So would he rave on for hours till, exhausted, he fell asleep. And then he would snore, and puff the lips of his toothless mouth about in such a terrific manner that I dreamed that I was dead and sleeping in a deep-sea cave where the waves rushed in and violently lifted my shell-burred bones eternally. On the third night I was relieved of his presence, for he rose after midnight, went outside, and knelt before a tallow candle which he lit and placed beneath the palm grove. He would kneel before this humble tallow altar for about two hours, chanting in a sombre voice the Lord’s Prayer, interspersed with ghastly epitaphs that made my blood curdle as I groaned on my trestle bed.
I was thankful when I made the acquaintance of a young German. I cannot wax enthusiastic over a member of the Teutonic race, but still, I must admit, that my German friend was as clean-minded a comrade as one could hope to meet in the South Seas in those days. Indeed, he and I secured a berth as stowaways on a full-rigged windjammer, and so left Nuka Hiva, incognito, outbound for the glorious Nowhere of sanguine youth. I see by my diary that I eventually arrived in New Guinea, where I stayed six months with a celebrated high chief and his family. Though my native host was an inveterate cannibal in battle times, he and his family were exceedingly kind to me while I was down with malaria. After that I shipped on a German vessel for the Solomon Isles, where I arrived off Bougainville in a typhoon. Our ship was wrecked off the coast, and we lost four hands. I had only my shirt and boots on when a huge comber swept me from the deck into the ocean, where I seemed to make about four somersaults between the sea and the night sky, ere I was landed high up on the sandy beach. Next day I recovered my violin from the wreck that lay high and dry on the barrier reefs. Unfortunately, I have no space to narrate all that I experienced when I became the staunch friend of the Solomon Island head-hunters!—played the violin to the great Ingrova, to Oom Pa, and gave violin lessons to high chief Stem-Poo’s half-caste daughter, Mallio-Wao, up in the mountain stronghold at Zalabar. I will simply say, that, under the friendly cover of one dark night, I hurriedly left Ysabel for New Guinea, and after many wanderings once more came across my Irish comrade, O’Hara. And in the next chapters I will attempt to relate those things which I count as the most thrilling experiences of wild South Sea life which I was ever thrown into by the mystery of circumstance.
CHAPTER XV. CHARITY ORGANIZATION OF THE SOUTH SEAS
I fall from Space—Court Violinist—Arrive in Fiji—With the Great Missing.
I wonder why men o’er the buried weep,
When ’tis the wandering dead who cannot sleep?
I WAS hanging by one foot from a mystical cloud, lesiurely travelling across the tropic sky, then I lost my grip and fell! I distinctly recall the awful sensation of that noiseless dive through space, ere I arrived with a crash! I had apparently fallen through the roof of a grog-shanty on a Pacific Isle. Many may doubt the aforesaid assertion of mine, and say that such a mishap was a physical impossibility. But I would say that it is only the impossible that does occur. I felt the spasm of that sudden headlong contact of my skull against some hard object very acutely. Opening my eyes I saw astonished traders standing around me, still holding their rum mugs between the bar and their lips as they stared, open-mouthed, down on my recumbent form. I looked through the doorway and saw feathery palms, and moonlit seas softly beating over the coral reefs of a strange shore.
“It looks as though I’ve fallen on another world,” thought I. But no such luck for me! The fact of the case is this. Our ship, from Honolulu, had arrived off the Fiji Islands that evening. I was with O’Hara, whom I had re-met in Hawaii. And, in my hurry to get ashore, I had hired a canoe, and whilst I was being paddled ashore, the canoe had turned turtle! It appeared that I had sunk twice beneath the water before O’Hara and the native boatmen rescued me. They thought I was done for when they dragged me up the shore and carried me into the grog-shanty.
The native bar-keeper had gone off immediately to fetch a well-known Fijian medicine-man who dwelt in Tumba-Tumba village. What on earth the medicine-man did before he succeeded in restoring my heart-beats, I don’t know. O’Hara swore that he delivered mighty blows on my hips with a flat war-club, lifted me repeatedly up to the shanty’s roof by one leg and let me drop with a crash! The native doctor was evidently cruel to be kind, for his strange acts saved my life, and were the direct cause of the strange sensations and my experience as above recorded.