OUT of the night the dawn came creeping over the ranges like a maiden with her sandals dipped in light, the glory of the stars fading in her hair as she stood on the brightening clouds of the eastern mountain peaks of Nuka Hiva, and with her golden bugle of silence she blew transcendent streaks of crimson along the grey horizon—to awaken the day.
The sounds of the natives beating their drums aroused the echoes of the hills.
“Wailo oooe! wailo ooooeeee!” called some nameless bird from the forest shadows where now the last of the Marquesan race sleep by their beloved seas.
The harbour was silent. Not an oath echoed from the grog shanty. The traders and sailormen still slept. I could not sleep. As I stood by the shore-sheds it seemed impossible that such tragedy should live in such beautiful surroundings. I was not sorry that I had secured a berth on the s.s. ——, a three-masted ship anchored out in the bay. She was due to sail on the Saturday morning, so I still had three more days in Nuka Hiva.
All the familiar faces had gone. News came in the Apia Times that the Bell Bird schooner had gone down in a typhoon, lost with all hands off Savaii Isle. The only evidence that the crew ever existed were several small, dark spots sighted by a passing ship’s skipper, fading away on the sky-line—the old peaked and oilskin caps of my old shellbacks drifting away on the waste of waters, travelling N.N.W.
The Hebrew prophet might well have spoken of such a place as that wooden grog bar of Tai-o-hae when he said: “One generation passeth away and another cometh. Only the mountains abideth for ever.” Ah, Koheleth, your wisdom was the wisdom of truth. The sun sets and rises again, the winds blow eternally on appointed courses; the river flows to the sea; but whither shall I go? And where is he who went away ten thousand years ago?
Not only in the South Seas will you hear of the tragedy of Waylao. She is at your door wailing—if you have eyes to see and ears to hear. She walks the ghostly London streets by night, calling for her lost lover. And one may pass her nameless grave wherever the dead are buried.
Perhaps my pages smack too much of sorrow; but I would say that even our sorrows are too brief. Life itself is little more than this:
A man and a woman awoke in the hills of Time.
“How beautiful is the sun that I see,” said the man, after admiring the beauty of the woman who had so mysteriously appeared before him. Still the man stared at the sun, but so brief was his existence that, when he turned to gaze once more on the glory of the woman beside him, she had wrinkled up to a wraith of skin and bone.