant crowd the natives were, and how it was the best place in the Pacific to see old-fashioned island life. We had been working to windward against a light northerly breeze, but the wind began to drop at noon, and by three o'clock it was glassy calm. There was a wicked-looking mass of clouds moving toward us from the west, but the glass was high and Johnson said we were in for nothing worse than a skull. As the clouds drew near I could see that they had a sort of purplish black heart. Broad at the top, pointed at the bottom, and dropping gradually toward the water. There was something queer about it. The mate was pointing, and Johnson's Kanakas were all standing up. Suddenly I heard a rushing sound like a heavy squall passing through the bush. The point of the funnel had touched the sea three or four hundred yards away from us, a water-spot. There wasn't a breath of air, and the Hatutu had no engine. It was moving straight for us, so slowly that I could watch every detail of its formation. The boys slid our boat overboard. The mate sang out something about all hands being ready to leave the schooner. I've heard of water-spots ever since I was a youngster, but I never expected to see one as close as we did that day. As the point of cloud dropped toward the sea it was ragged and ill-defined, but when it touched the water and the noise began I saw its shape change, and its outlines grow hard. It was now a thin column four or five feet in diameter, raising a couple of hundred feet before it swelled in the form of a flat cone. To join the clouds above, curiously enough, it was not perpendicular, but had a decided sagging curve. Nearer and nearer it came until I could make out the great swirling hole at its base and see the venerous look of this column of solid water revolving at amazing speed. It hadn't the misty edges of a waterfall. The outside was sharply defined as the walls of a tumbler. I wondered what would happen when it struck the hatutu. The mate was shouting again, but just then the skipper pushed a rifle into my hands. Damned if I'd leave the old hookery swore. Shoot into the thing. Maybe we can break it up. And believe me or not, we did break it up. It didn't come down with a crash, as one might have expected. When we had pumped about twenty shots into it, it was not more than fifty yards away. It began to dwindle. The column of water became smaller and drew itself out to nothing. The rushing noise ceased. The hole in the sea disappeared in a lazy eddy. The dark funnel rose and blended with the clouds above. A fine southeast breeze sprang up as the clouds disappeared. And we were reaching away for Pryron, when a boy up forward gave a shout and pointed to the northwest. Sure enough, there was a faint line on the horizon, the palms of Mataora. A sudden idea came to me. I was fed up with the schooner. Why not ask to be put ashore and picked up on the hatutu's return from Pryron. She would be back in a fortnight, and it was only a few miles out of her way to drop me and pick me up. Johnson is a good fellow. His answer to my proposition was to change to his chorus at once and slack away for the land twelve miles to Leeward. You'll have a great time, he said. I wish I were going with you. Old Terry will put you up. I'll give you a word to him. Take along two or three bags of flour and a few presents for the women. At five o'clock we were off the principal village with canoes, all about us, and more coming out through the surf. The men were a fine, brawny lot, joking with the crew, and eager for news and small trade. I lured my box some flour, tobacco, and a few bolts of calico into the largest canoe and said goodbye to Johnson. It was nearly a year before I saw him again. As you know, he lost a hatutu on Flying Venus Shoal. They made Penrian in the boat and got a passage to Tahiti two months later. Everyone knew I was on Matura, but it was five months before a schooner could come and take me off. There is no pass into the lagoon. As we drew near the shore, I saw that the easy, deceptive swell reared up to form an ugly surf ahead of us. At one point, where a crowd of people was gathered, there was a large, irregular fissure in the coral, broad and deep enough to admit the passage of a small boat and filled with rushing water each time a breaker crashed on the reef. My two paddlers stopped opposite this fissure and just outside the surf, watching over their shoulders for the right wave. They let four or five good-sized ones pass, backing water gently with their paddles. But at last a proper one came, rearing and tossing its crest till I thought it would break before it reached us. My men dug their paddles into the water, shouting exultantly. As they darted forward, the shouts were echoed on shore. By Jove, it was a thriller! Tilting just on the break of the wave, we flew in between jagged walls of coral up the fissure, around a turn and before the water began to rise back a dozen men and women had plunged in waist deep to seize the canoe. Matura is made up of a chain of low islands, all densely covered with coconut palm strung together in rough oval to enclose a lagoon five miles by three. Though there is no pass, the surf at high tide breaches over the gaps between the islands. The largest island is only a mile and a half long, and none of them are more than half a mile across. Dotted about the surface of the lagoon are a number of matu, tiny islets. Each with its flock of seafowl, its clump of palms and shining beach of coral sand. Said in a lonely stretch of the Pacific, the place is almost cut off from communication with the outside world. Twice or three times in the course of a year, a trading schooner calls to leave supplies and take off Cobra. Undisturbed by contact with civilization, the life at Matura flows on, simple, placid, and agreeably monotonous. Very little changed, I fancy, since the old days. It is true that they have a native missionary and use calico, flour, and tobacco when they can get them. But these are minor things, the great events in their annals are the outrage of the Peruvian slavers. In 1862, when many of the people were carried off to labor and die in the Tchenches island and the hurricane of 1913. After presenting myself to the missionary and the chief, I was escorted by a crowd of youngsters to the lagoon side of the island, where Terry lived in a spot cooled by the trade wind and pleasantly shaded by coconuts. The old chap was a warm friend of Johnson's and made me welcome. I soon arranged to put up with him during my stay on the island. His house, like all the Matura houses, was worth a bit of study. Panduna's logs, five or six inches in diameter, and set four feet apart, made the uprights. On each side of these logs, and extending from top to bottom, a groove was cut. Thin laths, split from the aerial roots of the Panduras, were set horizontally into the grooves, making a wall which permitted the free circulation of air. At the windward end of the house, a large shutter of the same material was hung on hinges of bark. On warm days, it could be opened to admit the breeze. The plates and rafters were made of the trunks of old coconut palms, a beautiful hard wood which blackens with age and can be polished like mahogany. The roof was thatched with cacao, strips of wood over which were doubled selected leaves of Panduras, six feet long and four inches across. The cacao are laid like shingles, so deeply overlapped that only six inches of each is exposed, and the result is a cool and perfectly watertight roof which lasts for years. The floor of Terry's house was a fine white gravel covered with mats. A bit of mats, a few odds and ends of fishing gear and a Bible in the Rotongan language made up the furniture. The old man had been a pearl diver for many years. He knew all the lagoons of this part of the Pacific and could give the history of every large pearl discovered in these waters, twenty fathoms he considered an ordinary depth for the naked divers, twenty-five the limit. One day he went too deep, and since then he has been a cripple with paralyzed leg, dependent for care on the kindly people of his island. He busied himself in carving out models of the ancient Polynesian sailing canoes, beautifully shaped and polished and laid with shell, and provided with sails of mother of pearl. Now and then he presented a canoe to the captain of a trading schooner, visiting the island, and received in return a bag of flour or a few sticks of tobacco. I had some interesting yarns with Terry. I speak Aurora Tongan, and Montara language is a good deal the same. They have three extra consonants, by the way, the F, L, and H. What a puzzle these island dialects are. Terry told me a lot about pearl fishing. The people had divided their lagoon into three sections, one of which was fished each year. In this way each section got a two years rest. The shell is the object of the diving. Pearls are a secondary issue. The divers are not much afraid of sharks but dread the tonu and the big conger eel. Some years before, when Terry was resting in a boat after his spell underwater, one of his companions failed to return to the surface. Looking through his water-glass, he saw a great tonu lying on the bottom sixty feet beneath him. The legs of his comrade hanging from its jaws. Fancy the ugly brute, ten feet long and all head, like an overgrown rock-caught with a man in his mouth. Terry and several others seized their spears and went over the side next moment. They killed a tonu but too late to save the life of their companion. Conger eels grow to enormous size in the pearl lagoon, and the divers keep a close watch for them. They lie in holes and crevices of the coral and dart out their heads to seize a passing fish, or the waist of a diver, stooping an intent on his task. When the conger's jaws close on wrist or ankle, the diver needs a cool head. No amount of struggling will pull the eel from his hole. One must wait quietly. Terry told me until the conger relaxes his jaws, preparatory to taking a better grip, than a quick wrench, and one is free. On a auto, like Matura, where the food supply is limited to fish and coconuts with a chicken or a piece of pork as an occasional treat, fishing plays a large part in the life of the people. The men were all expert fishermen, and used a variety of ingenious methods to catch the different kinds of fish. Terry, of course, was no longer able to go out, but a friend of his, an old fellow named Tamatoa, used to take me with him. He was a fine specimen, six feet tall, muscular, and active as a boy, with clear eyes and thick gray hair. One day he proposed trying for copperu, a small variety of mackerel. The settlement is on the lee side of the island, where a coral shoal runs out half a mile to sea, covered with twenty to forty fathom of the water. It was, early in the morning, a dead calm, when we launched the big canoe and slipped out through the surf. About a quarter of a mile offshore, Tamatoa asked me to hold the canoe stationary while he went about his fishing. Fastening a twenty foot rope to the thwart, he made a noose at the other end and passed it under his arms. Then he took a ripe coconut, split it, and gouged out the meat with his knife. With the white pulp in one hand he slipped overboard, and swam down as far as the rope would let him. Through my water-glass I watched him put pieces of coconut into his mouth, and blow out clouds of the finely chewed stuff, which drifted and eddied about him in the gentle current. He seemed to stay under indefinitely. The lungs of a pearl-diver are wonderful things. Now and then he came to the surface for a fresh supply of chum, and, finally, at first in twos and threes, and then in shoals, the cuparoo began to appear from the depths. Little by little he enticed them close to the surface until they swam all about him fearlessly, gobbling the morsels of coconut. And last the old man reached up for his fishing-tangle, an 18-inch twig, with a bit of doubled-sewing cotton and a tiny, barbless hook. He baited the hook with a particle of coconut and dangled it under the nose of the nearest cuparoo, while he hung on the shortened rope just beneath the surface. His right arm broke water in a series of jerks, and each time it rose a fish tumbled into the canoe until they lay in the bottom by dozens. Though the people of Matarora made sport of their work, they had plenty of leisure for other things. In the evening when the tasks of the day had been completed by lighting the lamps in the roofed-over sleeping places of the dead, the young people loved to gather for a session of a koutu talanga, storytelling. They met in some one's house or brought mats to spread in the bright moonlight outside, and while the others lay about intent on the tale, one after another reflected the adventures of some Polynesian hero or the loves of some legendary island princess, strange fragments from the old days, full of specters and devils and monstrous heathen gods. There was a girl named Porima who told her stories marvellously well, a tall youngster of seventeen, with a dash of off-island blood, Hawaiian, I think. She was an artist in her way. One could imagine in her the pioneer of a literature to come. Her broad forehead, the masses of black hair, which from time to time with an impatient gesture she shook back over her shoulders, and the slumberous eyes, with a suggestion of hypnotic power, made her a person not easily forgotten. Although she had told them many times, Primaia's stories never failed to hold her audience. The whispering ceased when she began, and every head turned towards where she sat, her hands continually in motion, her voice rising in excitement, or dying away to a murmur, while the listeners held their breath. As the hours passed, both audience and performers used to grow weary and drop off to sleep one by one. Finally a rooster crowed and one awoke with a start to realize that it was day. One evening, at a storytelling, I heard a shout from the beach and remembered that I had been invited to go after flying fish, a dozen canoes were putting out through the surf, each manned by four paddlers. I made a fourth in the last canoe. We shot out of the opening with a receding wave, paddled desperately through the surf, and a moment later were rocking gently beyond the breakers. The canoes were formed into a rough line. Each stern man, lit a torch of coconut leaves bound with bark and a man forward, took his place standing, net in hand. The net is like a shallow landing net, set on a half of stiff bamboo and can be handled only after years of unconscious training. My position, paddling midships, enabled me to watch how the net was managed. One doesn't often see such an exhibition of dexterity and strength. The art consists in clapping the net over the fish just at the moment when he is lying at the surface, hesitating before taking flight. At any instant the netter may see a fish to port, to starboard, or directly ahead. Our man swung his net continually, and each time it passed over the canoe, he flipped it upside down to drop a fish. Think of the muscles needed for this sort of thing, the quickness of eye in hand, where a delicate balance must be maintained, and one is constantly alert to guard one's face against the fish, which was passed at all angles. Then remember that it is a pretty serious matter to cap size in this torch lit water swarming with sharks, where it is imprudent even to trail one's hand overboard. In the bend of a bow-shaped islet at the north end of the lagoon under the palms behind a shore of blue water and dazzling sand, lived an old chat named Ruri, who introduced me to another kind of fishing. Ruri was close to seventy, but a strong man still. His only complaint was lack of teeth, which compelled him to live on Barabu, the graded-up meat of the young coconut, mixed with its own milk. The ambition of his life was a trip to Tahiti to get a set of false teeth. He was not a native of Matura. His mother was a Gilbert islander and his father a Samoan. For many years Ruri had followed the sea cabin boy under bullion haze, deserter to keep a whole skin from the famous Leonora, blackbirder in the New Habergies, and Solomon Islands, pearlfisher in Penren, and the lagoons of the Pomontu. At last, on a black night of storm, his vessel struck and went to pieces on the coral of Matura, and Ruri's days of wandering were over. He married a woman of the island, but now she was dead and the old man lived alone. A mile from the settlement occupied with his simple wants and immersed in dreams of the past. Close beside his house was the grave of his wife, a tomb of cement enclosed in a neat building of octagonal shape, with a door and a small curtain window. A fine lamp carefully tended and lit every evening at sunset, hung above the grave, and a few stunted gardenias and frankinpenias brought from enormous distances were planted about the door. Ruri's little plantation of coconuts and coarse taro was free from weeds and the neatness of his house, ship-shape and scrupulously clean, betrayed the old sailor. After a spell of calm weather, when the breaching surf had ceased to cloud the waters of the lagoon, and the suspended particles of coral sand had settled to the bottom, Ruri offered to show me how to catch tinu, a fine fish inhabiting the lagoon in ten to twenty fathoms of water. Speckled like a trout on a ground of brown and gold and reaching a weight of twenty pounds. In the absurdly complicated process of obtaining bait, tenu fishing is typical of the South Pacific. The night before, Ruri had spent two hours with a torch catching hermit crabs. Now, using these crabs for bait, we had to catch some kuta, a small prickly fish which alone has power to interest the tinu. We set out in Ruri's leaky canoe and paddled to a big coral mushroom, which rose to within a yard of the surface. Here the old man smashed the shells of his hermit crabs with a stone, broke off the claws, set the soft bodies to one side and mashed the claws to a paste, which he dropped overboard and allowed to drift into a dark hole in the coral. Then he produced a short line, baited the hook with a body of a crab, and let it sink out of sight into the darkness of the hole. In ten minutes a dozen kuta were gasping in the bottom of the canoe. Fantastic little fish, colored scarlet and vermilion, with enormous black eyes and a dorsal fin which seemed to be carved out of red ceiling wax. We put them in a basket, trailed overboard to keep them alive, and began the real fishing of the day. I paddled slowly while Ruri, who did not believe in fishing till the fish was in sight, leaned over the side scrutinizing the bottom through his water glass. Finally he signaled me to stop. His eyes had caught the movement of a tenu among the masses of live coral forty feet below us. The rest was simple. One hooked a kuta under the dorsal fin, tossed him overboard and allowed the weight of the hook and line to carry him to the bottom. By means of the water glass one could watch the approach of the tenu, see him seize the bait and judge the proper moment to strike. The badino, which they call a tu, is the most important of all fish to the people of Matora. Almost any fine day one could see a fleet of canoes working offshore, busy at Benito Catching, surrounded by a cloud of the sea birds which guide one to the schools. They use a pretty lure for this fishing, a sort of jig cut out of mother of pearl, equipped with a tuft of red dyed coconut husk and a barbless hook of shell. Each fisherman carries a stiff bamboo rod and half a dozen of these lures, ranging in color from pale green to black, attached to ten foot lengths of line. The islanders have discovered that the condition of the water and the variations of light make certain colors more attractive than others at a given time, and when a school is found they try one shade after another till they discover which the Benito prefer. Then the jigs not in use are hooked to a ring at the base of the pole, and the fisherman begins to pull Benito from the water, heaving them out by main strength without a moment's play. The barbless hook releases itself the moment the fish is in the canoe and the lure goes overboard without the loss of an instant. One day after a period of low tides I saw another method of fishing, rarely practiced nowadays, an aura or fish poisoning picnic. You know the Berington are probably the big tree from which they make their drums. It grows on all the high islands and sometimes one finds it on the richest atolls. There are a few on Matorra. Ever notice the flower? It is a lovely thing, a tassel of silky cream-colored stamens, shading to odd rows at the ends and tipped with golden beads. The fruit is odd looking, like a squarish palm granite, and it has odd properties, for when pounded up and put into shallow water it seems to stupefy the fish. I was sitting in the shade beside Terry's house when a boy came along the settlement, blowing melancholy blast on a conch shell, and announcing that the chief wanted everyone to be on hand that afternoon at a certain part of Lagoon, where an aura was to be held. We set out at noon, the women carrying the crushed seeds of the baritunga in hastily woven baskets of green coconut frond. A crowd from the other settlements was awaiting our arrival, and when the babies had been put to sleep in the shade, with small children stationed beside them to fan away flies, the fun began. A shallow stretch of lagoon lay before us, half a mile long, by a quarter wide, and into this plunged the women and girls, wading and swimming in all directions, trailing behind them their baskets of poison. As time went on, a faint and curious odor began to rise from the water, a smell which reminded me vaguely of potassium cyanide. Soon the spearmen were busy, wild brown figures naked except for scarlet loincloth, pursuing the half-stubified fish among the crevices of the coral. Before the effect of the poison wore off and the reviving fish began to make their escape to deeper water, the men were returning to the beach, the strings of hibiscus bark at their belts loaded and dragging. On another day I joined a party of young people for a picnic across the lagoon. It was glassy calm, the water was like a mirror in which the palms of the wooded islets were reflected with motionless perfection. The beaches on the far side, invisible on an ordinary day, seemed to rise far out of water in the mirage. We landed on an uninhabited island, hauled up our canoes, and set out for a hunt of coconut crabs. They are extraordinary creatures. These crabs enormous and delicious to eat. You will not find many on the high islands, but in a place like Matorra there are hundreds of them and they do a lot of damage to the coconuts. During the day they hide in their holes deep among the roots of some big trees. At night they come out, climb the palms, nip off the nuts with their powerful claws, descend to the ground, tear off the husk, break open the shells, and devour the meat. To catch them one can either dig them out or build a fire at the mouth of the hole, which never fails to draw them. Fire simply fascinates the roots. They must be handled rarely, for their claws can grip like a pair of pipe tongs and shear off a man's finger without an effort. We lit a fire under the shade of a puketry and liberated the crabs we had captured. It sounds incredible, but they walked into the fire and sat down quietly on the embers to roast. One of the boys climbed a palm and brought us some coconuts of a variety called new mangrove, with an edible husk, sweet and fibrous, like sugarcane. After lunch we had a swim in the deep water close and shore, and lay about smoking while the girl's woeous wreaths of sweet fern. It was an idyllic sort of a day. I spent five months on Matorra. At first when the schooner did not appear, I was worried and used to fret a little. But as time went on I agreed to like the easygoing, dreamy life, and when it last a schooner came to take me off, I didn't know whether to be glad or sorry. There were moments when I almost decided to send for a few things and follow the example of old Ruri. During those five months I knew more disinterested kindness than I had supposed existed in the world, my heart warmed to the people of Matorra. Finally the day came when the schooner dropped anchor in the lee of the village. Whitmore's Terria. Canoe after canoe shot out through the surf. The women gathered in the shade of the canoe houses on the beach, awaiting the landing of the boatmen. Who would bring news of husbands diving for shell in distant lagoons, or relative scattered among far off groups of islands? As I shook hands with Whitmore I heard a prolonged wailing from the village. The tangy of a new widow. When I went to the house to get my things together Terria informed me that as the schooner would not leave till next day the people were preparing a farewell feast to my honor. It was held in the assembly house of the village, decorated with arches of palm-fraund, garlands of scented fern and the scarlet flowers of Fibiscus. Everyone brought a gift for the departing stranger. A fan, a hat, a pearlfish hook, a drinking cup, a ornamented coconut shell, a carved paddle of porcupine wood inlaid with mother of pearl. I distributed what I had to offer. Wishing it were a dozen times as much. On the beach next morning the people of Matorra gathered for the last hand-clasp. Smile cynically, if you will. There were tears shed. I wasn't too happy myself when I heard their plaintive song of farewell floating out across the water. Worthington ceased speaking and leaned forward to scratch a match. The squall had passed long since. The immense arch of the milky way stretched overhead and low in the south, beyond Hull Island and Rematorra over the longest ocean in the world. The southern cross was rising. Lying on mats behind us, a party of Cook Islanders spoke in soft tones, their faces illuminated fitfully by the glow of their cigarettes. My companion was lighting his pipe. And in the flame of the match I could see that he was smiling to himself. Someday he said, you will hear that I have closed up my affairs and disappeared. Don't worry when that happens. You'll know I have gone to Matorra. This time to stop for good.