She considered a moment, and my mind took up the matter of arrangements. We could cook feis, and there was plenty of other fruit, with shelter in the house, if we needed that. We could start down early and be at Lovaina’s for the first déjeuner. Zeus! to pass the night in such a solitude! To hear in the pitch darkness the mysterious voices of po, the tenebræ of the Tahitian gods; the boom of the cascade in the abyss; the deep bass of the river in the rocky chute; the sigh of the wind in the trees; the murmur of the stream near by; the fantasia and dirge of the lofty night in the tropics. What a setting for her telling some old legend or fairy-tale of Tahiti!
Fragrance of the Jasmine ended my reverie. She slapped her thigh.
“I dine and dance to-night at eight o’clock,” she said. “A rohi! We must go! Besides, Maru, it would be too cold without blankets. The mercury here goes to sixty of your thermometer.”
We descended by the route we had come, picking up her shoes and stockings and our hats by our couch, and with the princess leading, hurrying along the obscuring trail. We passed a Tahitian youth who had been gathering feis, probably near the tarn, and who was bringing them to the market of the next morning. He was burdened with more than a hundred pounds of fruit, which he carried balanced on a pole over his shoulder, and with this he was to go seven or eight miles from their place of growth. He was a pillar of strength, handsome, glowing with effort, clad in a gorgeous pareu of red, and as we went by him, he smiled and said, “Ia ora na! I hea! Vaimato?” Greeting! Where have you been? The waterfall?”
“E, hitahita. Yes, we are hurrying back,” the princess called vivaciously.
“Those are our real men, not the Papeete dolts,” she said. “If we had time, we would catch shrimp in the river. I love to do that.”
When we came to where the habitations began and the road became passable for vehicles, Noanoa Tiare sat down on a stone. She put on her pale-blue silk stockings and her shoes, and asked me for the package she had given me at starting. She unfolded it, and it was an aahu, a gown, for which she exchanged, behind a banana-plant, her soiled and drenched tunic. The new one was of the finest silk, diaphanous, and thus to be worn only at night. The sun was down, and the lagoon a purple lake when we were again at the bust of Bougainville.
I thanked her at parting.
“Noanoa Tiare,” I said, “this day has a heavenly blue page in my record. It has made Tahiti a different island for me.”
“Maru, mon ami, you are sympathetic to my race. We shall be dear friends. I will send you the note to Tetuanui, the chief of Mataiea, to-morrow. Au revoir and happy dreams.”