Mystic Isles of the South Seas.

by Frederick O'Brien

A collector of corals would find many sorts there. They are wonderful, these stony plants, graceful, strange, bizarre. The Tahitian, who has a score of names for the winds, and who classifies fish not only by their names, but changes these names according to size and age, makes only a few lumps of the coral. It is to’a, and when round is to’a ati, to’a apu; when branching, uruhi, uruana; when in a bank, to’a aau; when above the surface of the water, to’a raa. A submerged mass is to’a faa ruru, and the coral on which the waves break, to’a auau. However, the native knows well that one species of coral, the ahifa, is corrosive, irritating the skin when touched, and another, which is poisoned by the hara plants, is termed to’a harahia.

Coral makes good lime for whitening walls, and is cut into blocks for building. Many churches in Tahiti were built of coral blocks. The puny fortifications erected by the French in the war with the Tahitians decades ago were of coral stones, and are now black with age and weather.

I headed my canoe toward the barrier reef, and tied it to a knob of coral. Then I stepped out upon the reef itself, my tennis shoes keeping the sharp edges from cutting my feet. It was the low tide succeeding sunrise, and the water over the reef was a few inches deep, so that I could see the marine life of the wall, the many kinds of starfish, the sea-urchins, and the curious bivalves which hide with their shell-tips just even with the floor of the lagoon, and, keeping them barely even, wait for foolish prey.

The floor of the lagoon was most interesting; the prodigality of nature in the countless number of low forms of life, their great variety, their beauty, and their ugliness, and, appealing to me especially, the humor of nature in the tricks she played with color and shape, her score of clowns of the sea equaling her funny fellows ashore, the macaws, the mandrills, the dachshunds, and the burros.

The sunlight on the water at that hour was like silver spangles on a sapphire robe. I paddled near to the Marara, and watched her let go her anchor and send her boat ashore with a stern line. Fastened to a cannon and passed around a bitt on the schooner, the crew hauled her close to the embankment, and soon she was broadside to, and her gangway on the quay. Her captain, M. Moet, Woronick, a pearl merchant, a government physician, and the passengers from the Paumotus were soon ashore shaking hands with friends. I walked behind them to Lovaina’s for coffee, and was introduced to them all.

Woronick took me to his house across the street from the Tiare Hotel, and there opened a massive safe and showed me drawer after drawer of pearls. They were of all sizes and shapes and tints, from a pear-shaped, brilliant, Orient pearl of great value, to the golden pipi of inconsiderable worth. Woronick spoke of a pearl he had bought some years ago in Takaroa, the creation of which, he said, had cost the lives of three men including a great savant.

“If you go to Takaroa,” said Woronick, “be sure to see old Tepeva a Tepeva. He used to be one of the best divers in the Low Islands, but he’s got the bends. He sold me the greatest pearl ever found in these fisheries in the last twenty years, and I made enough profit on it to buy a house in Paris and live a year. Get him to tell you his yarn. It beats Monte Cristo all hollow.”

Which I made a note to do.

In the afternoon, with Charlie Eager, a guest at the Annexe, I went to the worship-place of the Chinese, on the Broom Road. Outwardly, it had not the flaunting distinction of the joss-houses of the Far East or those of New York or San Francisco. The Chinese usually builds his temples even in foreign lands in the same Oriental superfluity of color and curve and adornment that makes them exclusively the Middle Kingdom’s own; but here he had been content to have a simple, whitewashed church which might be a meeting-house or school. It was set in the center of a great garden in which mango and cocoa and breadfruit abounded. We were struck by the superb breadth and immense height of a breadfruit-tree the shadows of which fell over a small brick pagoda. This tree was a hundred feet tall, and the always glorious leaves, as large as aprons, indented and a glossy, dark green, made it a temple in itself worthier of the ministrations of priests than the ugly brick or frame structure of our cities. The Druids in their groves were nearer to the real God than the pursy bishop in the steam-heated cathedral.

A native woman, aged and bent, said “Ia ora na!” to us, and we replied. With my few words of Tahitian I gained from her that the joss-house was open. We entered it, and found no one there. The center was wide to the sky, that the rain might fall and the stars shine within it. The altars were brilliant with memorial tablets, the green, red, and gold flower vases, and sandalwood taper-holders, so familiar to me, and all about were the written prayers of devotees, soliciting the favor of Heaven, asking success in business, or the averting of illness. They were evidently painted by the bonze of the fane, for his slab of India ink was on a table nearby, as also the brushes for the ideographs.