CHAPTER III. POKARA’S STORY
Pokara tells me how the first Idol came to be Worshipped.
WHEN I opened my eyes, the morning parrots were wheeling away in screaming droves over the slopes. Pokara was already awake and busy cooking yams for our breakfast on a little fire in the open.
“Good-morning, O mighty Pokara!”
Pokara, who loved to be addressed thus, saluted me in his fascinating theatrical style.
“Did we travel together under the moani ali (sea) last night, and watch a beautiful goddess walk the midnight skies with stars shining in her hair, comrade?” said I, as a bird flew out of the sunrise, pouring forth passionate melody in its rapture of the awakening day over our wide bedroom floor and the sculptural beauty of our vast, columned portico—the mountain gaps high over the forest slopes. For answer Pokara said:
“You taster nicer this, O Music Man of long fiddle-stick!”
It was good! Pokara was an estimable cook, as well as being a good companion. I was a connoisseur in the derelict companion line. I had travelled across the bushlands, isles, and seas with melancholy old men who mumbled in their beards; jolly old men with big red noses; soppy, anæmic-faced youths; lean, cynical men; scraggy, long-necked Don-Quixote-like beings; religious maniacs; atheists with sad eyes; glorious old liars crammed full of romantic notions; Homeric men who would have been knighted by kings and loved by princesses in another age, but alas! hanged in this new age where they slept with one eye ever open. I had even met derelict white women on my travels—some in rags, delicate lyrics of sorrow that only God knew the truth about; others, women who wore virgin moustaches and swore so vilely that the pretty brown maid from Malaboo hung her modest head as she ran off into the forest to hide for shame that a woman should swear so! And, notwithstanding this motley collection who had accompanied me on my travels, Pokara was no mean second to the best of them!
I recall that we were both tired out when we camped by the sea that day before travelling on in the cool of evening. For we were within sound of the native villages and the outskirts of Papeete. Pokara made a hasty meal of cooked fish from the lagoons. As we sat there, the ocean resembled some mighty glass mirror, so calm was the evening. But at times the water bubbled, was slightly fretted into feathery foams, as though something moved beneath the surface.