It took five years to grow a fine shell. The sixth year often doubled the value in mother-of-pearl, and the seventh year doubled it again. The Chinese, in a certain famous fishery off their coast, sought the shells only every ten or fifteen years; but those yellow people had the last word in conservation of soil and every other source of gain, forced to a sublimated philosophy by the demands of hundreds of millions of hungry bellies.
Warned by the Parisian professor, the French Government made strict regulations to prevent the extinction of the pearl-oyster, and, incidentally, of the Paumotuan. For the oyster they instituted the closed season or rahui, forbidding the taking of shells from certain atolls except at times stated. Experts examined the lagoons, and upon their recommendations a schedule of the rahui was drawn out, so that while diving might be permitted in one lagoon for successive seasons it might be prohibited in another over a term of years. This had caused a peripatetic school of divers, who went about the group from open lagoon to open lagoon, as vagrants follow projects of railroad building. But the lagoons would never be again what they had been in wealth. The denuding had been too rapacious. However, the oysters were now given time to breed, and their food was taken care of to a degree, though France, the most scientific of nations, with the foremost physicists, chemists, and physicians, did not send her genius to her colonies.
To protect the divers and their families, alcohol was made contraband. It was unlawful to let a Paumotuan have intoxicants. The scenes of riotous debauchery once common and which always marked the diving season, in the merciless pitting of pearl- and shell-buyers against one another, were rare, but surreptitious sale and donation of drink were still going on.
Mormonism, Josephitism, and Seventh Day Adventism, strict sects as to stimulants, had aided the law, and the Lying Bills and McHenrys, the Mandels and the Kopckes, had a white god against them in their devil-take-the-hindmost treatment of the natives. France also confined the buying and selling in the Paumotus to French citizens, so that the non-Gauls by blood had been driven to kiss the flag they contemned. But business excused all subterfuges.
One day when the diving term was almost on, Mapuhi and I were talking on his veranda about the ventures of his life, and especially of his experiences under the sea.
“Come!” he said, with an indulgent smile upon his flawed but noble face, “American, you and I will go upon the lagoon, and I will show you what may be strange to you.”
Going to the end of his spit of land, we entered a canoe, and, with the chief paddling swiftly, moved towards the other side of the lagoon, away from the habitations of the Paumotuans. When a hundred yards or two offshore, Mapuhi shipped his paddle and let the outrigger canoe lie idly on the water.
“Look!” he said, appraisingly, “See the wonders of God prepared for his children!”
I took the titea mata he handed me, the four-sided wooden box with a pane of ordinary glass fixed in it, about fifteen inches square, and notched for the neck of the observer. Putting the glass below the surface and gazing through it, I was in fairy-land.