“Well!” said the captain, who was a hard-shelled old whaler, with a strong religious cast. And again—“Well!”
“That’s what I think myself,” I explained. “But it certainly fills the exchequer. I hear the score runs up to ten or twelve apiece, often enough.”
“Disgustin’,” said the captain, spitting over the rail.
“Certainly,” I agreed.
But the incident has its own significance, so I have recorded it.
I linger long over the life and ways of Raratonga, for I spent many very happy weeks there—studying native customs, and taking notes? Well, perhaps—a little, at all events. Raratonga is not quite so lazy a place as Tahiti, and the climate is less trying. Still—still———
How impossible it is to explain to the reader who has never spent a hot season in the tropics! I think I shall not try. There were missed opportunities—there were things I ought to have studied, and did not, and things I should have seen, and didn’t see. It is of no use to say why. Those who have passed between the magic line of Cancer and Capricorn will not need to ‘be told, and the others could not understand.
I did something to satisfy my conscience, however, when I climbed the highest mountain in Raratonga—a peak something over three thousand feet high, so the residents said. It was reported that the Admiralty survey did not agree by a hundred feet or so, with the local estimate. I know myself that both were wrong; that peak is ten thousand, or perhaps a little more. Did it not take myself and two or three others from seven a.m. until nine p.m to get up and down, working as hard as white ants (there is nothing in the islands really busy except the ants) all the time?
We went the wrong way—several wrong ways—we lost our food and our water, and got so thirsty that we licked the leaves of the trees, and so hungry that it was agony to know ourselves above the zone of the orange and banana all day, and see the food we could not reach till night hanging in clusters far below. We did most of our climbing by the heroic method of swarming up perpendicular rock faces on the ladders of the creepers, and a good deal of it by scrambling along in the tops of small trees, like monkeys. When we got to the top there was just room for the whole party to stand and cheer, and we cheered ourselves vigorously. People do not climb mountains—much—in the islands of the Pacific, and the peak we were on had been trodden by only one or two white men, and no white women.
“There used to be natives up here often enough, some years ago, shooting wild fowl,” said one of our guides, letting the smoke of his pipe curl out over “half a duchy,” lying blue and green, and far, far down, under his elbow. “But they stopped coming. Several of ’em got killed, and the others didn’t think it good enough.”