I believe that dance was the last great primeval orgy indulged in by the Marquesan race, for gradually the officials condemned the old rites, till hardly one was left on the Government programme of the great “Permissible.”
Forest Scene, Marquesas Group
Pious whites said it was disgraceful that people should be heard laughing and dancing in the moonlight, and so the Marquesan race died out, sat silent round their camp-fires, and one by one crept into the grave—out of deep gloom into deeper silence.
Some of those heathen dances were a bit grotesque, I must admit. They reminded one vividly of a London or Paris music hall performance, with vast mirrors on the roof and stage walls, the ballet girls, terra-cotta coloured, whirling against a background of moonlit coco-palms and distant starlit mountains.
But to return to the dance in question. Grimes and I determined to attend that festival, in fact had been invited by the old high chief from Anahao. As we left the grog shanty, Grimes was still ruminating over Waylao’s beauty, and the charm of her voice. We did not know it then, but she too must have been tramping on through the forest, ahead of us, making her way to the festival. I suppose she was really off to meet her Indian lover, Abduh, whose wretched skull, well polished, with the brains scooped out, would have made a fitting spittoon for the grog shanty by Tai-o-hae.
As we passed over the westward slopes, Father O’Leary was tugging at his bell-rope, calling his children to prayer.
The night sky was crowded with stars. The very winds were scented with the odours of romance as whiffs crept from the orange groves and the over-ripe fies (bananas). It was a beautiful spot we had to cross ere we reached the native festival. As we passed along the mossy tracks we heard the island nightingales singing. High over the giant bread-fruit trees we could hear the whir of migrating, long-necked cranes, looking like whitened skeletons of dead men rushing beneath the moon. We heard the rattlings of the bones, then came their leader’s wild, crazy cry as they faded seaward. Sometimes, like a flock of frightened gnomes or dusky fairies, a group of surprised native children bobbed their shaggy heads out of the ferns of the forest floor, and vanished in the shadows, for we were approaching the natural stockade of a half-pagan, tiny city. Shadows in a hurry seemed dodging about. We heard the faint booming of drums and the weird wails of barbarian flutes and screaming bamboo fifes.
Emerging from the forest bread-fruits, we sighted the native village. All was a-bustle in that now dead Babylon of the South Seas. By the little groups of small bird-cage huts, made in picturesque style of yellow bamboo and twining sinnet, sat the wild denizens of the forest. It seemed as if we had suddenly passed through some little forest door that led from reality into faeryland. The coco-nut-oil lamps burning with a pale light by the hut doors gave a magical effect to the scene as they flickered in the brilliant moonlight. By some of the bee-hive-shaped dens sat handsome, savage, semi-nude old men and women, the genuine tattooed chiefs and their wives—the faded, dusky, harem beauties of a past which teemed with awful cannibalistic orgies. As those grim old warriors, dressed in the picturesque, barbaric Marquesan garb, sat there, they looked like idols or images, or tree trunks carved to resemble man. Only the blinking of the bright, dark eyes and drifts of tobacco smoke coming from their lips revealed the fact that they breathed. Some had their hair well oiled, done up mopwise, bunched high on top of the head; it almost looked as if some humorist had stuck huge coco-nuts on broad, living, headless shoulders, and painted hideous faces on them. Those grotesque physiognomies considerably enhanced the fine appearance of the really handsome Marquesan chiefs, who, squatting opposite their less fortunate companions, smoked vigorously and repeatedly expectorated on the naked feet of the chiefs who sat before them. (I believe this odious anointment was a sacrificial act of extreme politeness, a survival of some old rite that expressed brotherhood.)
Just on the outskirts of those picturesque village huts was a cleared forest patch, where was erected a kind of pae-pae, fashioned something after the style of the old heathen altars. Decorated with gorgeous hibiscus blossoms and forest festoons, which glimmered amongst the hanging lanterns, it inspired one with a vivid idea of what the old primeval fêtes must have been. The chief attraction of this pae-pae was the monstrous wooden idol that adorned it. The carven face was the acme of ugliness, and had been painted up for the occasion. The goggling glass eyes seemed to express the glorious humour of the situation. The big, slit mouth revealed one huge tooth, and its fixed grin expressed wonder, as though it showed its delight at being brought out of its hiding-place once more to be reinstated as supreme deity of heathen-land. Just below the pae-pae, directly opposite the huge wooden feet of the tiki (idol), squatted a bevy of pretty Marquesan girls. They looked like a group of dusky nymphs as they swayed their nut-brown arms and the moonlit wind uplifted their masses of dark hair. Some had golden tresses (dyed with coral lime).