Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
The pitcher that goes to the well, and the schooner that goes to the pearl islands, are apt to meet with the same fate, in time. Nevertheless, tales about the Paumotus are many, and interesting enough to attract adventurers from far, if they were known. How the rumour of a big pearl gets out; how a schooner sets forth to run down the game, pursues it through shifting report after report, from native exaggeration to native denial, perhaps for months; how it is found at last, and triumphantly secured for a price not a tenth its worth; how one shipload of shell, bought on speculation, will have a fortune in the first handful, and the next will yield no more than the value of the shell itself—this, and much else, make good hearing.
“Look at that pearl,” said a schooner captain to me one day, showing me a little globe of light the size of a pea, and as round as a marble. “I hunted that for a year, off and on. The native that had it lived way off from anywhere, but he knew a thing or two, and he wouldn’t part. I offered him goods, I offered him gin, I offered him twenty pounds cash, but it was all no go. How d’you think I got it at last? Well, I’ll tell you. I went up to his island with the twenty pounds in a sack, all in small silver, and when I came into his house, I poured it all out in a heap on the mats. ‘Ai, ai, ai!’ he says, and drops down on his knees in front of it—it looked like a fortune to him. ‘Will you sell now?’ says I, and by Jove, he did, and I carried it off with me. Worth? Can’t say yet, but it’ll run well into three figures.”
The pearling in the French islands is strictly preserved, and the terms on which it is obtainable are not known to me. Poaching is a crime not by any means unheard of.
A glance at the map, and the extent of the Paumotu group, will explain better than words why the policing of the pearl bed must necessarily be incomplete.
The steamer came in in due course, and carried me away to the Cook Islands. Huaheine and Raiatea, in the Society group, were called at on the way, but Bora-Bora was left out, as it is not a regular port of call. I am glad I did not land on Bora-Bora, and I never shall, if I can help it. No place in the world could be so like a fairy dream as Bora-Bora looked in the distance. It was literally a castle in the air; battlements and turrets, built of vaporous blue clouds, springing steep and impregnable from the diamond-dusted sea to the violet vault of heaven. Fairy princesses lived there, one could not but know; dragons lurked in the dark caves low down on the shore, and “magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas,” looked down from those far blue pinnacles.
Perhaps there is a village on Bora-Bora, with a dozen traders, and an ugly concrete house or two, tin-roofed, defacing the beauty of the palm-woven native homes, and a whitewashed church with European windows, and a school where the pretty native girls are taught to plait back their flowing hair, and lay aside their scented wreaths of jessamine and orange-blossom.
But if all these things are there, at least I do not know it, and Bora-Bora can still remain to me my island of Tir-na’n-Oge—the fabled country which the mariners of ancient Ireland sought through long ages of wandering, and only saw upon the far horizon, never, through all the years, setting foot upon the strand that they knew to be the fairest in the world. If they had ever indeed landed there.... But it is best for all of us to see our Tir-na’n-Oge only in the far away.
Le seul rêve, intéresse.
Vivre sans rêve, qu’est-ce?