I strolled to where the beach met the jungle. An outrigger canoe was coming through the surf. A faint shout from it reached me. I ran back to him where he still chewed an inedible splinter.
“Epo,” I said, and made the fire fiercer. He stirred his mitiaroa, the sauce, and watered his lips.
“How was the tapu broken finally?” I asked, casually.
“They are long away,” he observed with his eyes on the break in the trees.
“They are just now beaching the canoe,” I said soothingly. “We will eat in a moment. But taua, you leave me hungry for that last word.
“The women of Oomoa tried to break down your tapu of time immemorial against their entering canoes, and there was trouble. The gods were against them, and yet to-day—”
“The gods got tired,” he interrupted me. “The chiefs became afraid of the continuous hakapahi i te faufau, the excitement and turmoil. You know the chiefs and priests decided all things. Now the women cried out for a vavaotina, for each one of the tribe to lay a candlenut in one of two popoi troughs. One was assent to the tapu, and the other against it.”
There was argument first, said the taua. After the priests had called down the curse of Po and other gods of might on all who would invoke a popular judgment of a sacred and time-webbed commandment, the chiefs pictured the dangers to women and to canoes, to the tribe and the valley, if women broke loose from the centuried bonds that forbade canoeing. Older women and some younger beauties, the latter fearing hurt to their prestige by less luxurious belles, urged the inviolability of the tapu.
The women of the Long House, the rebels, merely demanded instant casting of the ama nuts into the hoana. He himself, the taua said, then made the great error of his life. He swiftly counted in his mind those for and against, and, convinced that he had a huge majority for the prevailing law and order, shouted out that the vavaotina, though long disused, was just and truly Marquesan.
The troughs were brought from a near-by house to the beach, and the trial was staged.