“Here lie the bodies of the people of Taaoa.” An all-inclusive tombstone, for there was no other, but, instead, banana-plants, badamiers, vi-apples, and chile peppers, the fiery-red pods of the latter bright against the green and black. Behind the burial-place were two great aoa trees, giant banyans that must have been there when the first adventurous white cast anchor in these waters. In the lessening light, they had a mysterious air of life in death; they were moribund with age, twisted and gnarled like those century-old Mission Indians of California who sit outside their adobe hovels and show a thousand wrinkles on their naked bodies. Yet these banyans were filled with life, for a hundred new shoots were thrusting from above into the rich mold of the earth, and presaging renewal of the dead limbs and greater growth of the whole.
The trees covered acres, overpowering in their immensity, with columns of regular and solemn symmetry. Their ponderous buttresses were like towers, but divided into many separate chambers where the branches had descended from heights to become roots, and later other columns. These trees were individuals, shattered and worn by existence, broken by storms, the boughs arching a hundred feet from the ground to let down grotesque and curving branches that blindly groped for a grasp upon the soil. They were tragedies in wood, and stirred in me memories of old French tales of darksome wolds, of the shadowy, dripping spinneys where the loup garou lay in wait for the bodies and souls of his victims.
Into one of the cells of the banyan, Song of the Nightingale led me. As large as an average room, it was divided by a tapa hanging, and from behind this came, at his call, the taua. He had a snow-white beard and long hair, and was very old. His body was quite covered with tattooing, the most elaborate designs I had seen. The candlenut ink, originally blackish-brown upon his dark skin, had, as the result of decades of kava drinking, turned to a verde-antique, like the patina upon an ancient bronze.
“Moa taputoho,” said Song, with extreme seriousness. “A sacred hermit.” One who had forsaken all the common things of existence to commune with the gods.
The sorcerer’s surrounding were druidic, remindful of the Norns, who dwelt beneath the world-tree Ygdrasil, Urd and Verdande and Skuld, and decided the fate of men.
He gazed at me intently, raised his hand in a grave manner, and said something to my companion which I did not understand.
“He asks if you want anything of him,” explained the convict.
“Yes, I do,” I replied. “Ask him if the daughter of Liha-liha is a leper?”
My interpreter did not put the question direct, but I comprehended his many sentences to state my meaning.
The taua pursed his lips and withdrew behind the curtain. From his hidden fane issued the deep rumbling of his voice in a chant.