My beautiful Niué girl was an exception, so far as her own island went. Niué women are strong and well made, but not lovely as a rule. Her companion was as sturdy as a cart-horse, but as plain as a pig. She smoked a huge pipe, chewed plug tobacco, and laughed like a hyena. They were truly a well-contrasted pair.
The reef was a good way off, so we all struck out for that, when we came up panting and blowing from our dive. The girls gave me a fine exhibition of under-water swimming now and then, slipping easily underneath the gleaming surface, and disappearing from view below, for so long a time that one became quite nervous. My pretty little friend persuaded me to accompany her once, and though I did not like it among the ugly-looking coral caves, I dived for a short time, and endeavoured to follow her flying heels.
Under water among the coral reefs! It sounds romantic, but it was not pleasant. Five feet beneath the surface, the light was as clear as day, and one could see all about one, far too much, for the things that were visible were disquieting. I knew extremely well that coral reefs are the haunt of every kind of unpleasant sea-beast, and I fancied Victor Hugo’s “pieuvre” at the very least, within the gloomy arch of every cave. There were far too many fish also, and they were much too impertinent, and a fish in one’s hair, even if harmless, is not nice. I had not gone down much over a fathom, when I turned, and began to beat upwards again looking eagerly at the light. And then I saw a thing that as nearly as possible made me open my mouth and drown myself.
It was merely a bunch of black waving trailers, coming out of the dark of the rocks, and spreading between me and the pale-green light of day. I did not know what it was, and I do not know, to this day. And, like the runaway soldier in the poem, “I don’t know where I went to, for I didn’t stop to see.” I was on the top of the water, twenty yards away, and swimming at racing speed, when I realised the fact that I was still alive, some moments later. And on the surface I stayed, for the rest of the swim. The native girls were exceedingly amused, for the islander fears nothing that is in the water or under it; but I did not mind their laughing.
One of them then, as she swam along, began laying her mouth to the surface of the water, and blowing bubbles, laughing all the time. She insisted that I should do it too, and I imitated her, at which she seemed delighted. “That what we doing, suppose some shark come,” she explained, “shark he plenty frighten, no like that.”
We practised this useful accomplishment for some time, and then went ashore again. I regret to say that I roused the amusement of my companions yet again, before we landed, by making hasty exclamations, and dodging rapidly away from the embraces of a black-and-white banded snake, about four feet long, that suddenly appeared from nowhere in particular, moving very swiftly, and seemed disposed to argue the right of way. The lagoon at Raratonga had not prepared me for the Zoological Garden in which one had to bathe at Niué.
“Snake he no harm,” said my Venus Anadyomene, as she stood on the rock, with her bathing scarf in her hand, wringing it out in the calmest manner in the world.
“Plenty-plenty snake stop there.”
There were indeed plenty of snakes. One could see them any fine day from the top of the cliffs, gliding through the water below, or lying on the rocks in family parties of a score or two, conspicuous at a great distance, because of their handsome black-and-white banded skins. As to there being no harm—well, I never heard of any one in Niué being injured. But a boy in Fiji trod on one of these checkerboarded creatures, about that time, and died in half an hour from its bite. I am strongly inclined to think that the Niué snake is poisonous, like almost all sea-snakes, though it does not seem at all ready to attack.
What was it I saw under water? I never knew, but I guessed as much as I wanted, a day or two later, when I saw a native, fishing on the reef near my bathing-place, draw up a big devil-fish, with eight limp dangling arms’ over six feet long, and carry it away. A trader told me that he had once pulled up one himself, while out fishing in a light canoe, and that it seized hold of the little boat, and made such a fight that he barely escaped with his life. It is the pleasant habit of this fish, when attacked by a human being, to fling its hideous tentacles over his head and face, and force them up into eyes, nostrils, and mouth, so as to suffocate him, if he cannot master the creature.