I tried to draw our conversation around to Mapuhi again, but Nohea, as the darkness grew thicker, busied himself in making a fire of cocoanut husks and leaves, and evaded any reference to the dead.
Only after the moon began to come up, he said, “I must now go to keep watch at the grave of Mapuhi. It is my duty, and I must go.”
He brought from his hut a crazy-quilt, and wrapped it about him, and with extreme hesitancy walked away through the obscurity to carry out the obligation of friendship.
Hardly can we guess at the horror he had to overcome to do this. The remnant of fear of the dead that our slight inheritance of ancestral delusions causes to linger in some of us is the merest shadow of the all-pervading terror that weakens the Paumotuan at thought of the ghost of the defunct which stays near the corpse to threaten and perhaps to seize and eat the living. Associated, maybe, with the former cannibalism, when the living consumed the dead, Nohea, though earnest Mormon, believed that the tupapau hovered over the grave or in the tree-tops, to accomplish this ghastly purpose. Had Punau, the widow of Mapuhi, been living, she would have had to spend her nights for several weeks by his sepulcher. Being a chief, there were many to perform this devoir, and before I entered the hut to sleep I saw several small fires burning about the spot where the watchers cowered and whispered through the night. Of the dangers of this office of friendship or widowhood, every atoll in the Paumotus had a hundred tales, and Tahiti and the Marquesas more. In Tahiti, the tupapau, the disembodied and malign ego of the dead, entered the room where the remains were laid out.
Photo by Dr. Theodore P. Cleveland
Paumotuans on a heap of brain coral
Photo by Dr. Theodore P. Cleveland
Did these two eat Chocolat?
Photo from Brown Bros.
The Stonehenge men in the South Seas