“They are singing to me,” she said, as she looked up into my face with earnest, wondering eyes.
“Who is singing to you, Nina?” I responded, rather surprised at her remark and the assurance in her manner that someone was singing to her in the shell. Then I heard from her lips an example of the poetical Arabian Nights of the South Seas. Crossing her legs, she arranged her pretty yellow frock, then put her finger up as though to tell me a great secret, and as I sat by her on the rock she told me the following story:—“There still lives an old heathen god deep down under the sea. His home is a large cavern, so big that its roof is the floor of all the ocean. In this big cavern is a beautiful country, lit up by the light of all the sunsets that have ever sunk down into the great waters out in the west. For it is in the west, deep down in the sea, where the old grey-bearded god’s door is. Every night, just as the days are going to bed, the lonely god stands by his door, with his big watching eyes gazing up through the waters, as the sun sinks slowly down into the sea. For he knows it is on the sunset fires that he will catch the shadows of dead Samoan sailors who have been drowned by the upsetting of their canoes when the great storms blow. For when they die their shadows swim away to the sun directly it commences to sink, and then, clinging to the golden light, they go down, down, and are caught by the big god as he stands by his door under the sea, pulling the sunset in as a fisherman does his nets.”
“And what does the god do with them, Nina?” I said, as she sat hesitating and looking up at me with her pretty brown eyes.
“Well,” she continued, as she put her finger to her lips and dabbled her little brown feet in the waves that crept up the shore in foamy curls, “for thousands and thousands of years he has been watching and catching the dead sailors, and all those who are drowned in the storms; and as he stalks along through his wonderful countries, his endless forests under the sea, moving through the light of yesterday’s sunsets, all the shadows of the dead sailors follow behind him, singing, and begging him to catch also the dead girls and women who have been drowned. But in a deep voice that echoes, and is the thunder you hear when the storms blow, he says: ‘Mia fantoes’ (my children), ‘you must only love me and not love mere women.’ But still the shadows follow him, imploring and singing, ‘Oh, bring us the beautiful dead girls and women’; and their voices, for ever echoing through the cavern roof, come up to the top of the ocean shores and caves, and you can hear them, though they are far away, faintly calling, calling to the big god under the sea. So all the girls and women come down to the shore and, if they have no one to love them, they put the shells to their ears and listen to the calling voices of the dead sailormen.”
“Do you believe that, Nina?” I said, as I looked at her.
Then she nodded her pretty head with absolute conviction; and I too listened to the shell’s murmur and pretended to be astonished and convinced. “Nina, and what becomes of the dead girls who are drowned?”
For answer she looked up at me sorrowfully for a while, then said: “The big sea-god is jealous of women, so he takes them out of his nets of sunset and throws them back into the waters, just as a fisherman does with the fish that are of no use to him.”
“And what becomes of them then, Nina?”
“They turn to ruios” (sea-swallows), “and you can see them very early after dawn flying away into the fire of the rising sun, whence all that is beautiful comes”; and saying that she looked up at me with her pretty eyes staring thoughtfully.
“Who told you all those beautiful things, Nina?” I said.