Mystic Isles of the South Seas.

by Frederick O'Brien

Chapter XVIII

The reef and the lagoon—Wonders of marine life—Fishing with spears and nets—Sponges and hermit crabs—Fish of many colors—Ancient canoes of Tahiti—A visit to Vaihiria and legends told there.

About a mile from the beach was the reef, on which the breakers beat clamorously or almost inaudibly, depending on the wind and the faraway surge of the seas. The Passe of Rautirare afforded entrance for small vessels. It was an opening in the wall about the island caused by the Vairahaha, the stream which emptied into the lagoon at our door, and the fresh waters of which had ages ago prevented the coral zoöphytes from building a structure there, as at Papeete and all other passages. Fresh water did not agree with these miraculous architects whose material was their own skeletons.

I went out toward the reef many mornings in a little canoe that Tiura, the eldest son of the chief, loaned me. I carried from the house a paddle and three harpoons of different sizes. The canoe had an outrigger and was very small, so that it moved fast through the usually still lagoon, propelled by the broad-bladed paddle. In the bottom of it might be an inch of water, for occasionally I shipped a tiny wave, but wetness was no bother in this delicious climate; a pareu was easily removed if vexatious and a cocoanut-shell was an ample bale.

Low tide was at sunrise, and warmed with my fruit and coffee, and the happy ia ora na, Maru! of the family, I paddled to the reef with never-failing expectation of new wonders. The marine life of the Tahiti reef is richer than anywhere in these seas, as the soil of the island is more bountiful.

At that state of the tide the surf barely broke upon the reef, and, almost uncovered, its treasures were exposed for a little while as if especially for me. The reef itself was a marvel of contrivance by the blind animals which had died to raise it. If I had been brought to it hooded, and known nothing of such phenomena, I would have sworn it was an old concrete levee. The top was about fifty feet wide, as level as a floor, pitted with innumerable holes, the hiding-places of millions of living forms which fed on one another, and were continually replenished by the rolling billows. The wall of the reef opposed to the sea was a rough slope from the summit to the bottom, buttressed against the attacks of storms, and defended by chevaux-de-frise such as the Americans sank in the Hudson River in 1777. I ventured cautiously over the edge. A student of ancient tactics would have found there all the old defenses in coral—caltrops, and abatis, molded in dark-gray coral, battered and shot-marked. It was a dream of a sunken city wall of old Syracuse, and conjured up a vision of the hoary Archimedes upon it before the inundation, directing the destruction, by his burning-glass, of the enemy’s ships. The side of the reef toward the land was as sheer as an engineer could make it with a plumb-line. The coral animals had as accurate a measure of the vertical as of defense against the ocean.

Over this levee rolled or slid a dozen kinds of shellfish spying out refuges against the breakers and their brother enemies in the troughs and holes of the coral floor. With my small spears I pried out dozens of them, Mao, starfish, clams, oysters, furbelowed clams, sea-urchins, and sponges. The mao is the turbo, the queer gastropod sold in the market in Papeete. He lives in a beautiful spiral shell, and has attached to him a round piece of polished shell, blue, green, brown, or yellow, which he puts aside when he wishes to feed on the morsels passing his door, and pulls shut when he wants privacy. He fits himself tightly into a hollow in the reef and dozes away the hours behind his shield, but ready to open it instantly at the perception of his favorite food. The mao was wedged in the recess so cleverly that it was difficult to extract him by my hand alone. His portal I kept after eating him raw or cooked, to have set in silver as an exquisite souvenir of my visit. These jewels studded the drinking cups from which the Vikings drank “Skoal to the Northland!”

The starfish were magnificent, of many colors, and one with fifteen arms covered with sharp, gray spines, and underneath pale yellow, fleshy feelers with suckers like a sea-anemone. These were as pliant as rubber in the water, but, when long out, as hard as stone. The sea-urchins were of many kinds, some with large spikes, as firm as rock, and others almost as brittle as glass, their needles, half a dozen inches long and sharp, dangerous to step on even with my rubber-soled, canvas shoes. All hues were these urchins, blood-red and heavenly blue, almost black, and as white as snow, the last with a double-star etched upon his shell. Others were round like blow-fish, with their spickles at every angle, menacing in look.

The clams and oysters were small, except the furbelowed clam, whose shell is fluted, and who grows to an immense size in the atolls of the Paumotus. I always ate my fill of these delicacies raw as I walked along the reef, smashing the shells to get at the inmates.

When the tide was approaching high or when it began to ebb I had immortal experiences upon the reef. I went with Tiura or with the chief and a party, and found the waves dashing and foaming upon the natural mole, sweeping over it with the noise of thunder, crashing upon the sloping front, and riding their white steeds over the solid flagging to the lower lagoon. In this smother of water we stood knee-deep, receiving its buffets upon our waists and the spray upon our faces, and watched for the fish that were carried upon its crests. With spears couched, we waited the flying chance to arrest them upon the points, a hazardous game, for often they were powerful creatures, and were hurled against us with threatening impact.

But inspiring as was this sport at sunset or by moonlight, it was even more exciting when we trod the reef with torches of dried reeds or leaves or candlenuts threaded upon the spines of cocoanut-leaves, and lanced the fish that were drawn by the lure of the lights, or which we saw by their glare passing over the reef. The gleam of the torches, the blackness all about, the masterful figures of the Tahitians, the cries of warning, the laughter, the shouts of triumph, and the melancholy himenes, the softness and warmth of the water, the uncanny feel of living things about one’s feet and body, the imaginative shudder of fear at shark or octopus or other terrible brute of the sea, the singing journey home in the canoes, and the joyous landing and counting of the catch—all these were things never to be forgotten, pictures to be unveiled in drabber scenes or on white nights of sleeplessness.

The sponges were oddities hard to recognize as the tender toilet article. Some were soft and some were full of grit. The grit was their skeletons, for every sponge has a skeleton except three or four very low specimens, and some without personal skeletons import them by attraction and make up a frame from foreign bodies. I examined and admired them, reasoning that I myself, in the debut of living creatures, was close in appearance to one; but my basic interest in them was to sit on them.

Many times I went only to where the coral began, half-way to the reef. This was away from the path of the Vairahaha River, and where the coral souls had manifestly indulged a thousand fancies in contour and color. After the million years of their labor in throwing up the bastion of the reef, with all its architectural niceties, they had found in the repose behind it opportunities for the indulgence of their artistry. They were the sculptors, painters, and gardeners of the lagoon.

I brought with me a lunette, the diver’s aid, a four-sided wooden frame fifteen inches each way, with a bottom of glass and no top. I stuck my head in the box and looked through the glass, which I thrust below the surface, thus evading the opaqueness or distortion caused by the ripples. One did not need this invention ordinarily, for the water was as clear as air when undisturbed, and the garden of the sea gods was a brilliant and moving spectacle below my drifting canoe. One must be a child again to see all of it; the magic shapes, the haunting tints, the fairy forms. The gardener who had directed the growth of the aquarium believed in kelpies, undines, and mermaids, and had made for them the superbest playground conceivable even by sprites.

There were trees, bushes, and plants of yellow and white coral, of scarlet corallins, dahlias and roses, cabbages and cauliflowers simulated perfectly, lilies and heaps of precious stones. On flat tables were starfish lazying at full width, strewn shells, and hermit-crabs entering and leaving their captured homes. Mauve and primrose, pink and blue, green and brown, the coral plants nodded in the glittering light that filtered through the translucent brine. They were alive, all these things, as were the sponges, with stomachs and reactions, and impulses to perpetuate their species and to be beautiful. They had no relation to me except as I had to nature, but they were my beginnings, my simple ancestors who had stayed simple and unminded, and I was to count those hours happy when I communed with them.

Taken from their element they died, but left their mold, to harden in the air they could not breathe, and to amaze the less fortunate people who could not see them in their own estate. The seaweeds grew among them, green or brown, more primordial than the corals, with less of organic life, vegetables and not animals, but eager, too, for expression in their motions, their increase in size, and their continuance through posterity. All these were the display of the kindness of the same spirit who rode the thunder, who permitted a million babes to starve, who stirred in men the madness to slay a myriad of their brothers, and who fixed the countless stars in the firmament to guide them in the darkness.

The hermit-crabs drew my minute attention, and I anchored my canoe and with the lunette watched them by the hour. They were as provident and as handy—with claws—as the bee that stores honey. The hermit inhabits the vacant shells of other mollusks, entering one soon after birth, sometimes finding them untenanted, and sometimes killing the rightful occupant, and changing his house as he grows. I had been surprised to see small and large shells moving fast over the reef, and on the beach at the water’s-edge; shells as big as my thumbnail and nearly as big as my head. I seized one, and behold! the inmate was walking on ten legs with the shell on his back, like a man carrying a dog-house. I attempted to pull him out of his lodging, and he was so firmly fastened to the interior by hooks on his belly that he held on until he was torn asunder. His abdomen is soft and pulpy and without protecting plates, as have other crabs, and he survived only by his childhood custom of stealing a univalve abode, though he murdered the honest tenant. In one I saw the large pincher of the crab so drawn back as to form a door to the shell as perfect as the original. When he felt growing pains the hermit-crab unhooked himself from his ceiling and migrated in search of a more commodious dwelling.

Interesting as were these habits of the cenobite crustacean, his keeping a policeman or two on guard on his roof, and moving them to his successive domiciles, was more so. These policemen are anemones, and I saw hermit crab-shells with three or four on them, and one even in the mouth of the shell. When the anchorite was ready for a new shell, he left his old one and examined the new ones acutely. Finding one to suit his expected growth, he entered it belly first, and transferred the anemone, by clawing and pulling loose its hold, to the outside of his chosen shell. How skilfully this was done may be judged by the fact that I could not get one free without tearing the cup-like base which fastened it. The anemone assisted in the operation by keeping its tentacles expanded, whereas it withdrew them if any foreign object came near. The stinging cells of the anemone prevent fishes from attacking the hermit, and that is the reason of his care for the parasite. It is the commensalism of the struggle for existence, learned not by the individual crab, but by his race. Some crabs wield an anemone firmly grasped in each claw, the stinging nematocysts of the parasite warding off the devilish octopus, and the anemone having a share of the crab’s meals and the pleasure of vicarious transportation. The anemone at the mouth of the shell keeps guard at the weakest spot of the hermit’s armor.

These sea-anemones themselves are mysterious evidences of the gradual advance of organisms from the slime to the poem. They are animals, and attach themselves by a muscular base to the rocks or shells, or are as free-swimming as perch. I saw them two feet in diameter, seeming all vegetable, some like chrysanthemums and some resembling embroidered pin-cushions. They were of many colors, and are of the coral family.

In this wonderful sea garden, where lobsters, crabs, sea-urchins, turbos, starfish, and hundreds of other sentient beings lived, I saw a thousand true scaled fish, most of them highly colored, and many so curiously marked, fashioned, and equipped with eccentric members that I was startled into biblical phrases. In the market they were strange enough, dead and on the marble slabs, or in green leaves, but in the lagoon they were a kaleidoscope of complexions and shapes. They were the lovely elves to complement the fantastic shellfish, yellow, striped with violet; bright turquoise, with a gold collar; gold, with broad bands of black terminating in winglike fins; scarlet, with cobalt polka-dots; silver, with a rosy flush; glossy green, dazzling crimson, black velvet, solid red.

They darted and flashed in and out of the caves in the coral, caressed the sea-anemones, idled about the shells, avoided by dexterous twistings and turnings a thousand collisions, and continued ever the primary endeavor, the search for those particular bits of food their appetites craved.

The effect upon me of all this splendor and grace of water life, as I bent over the surface of the lagoon or walked with lunette among the beds of coral, was, after the oft-repeated periods of bewilderment at the gorgeousness and whimsicality of the universe, a deep rejoicing for its prodigality of design and purpose, and a merry sorrow for those who would inflict dogma and orthodoxy on a practical and heterodox world. I leaned on the side of the canoe or on my spears and laughed at the fools of cities, and at myself, who had been a fool among them for most of my life. Just how this train of reasoning ran I cannot say, but it moved inexorably at the contemplation of the sublime radiancy of the vivarium of the Mataiea lagoon. It always appeared a symbol of the cosmic energy which poured the bounty of rain upon the sea as upon the thirsty earth, and which is beyond good and evil as we reckon them.

When I became myself the hunter for fish, and stood upon the hummocks of coral in water up to my waist or neck, lunette in one hand and spears in another, I saw a different aspect of the garden. I, naked among the coral and the plants, must have looked to them like a frightful demon, white and without scales, a horrible devil-fish, my arms and legs glabrous tentacles, and the lunette and spears adding to my hideousness and foul menace. I know that was the impression I made on the rainbow-fish, for they fled within the caves, and only by peeping in through the glass could I see them to drive the spear into them. These slender spears were a dozen feet of light, tough wood, two of them with single iron points two feet long, and a third fitted with ten fine-pointed darning-needles. For small fish I used the latter, and in thrusting into a school was pretty sure to impale one or two.

I tied the rope of pandanus-leaves about my shoulder, and pulled the canoe along with me as a creel, tossing the fish into it as I took them. The first seven were often of different kinds, and I did not despise the yellow and black eels, the lobsters, the mao, or the oysters and clams.

I would rest my spears in the canoe, and meander slowly and meditatively over the coral terraces, repeating verses:

We wandered where the dreamy palm
Murmured above the sleepy wave;
And through the waters clear and calm
Looked down into the coral cave
Whose echoes never had been stirred
By breath of man or song of bird.

When sky and wind were propitious, and other signs familiar to the Maori indicated that fish were plentiful in the lagoon, the whole village dragged the net. This belonged to the chief, who for his ownership received a percentage of the catch. The net was a hundred and fifty feet long, and was carried out by a dozen canoes or by half a hundred or more men and women, who let it sink to the bottom when up to their necks in water. They then approached the shore with the net in a half-circle, carrying it over the coral heaps, and artfully driving into it all the fish they encountered. In shallow water others waited with little baskets, and, scooping up the fish from the net, emptied them into larger baskets slung from their waists. These fish were not very big, but when larger ones were netted, marksmen with spears waited in the shallows to kill any that leaped from the seine. If the haul was bigger than the needs of the village, the overplus was sent to the market in Papeete, or kept in huge anchored, floating baskets of wicker. These fishermen had been heart and soul in the tahatai oneone, the fish strike, and when we had poor luck, often the best spearsman led the clan in the air taught them by the leader whom they remembered with pride and affection:

Hayrahrooyah! I’m a boom! Hayrahrooyah! Boomagay!

They associated the air and words with the fish, and deep down in their primitive hearts thought it an incantation, such as their tahutahu, the sorcerers of the island, spoke of old.

“Tellee haapao maitai! Kelly was a wise man!” they would lament.

Every one used a fine casting-net when fishing alone along the shores. The net was weighted, and was thrown over schools of small fish so dexterously that hundreds were snared in one fling. The tiniest fish were the size of matches. When cooked with a paste, they were as dainty as whitebait served at Greenwich to a London gourmet, and sung by Shakespere. The nets were plaited of the fibers of the hibiscus, banyan, or pandanus-bark, and when a mighty catch was expected, one of small mesh was laid inside a net of stronger and coarser make, to intercept any large fish that might break through the first line of offense. The weights were stones wrapped in cocoanut-fiber, and the floats were of the buoyant hibiscus-wood. In front of the grounds of the chefferie there hung on the trees a long line of nets drying in the breeze.

Before a feast, if there were not conditions auspicious for a tuu i te upea toro, a dragging of the seine, the village was occupied during the day or the wind was unfavorable, we went out at night after the trades had died down, and in a dozen or twenty canoes we speared them by torchlight. One was at the paddle, and the other at the prow, with uplifted flambeau, searching the waters for the fleeing shadows beneath, and launching the dart at the exact instant of proximity. The congregation of lights, the lapping of the waves, and perhaps the very gathering of humans excited the fish. They leaped and splashed, and unaware of their betrayal of their presence to slayers, informed our eyes and ears of their whereabouts. I could not compete with the Tahitians with the spears, and held a paddle, and that slight occupation gave me time and thought for the scene. The torches threw a lurid glare upon the exaggerated, semi-nude figures of the giant bronzes on the beaks of the pirogues, their arms raised in the poise of the weapon, each outlined against the darkness of the night, glorious avatars yet of their race that had been so mighty and was so soon to pass from the wave.

“Maru,” said the chief, when we sat on the mats at late supper after a return from the lagoon, “it is a pity you were not here when the Tahitians had their ’ar’ia and pahi, our large canoes for navigating on the moana faa aro, the landless sea. The ’ar’ia was a double canoe, each seventy feet long, high in the stern, and lashed together, outrigger to outrigger. A stout, broad platform was held firm between the canoes with many lashings of sennit, a strong, but yielding, framework on which was a small house of straw where the crew lived. We had no nails, but we used wooden pegs and thousands of cocoanut-fiber ropes, so that everything, aloft and alow, was taut, but giving in the toss of the sea.

“The pahi was eighty feet long, broad in the middle, very carefully and neatly planked over inside, forming a rude bulkhead or inner casing, and had a lofty carved stem rising into one or two posts, terminating in a human form. It was in these vessels that we made the long journeys from island to island, the migrations and the descents upon other Polynesian peoples in war. Both the ’ar’ia and the pahi were propelled by a huge ’i’e, or mat sail of pandanus-leaves shaped like a leg of a fat hog. In modern times these great canoes were built in Bora-Bora, the island the Hawaiians say they came from, and the name of which means ‘Land of the Big House Canoes.’ With a good wind we could sail a hundred and twenty miles a day in those vessels. We would attend the fa’a-Rua, which we now call the ha’a-Piti, the wind that blows both ways, for we waited for the northeast or southwest trade-winds according to the direction we made for.”

The chief lifted his glass of wine, and chanted:

“Aue mouna, mouna o Havaii!
Havaii tupu ai te ahi veavea!”

“Hail! mighty mountains, mountains of Havaii!
Havaii where the red, flaming fire shoots up high!”

Brooke had been to Lake Vaihiria, and suggested that I go. The excursion had been long in my mind, for every time an eel was caught or served some one exclaimed, “Aue! You should see the eels in Vaihiria. But, be careful!”

The warning referred to the dangers of the climb, but also to a mysterious menace of tupapaus, or ghosts. I had seen a canoe with the head of an eel carved in wood, and had heard often a hesitant reference to a legend of metempsychosis, of a human and eel transmigration. The chief, after much persuasion, said that the clans of Mataiea had always believed they were descended directly from eels; that an eel of Lake Vaihiria had been the progenitor of all the people of the valley. A vahine of another clan had been overcome by the eel’s sorcery, as Mother Eve by the serpent, which doubtless was an eel.

As the eel and the water-snakes are the only serpentine animals in Tahiti, his reasoning was sound. The lake lies high in the mountains, at the very summit of the valley of Mataiea, and overlooks the Great Valley of Papenoo, owned by Count Polonsky, the cultivated Slav-Frenchman.

Tiura, the chief’s oldest adopted son, arranged for the journey, and led the four of us who made it. One was an Australian, a doctor of the bush country of Queensland, in his thirties, very tall, and strong, though thin. He was a guest of the chief, and had walked entirely around Tahiti, barefooted, as had Mr. and Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, to the consternation of the conservative English residents of Tahiti, who wanted them to live in Papeete and hold teas. Two pleasant native youths went with us to carry our necessities.

One cannot make the trip in the wet season, usually, but we had had a period of quite dry weather, and were nearing the end of the rainy period. The beginning of the Valley of Vaihiria, the next to that of Mataiea, was reached within an hour by the crooked road that leaves the beach. The valley was very fertile, and its picturesqueness a foretaste of the heights. The brook that ran through it murmured that it, too, climbed to the mountains, and would be our music on the way. The ascent was difficult and wearisome. We walked through long grass, over great rocks, and pulled ourselves around huge trees. The birds, so rare near the sea-shore, sang to us, and we saw many nests of fine moss. The scenery was different from that of the Valley of Fautaua, which I had climbed with Fragrance of the Jasmine, more rugged, and less captivating, yet beautiful and inspiring. The enormous blocks of basalt often poised upon a point alarmed us, and Tiura said that many times they had crashed down into the abyss. We saw a score of white cascades. It seemed:

A land of streams. Some like a downward smoke,
Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go;
And some through wavering lights and shadows broke,
Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below.

We arrived at a plateau after seven hours of hard toil, almost all the time pursuing a rocky path: it was the crown of the mountain and the borders of the lake. Though we had surmounted only thirteen hundred feet of vertically, we had come by such steeps that we could not wait an instant before throwing off our light garments and plunging into the water. The lake occupied an extinct crater, surrounded by four mountains unequally raised up—Tetufera, Urufaa, Purahu, and Terouotupo. It is half a mile long and a third wide, of curious shape, the banks making it appear in the dusk like a babe in swaddling-clothes with its arms outside the band. A great natural reservoir, fed by many subterranean springs, it gives birth to many others at the feet of the mountains, in Mataiea and Papeari.

After a repast, it being already late, we built a house to sleep in away from the dews of the heights, and Tiura recalled that the first Pomaré took his name from a time when he had spent the night here and coughed from the exposure. His followers had spoken of the po mare, meaning literally, night cough, and the euphony pleased the king so that he adopted the name and bequeathed it to four successors. All these Polynesians took their names at birth or later from incidents in their own or others’ lives, as my own chief’s—“Deal Coffin,” from a relative being buried in a sailor’s chest; “Press Me” because the chief so named had heard these as the last word uttered by a dying grandchild, and Dim Sight because his grandfather had weak eyes.

Taata Mata, the name of a charming Tahitian woman I knew, signifies “Man’s Eye,” her own large eyes, perhaps, explaining the name, and Mauu, the name borne by a Tahitian man of good family in Papeete, “Moist.” In all Polynesia one found picture names for people, as among the American Indians, and as among all nations, though with Europeans the meanings are forgotten. Moses means “Pulled out of the Water,” or “Water Baby.” Some of our names of people and places have ridiculous import in Tahiti. I remember Lovaina laughed immoderately, and called all the maids to view a line in the Tiare Hotel register in which a man had put himself down from “Omaha.”

After we had eaten, we sat smoking in the darkness, I feeling very close to the blue field of stars. In the tropics the mountains, even so low as these, are impressive of a vast harmony of nature and of kinship with the force that rumpled them with its mighty hand. They have always inspired great thoughts. Moses framed in the mountains the ten taboos of Israel, which we hold as sacred as did the chosen people. Jesus made the mountains the seat of his most important acts, and was there transfigured in glory.

We had been pointed out by Tiura a great crack in the precipice, called Apoo Taria, the “Hole of the Ears.” In the bloody struggles of the ancient tribes here the conquerors cut off the ears of their victims—some say their captives—and threw them in this hole.

“Because of those ears,” said Tiura, “all the eels in this lake have very large ears, and it is so because the father of all the Mataiea folk was an eel. We shall see the eels to-morrow, but I must tell you of the chief of the district of Arue, near Papeete, about which M. Tourjee, the American, wrote the himene. The chief was married to a strong woman of this district, and in those days there were so many Tahitians that the mountains as well as the valleys were filled with them. He had a pet puhi, an eel named Faaraianuu. The eel had his home in a spring in the Arue district. The spring is there to this day.”

“Oia ia! It is true!” I interjected. “I have seen it.”

“One day,” went on Tiura, “the chief remarked to his vahine that he was starting up the mountain to see her grandparents. She wanted to go, too, but he said that he would just hurry along, and be back in a day or two. Against her will he went alone. He did come back in a day or two, and to her questions replied that he had had a delightful visit to her tupuna. After that he got the peu, the habit, of departing for the mountains and remaining for hours daily. The chief’s vahine became anoenoe (curious) to see what was his real reason for making these journeys every day. So she followed him secretly. She came to the mountain, where she saw him stop by an umu, a native oven he had evidently built before. He took out a bamboo, the kind in which we cooked small pieces of meat, and she saw him draw out a piece of meat and heard him say ‘Maitai! Good!’ as he ate it. She watched him closely, and was anxious to know what meat he had cooked, for he had said nothing about it.

“When he had left, she rushed to the oven, opened the bamboo, and saw on pieces of meat the special tattoomarks of the thighs of her grandmother and grandfather. Aue! She was riri. She fell to the earth and wept, and then she was angry. She made up her mind to get even with her false tane, and to hurt him the worst way possible. She hurried to his spring by their home in Arue, and caught his pet eel, Faaraianuu, who was sunning himself on the surface. She slashed him with her knife of pearl shell, and baked him in an umu. She ate his tail at once and put the remainder of the eel in a calabash. Then she left, with the ipu in her hand, for Lake Vaihiria.”

Tiura halted his tale a minute to point out the constellation of the Scorpion, and to say, “Those stars are Pipiri Ma, the children, who lived at Mataiea long ago. That is a strange story of their leaving their parents’ house for the sky!”

“Aue! Tiura,” said I, “the stars are fixed, but there was the vahine with all but the tail of Faaraianuu in her ipu, walking toward this very spot. What became of her?”

The son of Tetuanui smiled, and continued:

“On her way she stopped to see the sorcerer, Tahu-Tahu and his vahine. They were friends. After a paraparau, the usual gossip of women, they asked her what she had in her calabash, and she replied, ‘Playthings.’ Then they told her her journey would be unsuccessful, but she kept on to this lake and put the remains of the eel in the water, right here where we are. But the eel would not stay in the lake, and though time and again she threw him in, he always came out. Finally she put him back in her ipu and returned to the house of Tahu-Tahu. She told her misfortune, and Tahu-Tahu made passes and thrashed about with the sacred ti-leaves, and commanded her to put Faaraianuu in the lake again. This she did, and he stayed, but even now, if you put a cocoanut in this lake at this spot, it will come out at the spring in Arue. The eel still has power over that spring.”

Tiura spoke in Tahitian and French, and I handed on his narrative.

“The eel in Tahiti, from what I hear, has seen better days,” commented the Queensland doctor. “All over the world the primitive people endowed this humble form of animal—the serpentine—with a cunning and supernatural power surpassing that of the four-footed creatures. I think it was because in the cradle of the human family there were so many hurts from the bites of snakes and sea-eels—they couldn’t guard against them—that man salved his wounds by crediting his enemy with devilish qualities. That’s the probable origin of the garden of Eden myth.”

Again Tiura spoke of the Scorpion in the sky, and I knew he desired to talk of Pipiri Ma. The other Tahitians were already under the roof on their backs, upon the soft bed of dried leaves gathered by them for all of us, but the long, lean physician listened with unabated interest. He had run away for a change from the desert-like interior of his vast island, where he treated the ills of a large territory of sheep-herders, and to be on this mountain under such a benignant canopy, and to hear the folk-lore of the most fascinating race on earth, was to him worth foregoing sleep all night.

Tiura assumed a serious pose for the divulgement of secret lore. His language became grandiose, as if he repeated verbatim a rune of his ancestors:

“We Maoris lived at that time in the great peace of our long, quiet years. No outside influence, no evil wind, troubled our dreams. The men and women were hinuhinu, of high souls. At the head of the valley, in a grove of breadfruit, lived Taua a Tiaroroa, his vahine Rehua, and their two children, whose bodies were as round as the breadfuit, and whose eyes were like the black borders of the pearl-shells of the Conquered atolls. They were named Pipiri and Rehua iti, but were known as Pipiri Ma, the inseparables. One night when the moon, Avae, was at the height of its brilliancy, Taua and Rehua trod the green path to the sea. They lifted their canoe from its couch upon the grass, and with lighted torch of cocoanut-leaves glided toward the center of the lagoon.

“The woman stood motionless at the prow, and from her right hand issued the flames of their torch with a hissing sound—the flames which fell later in smoky clouds along the shore. A multitude of fish of strange form, fascinated by the blinding light, swam curiously about the canoe like butterflies. Taua stopped padpling, and directed his twelve-pronged harpoon toward the biggest fish. With a quick and powerful stroke the heavy harpoon shot like an arow from his hand and pierced the flashing scales. Soon the baskets of purau-fiber were filled, and they took back the canoe to its resting-place, and returned to their house, again treading the emerald trail which shone bright under the flooding moon. On the red-hot stones of the umu the fish grew golden, and sent forth a sweet odor which exceeded in deliciousness even the smell of monoi, the ointment of the oil of the cocoanut and crushed blossoms. Pipiri Ma rolled upon their soft mats, and their eyes opened with thoughts of a bountiful meal. They awaited with hearts of joy the moment when their mother would come to take them to the cook-house, the fare umu.

“The parents did not come to them. The minutes passed slowly in the silence, counted by beats of their hearts. Yet their mother was not far away. They heard the noise of the dried purau-leaves as they were placed on the grass. They distinguished the sound of the breadfruit as they rolled dully upon the large leaves, and then the silvery sound of cups filled with pape miti and the miti noanoa from which a pleasant aroma arose. They heard also the freeing of the cocoanuts from their hairy covering to release their limpid nectar. On their mats the children became restless and began to cry. Their eyes filled with bitter tears, and their throats choked with painful sobs.

“ ‘All is ready,’ said Rehua, gladly, to her husband, ‘but before we eat, go and wake our little ones so dear to us.’

“Taua was afraid to break the sweet sleep of the babies. He hesitated and said:

” ‘No, do not let us wake them. They sleep so soundly now.’

“Pipiri Ma heard these touching words of their father. Why was he afraid to wake them to-night when always they ate the fish with their parents—the fish just from the sea and golden from the umu? Had the love of their father been so soon lost to them, as under the foul breath of a demon that may have wandered about their home?

“Taua eats and enjoys his meal, but Rehua is distracted. A cloud gathers on her brow, and her eyes, full of sadness, are always toward the house where the children are sleeping. The meal finished, she, with her husband, hurry to the mats on which the children slept, but the little ones had heard the noise of their feet upon the dewy leaves.

” ‘Haere atu! Let us go!’ said the brother to the sister. The door is closed, and with his slender arms he parts the light bamboo palings which surround the house, and both flee through the opening.

“A long time they wandered. They followed the reaches of the valley. They dipped their bruised feet in the amorous river that sang as it crept toward the ocean. They broke through the twisted brush which was shadowed by the giant leaves, and while they so hurried they heard often the words of their parents, which the echoes of the valley brought to their ears:

“ ‘Come back! Come back to us, Pipiri Ma! Ma! Haere mai, haere mai, Pipiri Ma!’

“And they called back from the depths of their bosoms, ‘No, no; we will never come back. The torchlight fishing will again yield the children nothing.’

“They hid themselves on the highest mountains which caress the sky with their misty locks. They climbed with great difficulty the lower hills from which they looked down on the houses as small as a sailing canoe on the horizon. They came upon a dark cave where the tupapaus made their terrible noises, and in this cavern dwelt a tahu, a sorcerer. They were afraid, but the sorcerer was kind, and when he awoke, spoke so softly to them they thought they heard the sough of the hupe, the wind of the night, out of the valley below them.

“When he spoke, the spirit with whom the tahu was familiar let down a cloud and from it fell a fringe of varied hues. Pipiri Ma seized the threads that looked the most seducing, threads of gold and rose, and upon these they climbed to the skies. Their parents who saw them as they ascended, begged them, ‘Pipiri Ma, come back! Oh, come back to us!’ but the babes were already high in the heavens, higher than Orohena, the loftiest mountain, and their voices came almost from under the sun: ‘No, we will never return. The fishing with the torches might be bad again. It might not be good for the children.’

“Taua and Rehua went back to their hut in tears. Whenever the torchlight fishing was bountiful, and the fish were glowing on the hot stones of the umu, Rehua lifted sorrowful eyes toward the skies, and vainly supplicated, ‘Pipiri Ma, return to us!’ and Taua answered, shaking his head with a doleful and unbelieving nod, ‘Alas! it is over. Pipiri Ma will not come back, for one day the torchlight fishing was bad for the children.’ ”

Tiura finished with a finger pointing to Antares, of the Scorpion constellation.

“That,” he concluded, “is the cloud which was itself transformed.”

The doctor shook out his pipe as we entered the flimsy hut.

“Sounds like it was written by a child who wanted a continuous supply of sweets, but these people are so crazy on children that their legends point a moral to parents and never to the kiddies. They reverse ‘Honor thy father and mother.’ ”

In the morning the Valley of Vaihiria unrolled under the rays of the sun like a spreading green carpet, and the sea in the distance, a mirror, sent back the darts of the beams. After breakfast we built a raft of banana-trunks, which we tied with lianas, and on it we floated about to observe the big-eared eels. Except by the shore the natives warned us against swimming for fear of these monsters, but we were not disturbed. We looked into the dismal pit, Apo Taria, and tumbled rocks down it.

“It has no bottom,” said Tiura. “We have sounded it with our longest ropes.”

The sun was now climbing high, and we began the descent, moving at a fast pace, leaping, slipping and sliding, with the use of the rope, and arriving at the Chefferie a little after noon.

The long draft of a cocoanut, a full quart of delicious, cooling refreshment, and we were ready for the oysters and the fish and taro.