THE sun was low when the Faaite steamed out through the pass and headed for the Cook group, six hundred miles west and south. Dark clouds hung over Raiatea—Rangi Atea of Maori tradition, the Land of the Bright Heavens—but the level sunlight still illuminated the hillsides of Tahaa, the lovely sister island, protected by the same great oval reef. Far off to the north, the peak of Bora Bora towered abruptly from the sea.
It was not yet the season of the Trades, and the northeast breeze which followed us brought a sweltering heat, intolerable anywhere but on deck. Worthington was sitting beside me—a lean man, darkly tanned, with very bright blue eyes. His feet were bare; he wore a singlet, trousers of white drill, and a Manihiki hat—beautifully plaited of bleached pandanus leaf—a hat not to be bought with money. The dinner gong sounded.
"I'm not going down," he remarked; "too hot below. I had something to eat at Uturoa. How about you?"
I shook my head—it needed more than a normal appetite to drive one to the dining saloon. Banks of squall cloud, shading from gray to an unwholesome violet, were gathering along the horizon, and the air was so heavy that one inhaled it with an effort.
"This is the worst month of the hurricane season," Worthington went on; "it was just such an evening as this, last year, that the waterspout nearly got us—the night we sighted Mataora. I was five months up there, you know—marooned when Johnson lost the old Hatutu.
"I was pretty well done up last year, and when I heard that the Hatutu was at Avarua I decided to take a vacation and go for a six weeks' cruise with Johnson. Ordinarily he would have been laid up in Papeete until after the equinox, but the company had sent for him to make a special trip to Penrhyn. We had a wretched passage north—a succession of squalls and broiling calms. The schooner was in bad shape, anyway: rotten sails, rigging falling to pieces, and six inches of grass on her bottom. On a hot day she had a bouquet all her own—the sun distilled from her a blend of cockroaches and mildewed copra that didn't smell like a rose garden. On the thirtieth day the skipper told me we were two hundred miles from Penrhyn and so close to Mataora that we might sight the palm tops. I'd heard a lot about the place (it has an English name on the chart)—how isolated it was, what a pleasant crowd the natives were, and how it was the best place in the Pacific to see old-fashioned island life.
"We had been working to windward against a light, northerly breeze, but the wind began to drop at noon, and by three o'clock it was glassy calm. There was a wicked-looking mass of clouds moving toward us from the west, but the glass was high and Johnson said we were in for nothing worse than a squall. As the clouds drew near I could see that they had a sort of purplish-black heart, broad at the top, pointed at the bottom, and dropping gradually toward the water. There was something queer about it; the mate was pointing, and Johnson's Kanakas were all standing up. Suddenly I heard a rushing sound, like a heavy squall passing through the bush; the point of the funnel had touched the sea three or four hundred yards away from us—a waterspout! There wasn't a breath of air, and the Hatutu had no engine. It was moving straight for us, so slowly that I could watch every detail of its formation. The boys slid our boat overboard; the mate sang out something about all hands being ready to leave the schooner.
"I've heard of waterspouts ever since I was a youngster, but I never expected to see one as close as we did that day. As the point of cloud dropped toward the sea it was ragged and ill defined; but when it touched the water and the noise began I saw its shape change and its outlines grow hard. It was now a thin column, four or five feet in diameter, rising a couple of hundred feet before it swelled in the form of a flat cone, to join the clouds above. Curiously enough, it was not perpendicular, but had a decided sagging curve. Nearer and nearer it came, until I could make out the great swirling hole at its base, and see the vitreous look of this column of solid water, revolving at amazing speed. It hadn't the misty edges of a waterfall. The outside was sharply defined as the walls of a tumbler. I wondered what would happen when it struck the Hatutu. The mate was shouting again, but just then the skipper pushed a rifle into my hands. 'Damned if I leave the old hooker,' he swore. 'Shoot into the thing—maybe we can break it up.' And, believe me or not, we did break it up.
"It didn't come down with a crash, as one might have expected. When we had pumped about twenty shots into it, and it was not more than fifty yards away, it began to dwindle. The column of water became smaller and drew itself out to nothing; the rushing noise ceased; the hole in the sea disappeared in a lazy eddy; the dark funnel rose and blended with the clouds above.
"A fine southeast breeze sprang up as the clouds dispersed, and we were reaching away for Penrhyn when a boy up forward gave a shout and pointed to the northwest. Sure enough there was a faint line on the horizon—the palms of Mataora. A sudden idea came to me. I was fed up with the schooner. Why not ask to be put ashore and picked up on the Hatutu's return from Penrhyn? She would be back in a fortnight, and it was only a few miles out of her way to drop me and pick me up.
"Johnson is a good fellow; his answer to my proposition was to change his course at once and slack away for the land twelve miles to leeward. 'You'll have a great time,' he said; 'I wish I were going with you. Old Tari will put you up—I'll give you a word to him. Take along two or three bags of flour and a few presents for the women.'
"At five o'clock we were off the principal village, with canoes all about us and more coming out through the surf. The men were a fine, brawny lot, joking with the crew, and eager for news and small trade. I lowered my box, some flour, tobacco, and a few bolts of calico, into the largest canoe, and said good-by to Johnson.
"It was nearly a year before I saw him again; as you know, he lost the Hatutu on Flying Venus Shoal. They made Penrhyn in the boat and got a passage to Tahiti two months later. Everyone knew I was on Mataora, but it was five months before a schooner could come to take me off.
"There is no pass into the lagoon. As we drew near the shore I saw that the easy, deceptive swell reared up to form an ugly surf ahead of us. At one point, where a crowd of people was gathered, there was a large irregular fissure in the coral, broad and deep enough to admit the passage of a small boat, and filled with rushing water each time a breaker crashed on the reef. My two paddlers stopped opposite this fissure and just outside the surf, watching over their shoulders for the right wave. They let four or five good-sized ones pass, backing water gently with their paddles; but at last a proper one came, rearing and tossing its crest till I thought it would break before it reached us. My men dug their paddles into the water, shouting exultantly as we darted forward. The shouts were echoed on shore. By Jove! it was a thriller! Tilting just on the break of the wave, we flew in between jagged walls of coral, up the fissure, around a turn—and before the water began to rush back, a dozen men and women had plunged in waist deep to seize the canoe.
"Mataora is made up of a chain of low islands—all densely covered with coconut palms—strung together in a rough oval to inclose a lagoon five miles by three. Though there is no pass, the surf at high tide breaches over the gaps between the islands. The largest island is only a mile and a half long, and none of them are more than half a mile across. Dotted about the surface of the lagoon are a number of motu—tiny islets—each with its flock of sea fowl, its clump of palms, and shining beach of coral sand. Set in a lonely stretch of the Pacific, the place is almost cut off from communication with the outside world; twice or three times in the course of a year a trading schooner calls to leave supplies and take off copra. Undisturbed by contact with civilization, the life of Mataora flows on—simple, placid, and agreeably monotonous—very little changed, I fancy, since the old days. It is true that they have a native missionary, and use calico, flour, and tobacco when they can get them; but these are minor things. The great events in their annals are the outrage of the Peruvian slavers in eighteen sixty-two, when many of the people were carried off to labor and die in the Chinchas Islands, and the hurricane of nineteen thirteen.
"After presenting myself to the missionary and the chief I was escorted by a crowd of youngsters to the lagoon side of the island, where Tairi lived, in a spot cooled by the trade wind and pleasantly shaded by coconuts. The old chap was a warm friend of Johnson's and made me welcome; I soon arranged to put up with him during my stay on the island. His house, like all the Mataora houses, was worth a bit of study.
"Pandanus logs, five or six inches in diameter and set four feet apart, made the uprights. On each side of these logs, and extending from top to bottom, a groove was cut. Thin laths, split from the aërial roots of the pandanus, were set horizontally into the grooves, making a wall which permitted the free circulation of air. At the windward end of the house, a large shutter of the same material was hung on hinges of bark; on warm days it could be opened to admit the breeze. The plates and rafters were made of the trunks of old coconut palms—a beautiful hard wood which blackens with age and can be polished like mahogany. The roof was thatched with kakao—strips of wood over which were doubled selected leaves of pandanus, six feet long and four inches across. The kakao are laid on like shingles, so deeply overlapped that only six inches of each is exposed, and the result is a cool and perfectly water-tight roof which lasts for years.
"The floor of Tari's house was of fine white gravel, covered with mats. A bed of mats, a few odds and ends of fishing gear, and a Bible in the Rarotongan language made up the furniture. The old man had been a pearl diver for many years; he knew all the lagoons of this part of the Pacific, and could give the history of every large pearl discovered in these waters. Twenty fathoms he considered an ordinary depth for the naked divers—twenty-five, the limit. One day he went too deep, and since then he had been a cripple with paralyzed legs, dependent for care on the kindly people of his island. He busied himself in carving out models of the ancient Polynesian sailing canoes, beautifully shaped and polished, inlaid with shell, and provided with sails of mother-of-pearl. Now and then he presented a canoe to the captain of a trading schooner visiting the island, and received in return a bag of flour or a few sticks of tobacco.
"I had some interesting yarns with Tari—I speak Rarotongan, and the Mataora language is a good deal the same. They have three extra consonants, by the way—the f, l, and h. What a puzzle these island dialects are!
"Tairi told me a lot about pearl fishing. The people had divided their lagoon into three sections, one of which was fished each year. In this way each section got a two years' rest. The shell is the object of the diving—pearls are a secondary issue. The divers are not much afraid of sharks, but dread the tonu and the big conger eel. Some years before, when Tari was resting in a boat after a spell under water, one of his companions failed to return to the surface. Looking through his water glass, he saw a great tonu lying on the bottom, sixty feet beneath him—the legs of his comrade hanging from its jaws. Fancy the ugly brute, ten feet long and all head, like an overgrown rock cod, with a man in his mouth. Tairi and several others seized their spears and were over the side next moment; they killed the tonu, but too late to save the life of their companion.
"Conger eels grow to enormous size in the pearl lagoons, and the divers keep a close watch for them. They lie in holes and crevices of the coral and dart out their heads to seize a passing fish, or the wrist of a diver stooping and intent on his task. When the conger's jaws close on wrist or ankle, the diver needs a cool head; no amount of struggling will pull the eel from his hole. One must wait quietly, Tairi told me, until the conger relaxes his jaws preparatory to taking a better grip. Then a quick wrench, and one is free.
"On an atoll like Mataora, where the food supply is limited to fish and coconuts, with a chicken or a piece of pork as an occasional treat, fishing plays a large part in the life of the people. The men were all expert fishermen, and used a variety of ingenious methods to catch the different kinds of fish. Tairi, of course, was no longer able to go out; but a friend of his—an old fellow named Tamatoa—used to take me with him. He was a fine specimen—six feet tall, muscular and active as a boy, with clear eyes and thick gray hair. One day he proposed trying for koperu, a small variety of mackerel.
"The settlement is on the lee side of the island, where a coral shoal runs out half a mile to sea, covered with twenty to forty fathoms of water. It was early in the morning—a dead calm—when we launched the big canoe and slipped out through the surf. About a quarter of a mile offshore Tamatoa asked me to hold the canoe stationary while he went about his fishing. Fastening a twenty-foot rope to the thwart, he made a noose at the other end and passed it under his arms. Then he took a ripe coconut, split it, and gouged out the meat with his knife. With the white pulp in one hand, he slipped overboard and swam down as far as the rope would let him. Through my water glass I watched him put pieces of coconut into his mouth and blow out clouds of the finely chewed stuff, which drifted and eddied about him in the gentle current. He seemed to stay under indefinitely—the lungs of a pearl diver are wonderful things! Now and then he came to the surface for a fresh supply of chum, and finally—at first in twos and threes, and then in shoals—the koperu began to appear from the depths. Little by little he enticed them close to the surface, until they swam all about him fearlessly, gobbling the morsels of coconut. At last the old man reached up for his fishing tackle—an eighteen-inch twig, with a bit of doubled sewing cotton and a tiny barbless hook. He baited the hook with a particle of coconut and dangled it under the nose of the nearest koperu. While he hung on the shortened rope, just beneath the surface, his right arm broke water in a series of jerks, and each time it rose a fish tumbled into the canoe until they lay in the bottom by dozens.
"Though the people of Mataora made sport of their work, they had plenty of leisure for other things. In the evening, when the tasks of the day had been completed by lighting the lamps in the roofed-over sleeping places of the dead, the young people loved to gather for a session of akatu talanga—story telling. They met in some one's house or brought mats to spread in the bright moonlight outside; and while the others lay about, intent on the tale, one after another related the adventures of some Polynesian hero or the loves of some legendary island princess—strange fragments from the old days, full of specters and devils and monstrous heathen gods. There was a girl named Porima who told her stories marvelously well—a tall youngster of seventeen, with a dash of off-island blood; Hawaiian, I think. She was an artist in her way; one could imagine in her the pioneer of a literature to come. Her broad forehead, the masses of black hair which from time to time, with an impatient gesture, she shook back over her shoulders, and the slumberous eyes, with a suggestion of hypnotic power, made her a person not easily forgotten. Although she had told them many times, Porima's stories never failed to hold her audience; the whispering ceased when she began, and every head turned toward where she sat, her hands continually in motion, her voice rising in excitement, or dying away to a murmur, while the listeners held their breath. As the hours passed, both audience and performers used to grow weary and drop off to sleep, one by one; finally a rooster crowed and one awoke with a start to realize that it was day.
"One evening, at a story telling, I heard a shout from the beach and remembered that I had been invited to go after flying fish. A dozen canoes were putting out through the surf, each manned by four paddlers. I made a fourth in the last canoe; we shot out of the opening with a receding wave, paddled desperately through the surf, and a moment later were rocking gently beyond the breakers. The canoes were formed into a rough line; each stern-man lit a torch of coconut leaves bound with bark, and a man forward took his place standing—net in hand. The net is like a shallow landing net, set on a haft of stiff bamboo, and can be handled only after years of unconscious training. My position, paddling amidships, enabled me to watch how the net was managed—one doesn't often see such an exhibition of dexterity and strength. The art consists in clapping the net over the fish just at the moment when he is lying at the surface, hesitating before taking flight; at any instant the netter may see a fish to port, to starboard, or directly ahead. Our man swung his net continually, and each time it passed over the canoe he flipped it upside-down to drop a fish. Think of the muscles needed for this sort of thing; the quickness of eye and hand, where a delicate balance must be maintained, and one is constantly alert to guard one's face against the fish, which whizz past at all angles. Then remember that it is a pretty serious matter to capsize in this torch-lit water, swarming with sharks, where it is imprudent even to trail one's hand overboard.
"In the bend of a bow-shaped islet at the north end of the lagoon, under the palms behind a shore of blue water and dazzling sand, lived an old chap named Ruri, who introduced me to another kind of fishing. Ruri was close to seventy, but a strong man still; his only complaint was lack of teeth, which compelled him to live on varuvaru—the grated-up meat of the young coconut, mixed with its own milk. The ambition of his life was a trip to Tahiti to get a set of false teeth. He was not a native of Mataora—his mother was a Gilbert-Islander and his father a Samoan. For many years Ruri had followed the sea—cabin boy under Bully Hayes; deserter (to keep a whole skin) from the famous Leonora; blackbirder in the New Hebrides and Solomon Islands; pearl fisher in Penrhyn and the lagoons of the Paumotu. At last, on a black night of storm, his vessel struck and went to pieces on the coral of Mataora, and Ruri's days of wandering were over. He married a woman of the island, but now she was dead and the old man lived alone, a mile from the settlement, occupied with his simple wants and immersed in dreams of the past. Close beside his house was the grave of his wife—a tomb of cement inclosed in a neat building of octagonal shape, with a door and a small curtained window. A fine lamp, carefully tended and lit every evening at sunset, hung above the grave, and a few stunted gardenias and frangipanis, brought from enormous distances, were planted about the door. Ruri's little plantation of coconuts and coarse taro was free from weeds, and the neatness of his house, shipshape and scrupulously clean, betrayed the old sailor.
"After a spell of calm weather, when the breaching surf had ceased to cloud the waters of the lagoon, and the suspended particles of coral sand had settled to the bottom, Ruri offered to show me how to catch tenu—a fine fish, inhabiting the lagoon in ten to twenty fathoms of water—speckled like a trout on a ground of brown and gold, and reaching a weight of twenty pounds.
"In the absurdly complicated process of obtaining bait, tenu-fishing is typical of the South Pacific. The night before, Ruri had spent two hours with a torch, catching hermit crabs; now, using these crabs for bait, we had to catch some ku ta—a small, prickly fish which alone has power to interest the tenu. We set out in Ruri's leaky canoe and paddled to a big, coral mushroom, which rose to within a yard of the surface. Here the old man smashed the shells of his hermit crabs with a stone, broke off the claws, set the soft bodies to one side, and mashed the claws to a paste, which he dropped overboard and allowed to drift into a dark hole in the coral. Then he produced a short line, baited the hook with a body of a crab, and let it sink out of sight into the darkness of the hole. In ten minutes a dozen ku ta were gasping in the bottom of the canoe—fantastic little fish, colored scarlet and vermilion, with enormous black eyes and a dorsal fin which seemed to be carved out of red sealing wax. We put them in a basket, trailed overboard to keep them alive, and began the real fishing of the day. I paddled slowly, while Ruri—who did not believe in fishing till the fish was in sight—leaned over the side, scrutinizing the bottom through his water glass. Finally he signaled me to stop—his eye had caught the movement of a tenu among the masses of live coral, forty feet below us. The rest was simple: one hooked a ku ta under the dorsal fin, tossed him overboard, and allowed the weight of the hook and line to carry him to the bottom. By means of the water glass, one could watch the approach of the tenu, see him seize the bait, and judge the proper moment to strike.
"The bonito, which they call atu, is the most important of all fish to the people of Mataora. Almost any fine day one could see a fleet of canoes working offshore, busy at bonito catching, surrounded by a cloud of the sea birds which guide one to the schools. They use a pretty lure for this fishing—a sort of jig cut out of mother-of-pearl, equipped with a tuft of red-dyed coconut husk and a barbless hook of shell. Each fisherman carries a stiff bamboo rod and half a dozen of these lures—ranging in color from pale green to black—attached to ten-foot lengths of line. The islanders have discovered that the condition of the water and the variations of light make certain colors more attractive than others at a given time; and when a school is found they try one shade after another till they discover which the bonito prefer. Then the jigs not in use are hooked to a ring at the base of the pole, and the fisherman begins to pull bonito from the water, heaving them out by main strength, without a moment's play. The barbless hook releases itself the moment the fish is in the canoe, and the lure goes overboard without the loss of an instant.
"One day, after a period of low tides, I saw another method of fishing—rarely practised nowadays—an ora, or fish-poisoning picnic. You know the barringtonia, probably—the big tree from which they make their drums; it grows on all the high islands, and sometimes one finds it on the richer atolls. There were a few on Mataora. Ever notice the flower? It is a lovely thing—a tassel of silky cream-colored stamens, shading to old rose at the ends, and tipped with golden beads. The fruit is odd-looking, like a squarish pomegranate, and it has odd properties, for when pounded up and put into shallow water it seems to stupefy the fish.
"I was sitting in the shade beside Tari's house when a boy came through the settlement, blowing melancholy blasts on a conch shell and announcing that the chief wanted everyone to be on hand that afternoon at a certain part of the lagoon, where an ora was to be held. We set out at noon, the women carrying the crushed seeds of the barringtonia in hastily woven baskets of green coconut frond. A crowd from the other settlements was awaiting our arrival; and when the babies had been put to sleep in the shade, with small children stationed beside them to fan away the flies, the fun began. A shallow stretch of lagoon lay before us, half a mile long by a quarter wide, and into this plunged the women and girls, wading and swimming in all directions, trailing behind them their baskets of poison. As time went on, a faint and curious odor began to rise from the water—a smell which reminded me vaguely of potassium cyanide. Soon the spearmen were busy—wild brown figures, naked except for scarlet loin cloths—pursuing the half-stupefied fish among the crevices of the coral. Before the effect of the poison wore off and the reviving fish began to make their escape to deeper water the men were returning to the beach, the strings of hibiscus bark at their belts loaded and dragging.
"On another day I joined a party of young people for a picnic across the lagoon. It was glassy calm; the water was like a mirror in which the palms of the wooded islets were reflected with motionless perfection. The beaches on the far side, invisible on an ordinary day, seemed to rise far out of water in the mirage. We landed on an uninhabited island, hauled up our canoes, and set out on a hunt for coconut crabs.
"They are extraordinary creatures, these crabs, enormous, and delicious to eat. You will not find many on the high islands; but in a place like Mataora there are hundreds of them, and they do a lot of damage to the coconuts. During the day they hide in their holes, deep among the roots of some big trees; at night they come out, climb the palms, nip off the nuts with their powerful claws, descend to the ground, tear off the husks, break open the shells, and devour the meat. To catch them, one can either dig them out or build a fire at the mouth of the hole, which never fails to draw them. Fire simply fascinates the brutes. They must be handled warily, for their claws can grip like a pair of pipe tongs and shear off a man's finger without an effort.
"We lit a fire under the shade of a puka tree and liberated the crabs we had captured. It sounds incredible, but they walked into the fire, and sat down quietly on the embers to roast! One of the boys climbed a palm and brought us some coconuts of a variety called nu mangaro, with an edible husk, sweet and fibrous, like sugar cane. After lunch we had a swim in the deep water close inshore and lay about smoking while the girls wove us wreaths of sweet fern. It was an idyllic sort of a day.
"I spent five months on Mataora. At first, when the schooner did not appear, I was worried and used to fret a little; but as time went on I grew to like the easy-going, dreamy life, and when at last a schooner came to take me off I didn't know whether to be glad or sorry—there were moments when I almost decided to send for a few things and follow the example of old Ruri.
"During those five months I knew more disinterested kindliness than I had supposed existed in the world; my heart warmed to the people of Mataora.
"Finally the day came when the schooner dropped anchor in the lee of the village—Whitmore's Tureia. Canoe after canoe shot out through the surf; the women gathered in the shade of the canoe houses on the beach, awaiting the landing of the boatmen, who would bring news of husbands diving for shell in distant lagoons, or relatives scattered among far-off groups of islands. As I shook hands with Whitmore I heard a prolonged wailing from the village—the tangi of a new widow.
"When I went to the house to get my things together Tari informed me that, as the schooner would not leave till next day, the people were preparing a farewell feast in my honor. It was held in the assembly house of the village, decorated with arches of palm frond, garlands of scented fern, and the scarlet flowers of the hibiscus. Everyone brought a gift for the departing stranger—a fan, a hat, a pearl fishhook, a drinking cup of ornamented coconut shell, a carved paddle of porcupine wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl. I distributed what little I had to offer, wishing it were a dozen times as much.
"On the beach next morning the people of Mataora gathered for a last handclasp; smile cynically if you will—there were tears shed; I wasn't too happy myself when I heard their plaintive song of farewell floating out across the water."
Worthington ceased speaking and leaned forward to scratch a match. The squall had passed long since; the immense arch of the Milky Way stretched overhead, and low in the south—beyond Hull Island and Rimatara, over the loneliest ocean in the world—the Southern Cross was rising. Lying on mats behind us, a party of Cook-Islanders spoke in soft tones, their faces illuminated fitfully by the glow of their cigarettes. My companion was lighting his pipe, and in the flare of the match I could see that he was smiling to himself.
"Some day," he said, "you will hear that I have closed up my affairs and disappeared. Don't worry when that happens; you'll know I have gone to Mataora—this time to stop for good."
I might attempt to set down a matter-of-fact description of this place if only the subject permitted one to be matter-of-fact. Strange and remote, set in a lonely space of the sea and isolated from the world for the seven or eight centuries following the decline of Polynesian navigation, there is no other land like this hollow island of Ahu Ahu. Week after week, month after month, the watcher on its cliffs may gaze out toward the horizon and see never a sail nor a distant trail of smoke to liven the dark-blue desert of the Pacific. The cliffs themselves are strange—the reef of an ancient atoll, upraised in some convulsion of the earth to form a ring of coral limestone—sheer precipices facing the sea, half a mile of level barren summit, and an inner wall of cliffs, overlooking the rich lowlands of the interior. During the unnumbered years of their occupation, the land has set a stamp upon its people—so long on Ahu Ahu that they have forgotten whence they came. Hardy, hospitable, and turbulent, they are true children of the islands, and yet a family apart—ruder and less languid than the people of Samoa or Tahiti, and speaking a harsher tongue. And, more than any other island folk, they live in the past, for ghosts walk on Ahu Ahu, and the living commune nightly with the old dead who lie in the marae.
It was an hour before sunset when we sighted the land—the merest blue irregularity on the horizon, visible from one's perch in the shrouds each time the schooner rose to the crest of a sea. The mellow shout of landfall brought a score of native passengers to their feet; at such a moment one realizes the passionate devotion of the islander to his land. Men sprang into the rigging to gaze ahead with eager exclamations; mothers held up their babies—born on distant plantations—for a first glimpse of Ahu Ahu; seasick old women, emerging from disordered heaps of matting, tottered to the bulwarks with eyes alight. The island had not been visited for six months, and we carried a cargo of extraordinary variety—hardware, bolts of calico, soap, lumber, jewelry, iron roofing, cement, groceries, phonograph records, an unfortunate horse, and several pigs, those inevitable deck-passengers in the island trade. There were scores of cases of bully beef and ship's biscuit—the staple luxuries of modern Polynesia, and, most important of all, six heavy bags of mail.
As we drew near the land, toward midnight, I gave up the attempt to sleep in my berth and went on deck to spread a mat beside Tari, our supercargo, who lay aft of the mainmast, talking in low tones with his wife. It was calm, here in the lee of the island; the schooner slipped through the water with scarcely a sound, rising and falling on the long gentle swell. Faint puffs of air came off the land, bringing a scent of flowers and wood smoke and moist earth. We had been sighted, for lights were beginning to appear in the village; now and then, on a flaw of the breeze, one heard a sigh, long drawn and half inaudible—the voice of the reef. A party of natives, seated on the forward hatch, began to sing. The words were modern and religious, I believe, but the music—indescribably sad, wild, and stirring—carried one back through the centuries to the days when man expressed the dim yearnings of his spirit in communal song. It was a species of chant, with responses; four girls did most of the singing, their voices mingling in barbaric harmonies, each verse ending in a prolonged melodious wail. Precisely as the last note died away, in time with the cadence of the chant, the deep voices of the men took up the response, "Karé, aué!" ("No, alas!") Tari turned to me.
"They sing well," he said, "these Ahu Ahu people; I like to listen to them. That is a hymn, but a stranger would never suspect it—the music is pure heathen. Look at the torchlights in the village; smell the land breeze—it would tell you you were in the islands if you were set down here blindfold from a place ten thousand miles away. With that singing in one's ears, it is not difficult to fancy oneself in a long canoe, at the end of an old-time voyage, chanting a song of thanksgiving to the gods who have brought us safely home."
He is by no means the traditional supercargo of a trading schooner, this Tari; I have wasted a good deal of time speculating as to his origin and the reasons for his choosing this mode of life. An Englishman with a hint of Oxford in his voice—quite obviously what we call a gentleman—a reader of reviews, the possessor (at his charming place on Nukutere) of an enviable collection of books on the natural history and ethnology of the South Seas, he seldom speaks of himself or of his people at home. For twenty years he has been known in this part of the world—trading on Penrhyn, Rakahanga, Tupuai, the atolls of the Paumotu. He speaks a dozen of the island dialects, can join in the singing of Utes, or bring a roar of applause by his skill in the dances of widely separated groups. When the war broke out he enlisted as a private in a New Zealand battalion, and the close of hostilities found him with decorations for gallantry, the rank of captain, and the scars of honorable wounds. As a subject for conversation, the war interests him as little as his own life, but this evening he had emptied a full bottle of rum, and was in the mildly mellow state which is his nearest approach to intoxication.
"I never thought I'd see the old country again," he said, "but the war changed all that. I got a nasty wound in Gallipoli, you see, and they sent me home to convalesce. The family wasn't meant to know I was hurt, but they saw a bit of a thing in the paper [an account of the exploit which won Tari his D. C. M.], and there they were at the dock when the transport off-loaded. I hadn't laid eyes on them for fifteen years.... The old governor—by Jove! he was decent. It was all arranged that I should stop in England when the war was over; I thought myself it was a go. When the job was finished, and I'd got a special dispensation to be demobbed at home, I stood it for a fortnight and then gave up....
"Home is all very well for a week or two, but for a steady thing I seem to fit in better down here. What is it that makes a chap stop in the islands? You must have felt it yourself, and yet it is hard to put into words. This sort of thing, perhaps [he swept his hand through the soft darkness] ... the beauty, the sense of remoteness, the vague and agreeable melancholy of these places. Then I like the way the years slip past—the pleasant monotony of life. My friends at home put up with a kind of dullness which would drive me mad; but here, where there is even less to distinguish one day from another, one seems never to grow fretful or impatient of time. One's horizon narrows, of course; I scarcely look at the newspaper any more. If you stop here you will find yourself unconsciously drifting into the native state of mind, readjusting your sense of values until the great events of the world seem far off and unreal, and your interests are limited to your own business, the vital statistics of your island, and the odd kinks of human nature about you. Perhaps this is the way we are meant to live; at any rate, it brings serenity.
"I've been here too long to sentimentalize about the natives—they have their weak points, and plenty of them. Allowing for these, you'll find the Kanakas a good sort to have about—often amusing, always interesting; at once deep, artful, gay, simple, and childish. At bottom they are not very different from ourselves; it is chiefly a matter of environment. Consider any of the traders who came here as boys—old fellows who will buttonhole you and spend hours abusing the people—the truth is that they have become more native than the men they abuse.
"There are places, like Africa, where one can live among a primitive people and absorb nothing from them; their point of view is too alien, their position in the scale of humanity too widely separated from our own. It is different in the islands. If one could discover the truth, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that these people were distant cousins of ours. The scholars—in whose conclusions I haven't much faith—trace them back, along the paths of successive migrations, through Indonesia to northern India or the land of the Cushites. In any case, I believe that the blood we term Caucasian flows in their veins, the legacy of ancestors separated from the parent stock so long ago that mankind had not yet learned the use of iron. And they are old, these island tribes who were discovering new lands in the Pacific in the days when our forefathers wore the horns of bulls upon their heads. Don't judge them in the present, or even in the time of Cook; they were a dying people then, whose decline had begun five or six hundred years before. It seems to me that a race, like an individual, grows old, loses heart, and fades away. On nearly every island they are dying to-day—a tragedy, an inevitable one, which the coming of the European has hastened, but not caused.
"Whether or not it may be accounted for on grounds of a distant kinship, it is impossible to stop long in the islands without absorbing, to a certain extent, the native point of view. Things which seemed rubbish at first slowly acquire significance; one begins to wonder if, after all, there may not be varieties of knowledge lost to us in the complexities of civilization.... I've seen some queer things myself.
"My wife's mother lives on Ahu Ahu, where her ancestors have been hereditary rulers since Maui fished the island out of the sea. I've known the family a good many years, and long before I married Apakura the old lady was kind enough to take a motherly interest in me. I always put up with her when we touched at Ahu Ahu. Once, after I had been away for several months, I sat down to have a yarn with her, and was beginning to tell about where I'd been and what I'd done when she stopped me. 'No, let me tell you,' she said, with an odd smile; and, upon my honor, she did—down to the details! I got the secret out of her the same evening. She is very friendly, it seems, with an ancestor of hers—a woman named Rakamoana, who lived twenty-eight generations—seven hundred years—ago, and is buried in the big marae behind the village. When one of the family is off on a trip, and my mother-in-law suspects that he is in trouble or not behaving himself, she puts herself into a kind of trance, calls up old Rakamoana, and gets all the facts. I hope the habit won't come into general use—might prove jolly awkward, eh? Seriously, though, I can't account for the things she told me without accepting her own explanation. Strange if there were a germ of truth in the legends of how the old sea-going canoes were navigated—the priests, in a state of trance, directing the helmsmen which way to steer for land....
"There is another old woman on Ahu Ahu whose yarns are worth hearing. Many years ago a Yankee whaling vessel called at the island, and a Portuguese harpooner, who had had trouble with the captain, deserted and hid himself in the bush. The people had taken a fancy to him and refused to give him up, so finally the captain was obliged to sail away without his man. From all accounts this harpooner must have been a good chap; when he proved that he was no common white waster, the chief gave him a bit of land and a girl of good family for a wife—now the old lady of whom I spoke. I think it was tools he needed, or some sort of gear for a house he was building; at any rate, when another whaler touched he told his wife that he was going on a voyage to earn some money and that he might be gone a year. There was a kind of agreement, current in the Pacific in those days, whereby a whaling captain promised to land a man at the point where he had signed him on.
"Well, the harpooner sailed away, and, as might have been expected, his wife never saw him again; but here comes the odd part of the story. The deserted wife, like so many of the Ahu Ahu women, had an ancestor who kept her in touch with current events. Being particularly fond of her husband, she indulged in a trance from time to time, to keep herself informed as to his welfare. Several months after his departure the tragedy occurred—described in detail by the obliging and sympathetic dweller in the marae. It was a kind of vision, as told to me, singularly vivid for an effort of pure imagination—the open Pacific, heaving gently and ruffled by a light air; two boats from rival vessels pursuing the same whale; the Portuguese harpooner standing in the bows of one, erect and intent upon the chase, his iron the first, by a second of time, to strike. Then came a glimpse of the two boats foaming side by side in the wake of the whale; the beginning of the dispute; the lancing and death flurry of an old bull sperm; the rising anger of the two harpooners, as the boats rocked gently beside the floating carcass; the treacherous thrust; the long red blade of the lance standing out between the shoulders of the Portuguese.
"The woman awoke from her trance with a cry of anguish; her husband was dead—she set up the widow's tangi. One might have thought it an excellent tale, concocted to save the face of a deserted wife, if the same vessel had not called at Ahu Ahu within a year, to bring news of the husband's death under the exact circumstances of the vision.
"What is one to believe? If seeing is believing, then count me a believer, for my own eyes have seen an incredible thing. It was on Aitutaki, in the Cook group. An old chief, the descendant of a very ancient family, lay ill in the village. I had turned in early, as I'd promised to go fishing on the reef when the tide served, an hour after midnight. You know how the spirits of the dead were believed to flee westward, to Hawaiki, and how their voices might be heard at night, calling to one another in the sky, as they drove past, high overhead. Early in the evening, as I lay in bed, a boy came into the next room, panting with excitement. He had been to a plantation in the hills, it seemed, and as he returned, just after dusk, had heard the voices of a shouting multitude passing in the air above him. I was tired and paid little attention to his story, but for some reason I found it impossible to sleep. It was a hot night, very still and sultry, with something in the air that made one's nerves twitch every time a coconut frond dropped in the distance. I was still lying awake when my fishing companions came to get me; a little ahead of time, for, like me, they had been unable to sleep. We would wait on the reef, they suggested, where it was sure to be cool, until the tide was right.
"We were sitting on the dry coral, smoking. I had just looked at my watch, I remember; it lacked a few minutes to one o'clock. Our canoes were hauled up on one side of the Arutunga Passage—the western pass, by the way. There was no moon. Suddenly one of the boys touched me. 'What is that?' he exclaimed, in a startled voice. I looked up; the others were rising to their feet. Two flaring lights were moving across the lagoon toward us—together and very swiftly. Nearer and nearer they came, until they revealed the outlines of a canoe larger than any built in the islands nowadays—a canoe of the old time, with a flaming torch set at prow and stern. While we stood there, staring in silence, it drew abreast of us, moving with the rush of a swift motor boat, and passed on—out to sea. I was too amazed to think clearly until I heard one of the boys whisper to another, 'Kua mate te ariki—the chief is dead; the great canoe bears him out to the west.' We launched our canoes and crossed the lagoon to the village. Women were wailing; yes, the old man was dead—he had drawn his last breath a little before one o'clock. Remember that I saw this thing myself.... Perhaps it was a dream—if so, we all dreamed alike."
It was late. The singing died away; the lights in the village went out one by one. The passage in the Ahu Ahu reef is a bad place by daylight—the chances were that no canoes would risk it till dawn. Tari struck a match for an instant and lay down on the mat beside his wife. In the little flare of light I saw her sleeping in the unconscious manner of a child.
I know their story—a pretty one, in pleasant contrast to the usual ignoble and transitory loves of white and brown. Apakura is the daughter of the principal family of this island—her mother and father for many years the warm friend of Tari. He had petted the child from the time she was three; she was always on the beach to meet the canoe that brought him ashore, and he, for his part, never forgot the small gifts for which she waited with sparkling eyes. On his rambles about the island the little girl followed Tari with the devotion of a dog; many a time, clambering along the base of the cliffs at dawn, his first knowledge of her presence came with the shrill cry of, "Tiaké mai, Tari!" and he waited while his small follower managed some difficult pile of coral in the rear. Their friendship had only Tari's two or three visits a year to feed on, but neither forgot, and in the course of time, as the child learned to read and write, a correspondence began—very serious on her side, pleased and amused on his. When he went away to the war she was eleven—a slim, dark-eyed child; when he returned she was sixteen, and a woman, though he did not know it.
On this occasion, in the evening, when the rest of the family had gone to bed, he sat talking with Apakura's mother—or, rather, listening while the old woman told one of her stories of life on Ahu Ahu, equally fascinating and long drawn out. It is not difficult to reconstruct the scene in imagination—Tari comfortable in bare feet and a pareu, half reclining against the wall as he smoked his pipe in absent-minded puffs; the woman cross-legged on the floor, leaning forward in earnest speech—her voice rising, falling, and dying to a whisper in the extraordinary manner of the Polynesian teller of tales; her hands from time to time falling simultaneously with a loud slap to her knees, in emphasis of some point in the narrative. The story ended, little by little the mother led the conversation to the subject of her daughter. Tari began to praise the girl.
"What do you think of her," asked the old woman, "now that you have been away these five years?"
"There is no other girl like her," said Tari.
"Since that is so, take her with you; we shall be pleased, all of us—I in particular, who look on you as a son. She is a good girl; she can sew, she can cook, and the young men say that she is beautiful."
"You propose that I take her as a wife?" exclaimed the astonished Tari, to whom, in truth, the idea had not occurred.
"Yes. Why not? You need a wife, now that the little affair of Tukonini has blown over."
"But think, mamma—I am forty and the child is sixteen; it is not fitting."
"Young wives are best if they are faithful; Apakura will never look at another man."
"I will think it over," said Tari; "let us leave it so. Not this year, at any rate—she is too young."
As he bade her good night and turned to go to his sleeping place the old woman spoke again.
"Bear one thing in mind," she said, with a smile; "it will help you to decide. Consider, now and then, the thought of my daughter married to another."
In the end, as is often the case, it was Apakura who settled the matter. Next morning Tari was busy with some stock taking and did not board the schooner till the last moment, or notice—in his preoccupation—the mysterious smiles with which the crew greeted him. They were a dozen miles offshore before he folded the last of his papers, lit a pipe, and went on deck for a breath of air. The old woman's last words stuck unpleasantly in his mind, I fancy, as he stood there smoking, with his back to the companionway. All at once he saw the helmsman—an Ahu Ahu boy he had known since childhood—lift his eyes from the binnacle and grin from ear to ear; at the same moment Tari felt a hand slip into his own, and heard a small, familiar voice say, "I am here." It was Apakura—more serious than usual and a little frightened, but not to be put off longer. They were married in Tahiti a fortnight later.
It was Apakura's voice that awakened me. She was leaning over the bulwark in eager conversation with her mother, who had come off in the first canoe. The air was fresh with the cool of dawn; in the east the sky was flushing behind scattered banks of trade-wind clouds, tinted in wonderfully delicate shades of terra cotta. A dozen big outrigger canoes, of the type peculiar to this island, were coming out through the passage, each paddled by four men, who shouted as their heavy craft dashed through the breakers.
Little by little, not at all after the manner of traditional dawn in the tropics, the light increased, until Ahu Ahu lay fully revealed before us—the smoking reef, the shallow lagoon, and the cliffs, their summits plumed with coconut palms. A crowd of islanders was already gathering on the reef, and I could see others making their way down the steep path from the settlement. As the sun rose the colors of the scene grew stronger—green palms, gray cliffs, white walls of the village, pale blue of the sky, azure of the sea water. There is no color in the world—that I have seen—like the blue of the water off the Ahu Ahu reef; so vivid, so intense, one felt that a tumbler of it, held up to the sun, would be a mass of sapphire, or that a handkerchief dipped in it would emerge strongly dyed.
Apakura was going ashore with her mother. Standing in the narrow canoe, she directed the stowing of her luggage—a mat, a bright patchwork quilt, a box of cedar wood. Tari was awaiting the coming of the traders, for the schooner was stocked with good Tahiti rum, and the rites of welcome would take place on board.
"There they are," he said, pointing to two white figures wading gingerly across the shallow lagoon to the reef; "you're going to meet a pair of rare ones—they've been hard doers in their time!"
The distant figures reached the edge of the boat passage and I could see a boy beckoning them into a waiting canoe, but now they stopped and seemed to argue, with many gestures. Tari chuckled.
"No use trying to hurry them," he told me; "they are discussing the loss of the Esperanza. She went ashore here in the late 'nineties—a full-rigged ship. Peter was one of her crew; Charley had just come here to trade, and saw the whole thing. They've spent twenty years thrashing out the question of whether or not the wreck might have been avoided. Every morning, after breakfast, Charley strolls across to Peter's house to smoke a pipe and discuss some of the fine points; every evening, after tea, Peter returns the visit, and the argument goes on till bedtime. Charley's an American—an old man now, close to seventy. He put in thirty years on Hiva Oa, in the Marquesas, before he came to Ahu Ahu; I'd like to have some of his memories. Notice his arms if he pulls his sleeves up. He has sixteen children on Hiva Oa and fourteen here—all numbered; he says he never can remember their heathen names. When his wife died in the north he gave all his land to the children and left on the first schooner. She touched at Papeete, but he didn't go ashore. Then she made Ahu Ahu, where he landed and established himself a second time. He has never seen a motor car, a telephone, or an electric light."
Presently the canoe came dancing alongside, and the two old men clambered painfully over the rail—Peter thin, hatchet faced, and stooping; Charley the ruin of a magnificent man. He towered above any of us on the deck—this ancient dweller among cannibals—still erect, his head still carried proudly, but the flesh hanging loose and withered on his bones. It was easy to fancy the admiration he must have inspired forty years ago among the wild people, in whose eyes physical strength and perfection were the great qualities of a man. In the cabin, while the cook squeezed limes for the first of many rum punches, Charley took off his tunic of white drill, and as he sat there in his singlet I saw that his arms and chest, like his face, were tanned to an indelible dull brown, and that patterns in tattooing ran from wrist to shoulder—greenish blue and barbaric.
I never learned his history—it must have been a thing to stir the imagination. Once, as we sat drinking, Tari mentioned Stevenson, and the old man's face brightened.
"É," he said, slowly, in native fashion, "I remember him well; he came to Hiva Oa with the Casco. A funny fellow he was ... thin! There was nothing to him but skin and bones. And questions—he'd ask you a hundred in a minute! I didn't take to him at first, but he was all right. He didn't care how he dressed; one day I saw him walking on the beach with nothing on but a pair of drawers."
The cook plied back and forth, removing empty glasses and bringing full ones. As each tray was set on the table, Peter—typical of a lively and garrulous old age—seized his glass and held it up.
"Hurrah!" he exclaimed. "Down she goes," drawled Charley, and Tari murmured, "Cheerio!" At the end of two hours Charley's eyes were beginning to glaze, and Peter was mumbling vaguely of the Esperanza. Tari rose and beckoned to me.
"Make yourselves at home," he said to the old men; "I've got to go ashore. Akatara will give you lunch whenever you want it."
As our canoe made for the reef my companion told me there was to be a feast in his honor, and that his wife wished me to be present. We shot into the passage without a wetting; the people crowded about Tari, laughing, shaking his hand, speaking all at once—an unmistakable warmth of welcome.
The settlement, reached by a short, steep trail, lies at the base of a break in the cliffs. At the door of her mother's house Apakura met us—turned out, as becomes a supercargo's wife, in the choicest of trade finery. She wore heavy golden earrings; bands of gold were on her fingers, and her loose frock was of pale embroidered silk. Her mother—the keen-eyed old woman I had seen in the canoe—made me welcome.
In the afternoon, when the feast was over and we rose stiffly, crammed with fish and taro and baked pig, I asked Tari if he knew a youngster who would show me the best path to the interior of the island. A boy of ten was soon at the door—a dark-skinned child with a great shock of hair, and legs disfigured by the scars of old coral cuts.
A twisting path, cobbled, and wide enough to walk two abreast, led us to the summit. The stones were worn smooth by the passage of bare feet, for, excepting fish, all the food of the village is brought over this road from the plantations to the sea. There could be no doubt that the ring of cliffs on which we stood was an ancient reef; in places one could recognize the forms of coral, imbedded, with shells of many varieties, in the metamorphosed rock. Here and there one found pockets of a material resembling marble, veined and crystalline—formed from the coral by processes impossible to surmise. The bulk of the rock is the fine-grained white limestone called makatea in the eastern Pacific. The level summit of the cliffs, over which, in centuries gone by, the sea had washed and thundered, forms a narrow plain, sparsely wooded and cultivated in spots where a thin soil has gathered in the hollows.
We halted under the palms crowning the inner brink. The trail wound down giddily ahead—so steep in places that ladders had been fastened to the rock. To right and left of us the cliffs were sheer walls of limestone, rising from a level little above that of the sea. The low hills of the interior, volcanic and fern covered, draining in every direction toward the foot of the makatea, have formed a circling belt of swamp land, on which all the taro of the island was grown. One could look down on the beds from where we stood, a mosaic of pale green, laid out by heathen engineers in days beyond the traditions of men.
Another time, perhaps, I will tell you of that afternoon—how we climbed down the trail and walked the dikes among the taro; how my escort increased to a merry company as the people began to come after food for the evening meal; of a boisterous swim in a pool beneath a waterfall; of how I found the remains of an ancient house, built of squared stone so long ago that over one end of it the wooded earth lay two yards deep.
Toward evening, in the bush at the edge of the taro swamps, I came upon a large house, built of bamboo and pandanus in the native fashion. A man was standing framed in the doorway—a tall, white man, dressed in pajamas of silk. His gold-rimmed spectacles, gray beard, and expression of intelligent kindliness were vaguely academic—out of place as the cultivated voice which invited me to stop. The boys and girls escorting me squatted on their heels outside; a brace of pretty children, shy and half naked, scurried past as I entered the house. My host waved his hand toward a mat. There was only one chair in the room, standing before a table on which I saw a small typewriter and a disordered heap of manuscript. Otherwise the place was unfurnished except for books, ranged in crude bookcases, tier upon tier, stacked here and there in precarious piles, standing in rows along the floor.
"I am glad to see you," he said, as he offered me a cigarette from a case of basketwork silver; "it is not often that a European passes my house."
I shall not give his name, or attempt to disguise him with a fictitious one; it is enough to say that he is one of the handful of real scholars who have devoted their lives to Polynesian research. I had read his books, published long before, and wondered—more than once—whether he still lived and where he hid himself. The years of silence had been spent (he told me) in a comparative study of the ocean dialects, through which he hoped to solve the riddle of the Pacific—to determine whence came the brown and straight-haired people of the islands. Now, with the material in hand, he had chosen Ahu Ahu as a place of solitude, where he might complete his task of compilation undisturbed.
"On the whole," he said, with agreeable readiness to speak of his work, "I am convinced that they came from the west. The Frenchman's theory that the race originated in New Zealand, like the belief that they migrated westward from the shores of America, is more picturesque, more stirring to the imagination; but the evidence is too vague. If one investigates the possibilities of an eastward migration, on the other hand, one finds everywhere in the western islands the traces of their passage. Far out in the Orient, in isolated groups, off the coast of Sumatra, about Java and Celebes, and in the Arafura Sea, I can show you people of the true Polynesian type. Even in such places, where the last migration must have passed nearly two thousand years ago, scraps of evidence remain—a word, a curious custom, the manner of carrying a basket. These things might seem coincidences if the trail did not grow warmer as one travels east.
"Though no trace of their blood is left, New Guinea must at one time have been a halting place in the migration. Papua it is called, and one finds the word current in Polynesia, meaning a garden, a rich land. The natives of New Guinea are as unlike the people of the eastern Pacific, I should say, as the average American or Englishman, and yet throughout New Guinea there is a most curious cropping out of Polynesian words, pointing to a very ancient intercourse between the races. Consider the word for woman among the Polynesians. In Rarotonga, it is vaine; in Tahiti, vahine; in the Marquesas, vehine; in Hawaii, wahine; in Samoa, fafine. The same root runs through the dialects of Papua. In Motu, woman is habine; in Kerepunu, vavine; in Aroma, babine; and in Motumotu it is ua, which in this part of the Pacific means, variously, female, seed, and rain. I could cite you dozens of similar examples. Now and then one comes across something that sets one's imagination to work ... as you must know, the word for sun in the islands is ra, but in Tahiti they have another word, mahana. In New Guinea, thirty-five hundred miles away, and with all Melanesia between, the tribes of the South Cape call the sun mahana. What a puzzle it is!
"Though it may be the merest coincidence, that ra has a flavor of Egypt. I wonder if there could be a connection? I used to know a girl in Tahiti whose strange and rather beautiful name—hereditary as far back as the records of her family went—was that of a queen of Egypt who ruled many hundreds of years before Christ. But I mustn't ride my hobby too fast.
"It is a pity you can't stop on Ahu Ahu for a time—there are not many islands so unspoiled. I've grown very fond of the place; I doubt if I ever leave it permanently. If you are interested in ghosts, you had better change your mind. I have a fine collection here; the house is built on the site of a tumble-down marae. There is our white rooster, the spirit of an old chief, which appears during the new moon—perfectly harmless and friendly, but the people rather dread him. Then we have a ghostly pig, very bad indeed; and a pair of malignant women, who walk about at night with arms and long hair entwined, and are suspected of ghastly appetites. I shall not say whether or not I have seen any of these; perhaps it is living too much alone, but I am not so skeptical as I was...."
It was not easy to part with such a host, but the sun was low over the makatea, and the prospect of crossing the dikes among the taro and scaling the cliff by dark drove me at last to take reluctant leave.
Lamps were shining in the village when I returned; in some of the houses I heard the voice of the father, reading aloud solemnly from the Bible in the native tongue; in others, the people were assembled to chant their savage and melancholy hymns. Tari was alone on the veranda, smoking in his absent-minded fashion, and motioned me to sit down beside him. I told him how I had spent the afternoon. When I had finished he puffed on in silence for a time.
"It is a strange place, Ahu Ahu," he said at last. "My mother-in-law has finished her prayers, sung her himines, and put away the family Bible. Now she has gone to the house of one of her pals for a session with old Rakamoana. Like the land itself, the people are relics of an elder time—pure heathen at heart."