CHAPTER VIII. IN OLD FIJI
A Heathen Monastery—A scene of Primitive Heathenism—My unsolicited Professional Engagement—I imbibe Kava—I am made “Taboo”—Things that I may not Confess—My escape—Fanga Loma—A Native Village—The Enchantress of the Forest—Temptation—In Suva again.
I RECALL that, though my profession has never burdened me with wealth till it seemed an encumbrance, my violin has enabled me to delve without harm into the most secretive, dangerous heathen societies and sacred festivals. Where a white man would have been, in the ordinary way, clubbed, or doped with a mixture of kava and South Sea strychnine for intruding at a secret sacred festival, I have been received with open arms. It seems incredible, when I think of the magnificent receptions I have had through being able to play my old Sunday-school hymns on a fiddle before ex-cannibal chiefs.
I was in Suva, Fiji, when I managed to wheedle my way into a heathen monastery that was the one surviving temple of another age. This sacred hell was situated in a picturesque spot up in the Kai Tholos mountains. These Kai Tholos tribes were a fierce mountain people who, up till that date, had successfully resisted the advances of the British missionaries. Few of them were still living, but those few most certainly did their best to make up for the iniquities of the missing when they met in their temple cavern four miles west of Mandaua, not far from the Rewa River. The aforesaid river ran through an isolated district in those days. Where now the new sugar and coffee plantations are, there was nothing more than a few taro and pineapple patches that supplied the scattered villages with work and food.
How I got to know the whereabouts of the aforesaid monastery matters little. I will simply say that an elder chief, named Kambo, secured me uninterrupted admission into the cavern-chamber where the old unconverted Kai Tholos assembled for religious purposes.
Only a poet of superb descriptive ability could adequately describe that cavern’s interior and its romantic surroundings. All I am able to say of the local scenery is, that the mountains seemed to abet, to watch over those wild Kai Tholos and their secret meetings, for ever guarding the cavern’s entrance with their rugged hollows and pinnacles that were clad with feathery palms and the innocent flowerage of artless Nature. It was like entering some wondrous Arabian Nights cave of enchantment to enter that volcanic chamber.
“In there?” I said to old Kambo, as I stood hesitating, looking across the silent gullies, watching the migrating cockatoos fade away in the aftermath of the sunset ere I made up my mind to enter.
The large red feathers in Kambo’s mop-head brushed against the low roof of the tunnel-way as we both entered that ominous-looking entrance. The glittering stalactites, hanging in festoons from the rocky alcoves, intensified the weird atmosphere of that gloomy place, as, with fiddle in my hand, I crept warily behind my swarthy guide. We had to stoop, almost crawl, as we passed along into the third corridor. Great was my surprise as I suddenly entered a spacious chamber. The scene before me almost dazzled my eyes, for beneath the hanging rows of innumerable coco-nut-oil lamps, suspended over a large platform, danced a group of dusky, sparkling-eyed houris!
I stared like one in a dream as I continued to gaze on those whirling, semi-nude figures. A few were attired in diaphanous tappa robes, that seemed to be worn for no other purpose than for the fact that they softly opened out like large umbrellas and then closed down again. I am at a loss to know how to describe the dances and the various “turns” those maids gave, as they sought to give the onlookers a violent, demonstrative exhibition of their charms. Some whirled, some somersaulted, and a few seemed to detach their limbs from their bodies and gently throw them, in boomerang-like swerves, across the stage, ere they returned and fixed themselves by apparent magic into their customary position. So it seemed to me, for I am at a loss to give any reasonable explanation of maidens pitching their legs and arms in such a way as they did, without dislocation, if not serious injury and strain. It is quite possible that they had been trained from early childhood, like to our own contortionists and music-hall dancers, so that they might please the eyes of sinful old priests.
Squatting on coco-nut-fibre mats, arranged in semicircles, reposed the most hideous-looking chiefs it has ever been my lot to gaze upon. They were tattooed in grotesque style from toes to chin, their teeth reddened through chewing betel-nut. They were undoubtedly the surviving grand old roués of the pre-Christian times. To the indescribable capers of the sacred maids, they gave enthusiastic grunts and awful wheezes, and the effect of it all was weird enough as the sounds echoed and re-echoed ere they escaped from the close atmosphere of that subterranean chamber.