Mystic Isles of the South Seas.

by Frederick O'Brien

“When he had left, she rushed to the oven, opened the bamboo, and saw on pieces of meat the special tattoomarks of the thighs of her grandmother and grandfather. Aue! She was riri. She fell to the earth and wept, and then she was angry. She made up her mind to get even with her false tane, and to hurt him the worst way possible. She hurried to his spring by their home in Arue, and caught his pet eel, Faaraianuu, who was sunning himself on the surface. She slashed him with her knife of pearl shell, and baked him in an umu. She ate his tail at once and put the remainder of the eel in a calabash. Then she left, with the ipu in her hand, for Lake Vaihiria.”

Tiura halted his tale a minute to point out the constellation of the Scorpion, and to say, “Those stars are Pipiri Ma, the children, who lived at Mataiea long ago. That is a strange story of their leaving their parents’ house for the sky!”

“Aue! Tiura,” said I, “the stars are fixed, but there was the vahine with all but the tail of Faaraianuu in her ipu, walking toward this very spot. What became of her?”

The son of Tetuanui smiled, and continued:

“On her way she stopped to see the sorcerer, Tahu-Tahu and his vahine. They were friends. After a paraparau, the usual gossip of women, they asked her what she had in her calabash, and she replied, ‘Playthings.’ Then they told her her journey would be unsuccessful, but she kept on to this lake and put the remains of the eel in the water, right here where we are. But the eel would not stay in the lake, and though time and again she threw him in, he always came out. Finally she put him back in her ipu and returned to the house of Tahu-Tahu. She told her misfortune, and Tahu-Tahu made passes and thrashed about with the sacred ti-leaves, and commanded her to put Faaraianuu in the lake again. This she did, and he stayed, but even now, if you put a cocoanut in this lake at this spot, it will come out at the spring in Arue. The eel still has power over that spring.”

Tiura spoke in Tahitian and French, and I handed on his narrative.

“The eel in Tahiti, from what I hear, has seen better days,” commented the Queensland doctor. “All over the world the primitive people endowed this humble form of animal—the serpentine—with a cunning and supernatural power surpassing that of the four-footed creatures. I think it was because in the cradle of the human family there were so many hurts from the bites of snakes and sea-eels—they couldn’t guard against them—that man salved his wounds by crediting his enemy with devilish qualities. That’s the probable origin of the garden of Eden myth.”

Again Tiura spoke of the Scorpion in the sky, and I knew he desired to talk of Pipiri Ma. The other Tahitians were already under the roof on their backs, upon the soft bed of dried leaves gathered by them for all of us, but the long, lean physician listened with unabated interest. He had run away for a change from the desert-like interior of his vast island, where he treated the ills of a large territory of sheep-herders, and to be on this mountain under such a benignant canopy, and to hear the folk-lore of the most fascinating race on earth, was to him worth foregoing sleep all night.

Tiura assumed a serious pose for the divulgement of secret lore. His language became grandiose, as if he repeated verbatim a rune of his ancestors:

“We Maoris lived at that time in the great peace of our long, quiet years. No outside influence, no evil wind, troubled our dreams. The men and women were hinuhinu, of high souls. At the head of the valley, in a grove of breadfruit, lived Taua a Tiaroroa, his vahine Rehua, and their two children, whose bodies were as round as the breadfuit, and whose eyes were like the black borders of the pearl-shells of the Conquered atolls. They were named Pipiri and Rehua iti, but were known as Pipiri Ma, the inseparables. One night when the moon, Avae, was at the height of its brilliancy, Taua and Rehua trod the green path to the sea. They lifted their canoe from its couch upon the grass, and with lighted torch of cocoanut-leaves glided toward the center of the lagoon.