I went and lay where the curling sea caressed my naked feet. I was within easy distance of the taua’s voice. One must not hurry even in speech in these Isles of Leisure. The old man blew through the bowl and then the stem, and, taking pieces of tobacco from his pareu, he packed the pipe and lit it. He drew a long whiff first, as one pours wine first in one’s own glass, and handed it to me.
He responded when I put the pipe again between his trembling fingers.
“The gods grew weary. Messages but few came from them. Priests’ wives even ceased to cook the breadfruit on the hot stones, and went to live in that accursed haa ite.”
“We esteem such a long house, and call it a club,” I interposed in subconscious defense of my own habits.
“Oti! Maybe. Your island forgot wisdom early. You even cook your fish. We will make the fire now.”
I rose and shook off the warm salt water from my body. My pareu of blue with white stars was on a descending branch of the banyan. I put it about my thighs and folded it for holding. Then arm in arm we walked to our own house on the raised paepae of great basalt stones.
I heaped the dried cocoanut fiber in a hollow of a rock, and about it set the polished coral of our kitchen. A spark from the pipe set it afire, and, heaped with more fiber and wood of the hibiscus, before long the stones blushed with the heat, and, growing redder yet, were ready for their service.
The priest of old had withdrawn to make a sauce of limes and sea-water, which he brought out within the half-hour from the penthouse in which we stored our simple goods. It was in a tanoa formerly used for kava, a trencher of the false ebony, black in life, but turned by the years of decoction of the mysterious narcotic to a marvelous green. It was like an ancient bronze in the open. Here we were both ready for our delayed food, I, beside the glowing coral stones, the bones of once living organisms, and the old man, with his bowl of sauce. But the food tarried.
He fluttered about the paepae and chewed a bit of the hibiscus wood to stay his hunger. In the breadfruit-grove the komako, the Marquesan nightingale, deceived by a lowering cloud or perhaps impelled by a sudden passion, was early pouring his soul into the shadowy air. I tended my fire and wondered at man’s small relation to most of creation.
“Go, my son,” said the taua impatiently, “to the opening of the forest, and see if they do not come over the waves!”