“Allons!” cried the princess, and running toward the waterfall, she climbed up the cliff to a height of a dozen feet, and threw herself, wreathed as she was, with a loud “Aue!” into the pool.
I followed her, and she dived and swam, brought up bottom, treaded water, and led me in a dozen exercises and tricks of the expert swimmer. The water was very cool, and ten minutes in it, with our sharpening hunger, were enough delight. Fragrance of the Jasmine, as she came dripping from water and lingered a few moments on the brink, was a rapturous object. With unconscious grace she flung back her head many times to shake the moisture from her thick hair, and ran her fingers through it until the strands were fairly separated. The pareu disclosed the rounded contour of her figure as if it were painted upon her. She was one of those ancient Greek statues, those semi-nudes on which the artists painted in vivid tints the blush of youth, the hue of hair, and a shadow of a garment. She entranced me, and I called out to her, “Nehenehe!” “Beautiful!”
She ran to her boudoir behind the bird’s-nest fern, and soon returned in her tunic, still barefoot, and with her pareu in her hand for drying on a rock. She brought two wreaths now and put one upon me. We resumed our couches upon the green sward, and the princess laid the basket of fruit between us.
“Maintenant pour le déjeuner!” she said.
We ate the bananas first, and then the pineapple, which we cut with a sliver of basalt,—we were in the stone age, as her tribe was when the whites came,—and last the oranges. She made cups of leaves and filled them with water, and into them we squeezed the limes for a toast.
“Inu i te ota no te!” she said and lifted her cup. “A health to you! He who eats the fei passes under a spell; he must return again to the islands. Have you eaten the fei?”
“Not yet, Princess,” I replied.
“There they are in abundance on the hillside,” she said. “Look! If we had fire, I would roast one for you, but to-morrow will be another day.”
The fei, the mountain banana, the staple of the Tahitian, was there aplenty. The plant or stalk was that of the banana, but very dark at the base, and the leaves thicker. The fruit was two or three times as large, and red, and a striking difference was that it was placed on the bunches erect, while bananas hang down from the stem.
I drank to her increasing charm, and I told her how much the beauty and natural grace of the Tahitians appealed to me; how I intended to leave Papeete and go to the end of the island to be among the natives only; that I had remained thus long in the city to learn first the ways of the white in the tropics, and then to gain the contrast by seeking the Tahitian as nearly as possible in his original habitat.