Horoa moni e fahiti;
Ita ori miro;
Ana piri atu;
Ana piri atu;
Ana tagu atu.”
Even a quarter of Maori blood with childhood spent in Polynesia lends a plaintive quality to the voice of men and women, and gives them an ability to sing their own songs in a powerfully affecting manner—the outpouring of the sad, confused hearts of a destroyed people. Under the cocoanut-trees of Takaroa, the lamps all but expiring by then, the man who had sat under Nietzsche at Basel rendered the song of Takaroa, the primitive love cry of the Rapa Nuiis, so that I was transported to the Land of Womb and Navel, and saw as he did the lovely savage Taaroa in her wretchedness.
“Auwe!” Kopcke exclaimed. “She could love!”
“Eiaha e ru! You shall see!” murmured Llewellyn, forebodingly. “After that I didn’t meet Taaroa for two months. She stopped visiting Tokouo, and my girl said she was heva, which is wrong in the head. Tokouo couldn’t even understand jealousy. But I did, and I envied the American having two women, the finest on the island, in love with him. About a month later I was at the palace to have supper with them. My word, Miss Dorey had straightened out things. There were the best mats, those the natives make of bulrushes, everywhere. The table was spread as fine as wax, and we had a leg of mutton, tomatoes, and other fresh vegetables. She said they owed the green things to Willis, who had hunted the islands for them, and found some wild and some cultivated by natives who had the seed from war-vessels that had come years before. The professor had out my tablets after dinner, and his daughter read the translation into English of the song Taaroa had sung. She had brought with her on the schooner a tiny organ about as big as a trunk, and she had set the ute to music, as wild as the wind. The words went like this:
“Who is sorrowing? It is Renga-a-manu-hakopa!
A red branch descended from her father.