It is no wish of mine to dwell on the terrors, the abominations of that Indian Night Entertainment of Eastern Sensualism. All that I am out to tell is of the temptation that came to Benbow’s daughter. And so I have painted to the best of my ability all that is fit to tell of the scene and happenings in that harem cave near Tai-o-hae: a scene that is common enough in the Indian lines—as they call them—in Fiji and other plantation settlements which are the glory-holes of emigrant Mohammedanism in the South Seas. To this day the missionaries curse those swarthy men, who, I have been told, were not true Indians, but a mongrel race from the Malay Archipelago. However that may be, Abduh had lived in Calcutta, and they were all Mohammedans.
I may as well say and have done with it that Pauline was also lured into that cavern of iniquity. She too had crept behind that mockery in the shape of man, Abduh, expecting to see something that corresponded with her girlish conception of paradise. I do not wish to dwell on all that she confessed to me; suffice it to say that Pauline swiftly saw through the veiled curtain that hid the monstrous inclinations of that human spider and his crew.
Thank heaven! he failed to pounce upon her innocence then. She too had lifted that vile potion to her lips, but had shattered the goblet, untouched, in fragments at his feet.
Those swashbucklers at the card-tables, flushed with drink and thoughts of the prize that seemed almost in their clutches, had also put forth their vile talons to stay her flight; but she was too swift for them as she sped from that sensual hollow by the seas, her soul ablaze with fear.
Such is a portion of the history of those much-admired caves and subterranean passages of the Marquesan Group, caverns where the tourist doubtless enters to take a snapshot of Nature’s transcendent beauty of coral, flowers and ferns, little dreaming of the secret they held for the guile of men years ago.
I believe that these caverns were also used as Chinese opium dens. The French authorities had issued an edict forbidding the traffic in opium because of its demoralising influence on the native population. But still the trade prospered in secret, natives inhaling the dreamy narcotic, from Tai-o-hae to Papeete. The penalty for smugglers was a heavy fine, but if the culprit had not the wherewithal he was discharged with a caution, for the official exchequer was too poor to keep them in the calaboose, which was always full of successful aspirants who yearned to live, under Government protection, a life of comparative luxury and ease.
It was hinted that the French officials of that time were not above accepting bribes in the way of cash and maids, for Abduh Allah’s harem cave was strangely immune from the vigilant eye of the law.
CHAPTER XIV
Waylao Off Colour—Our Trip to Tahiti—Papeete at Night—The drowned Native Girl—Her Obsequies—A Humorous Creed