“Their popoi pits are the wallows of the wild boar; on their paepaes sit the wild white dogs. The horned cattle wander where they walked. Hee i te fenua ke! They are gone, and the stranger shall have their graves.”
CHAPTER XIX
A feast to the men of Motopu; the making of kava, and its drinking; the story of the Girl Who Lost Her Strength.
The Vagabond, Kivi, who lived near the High Place, came down to my paepae one evening to bid me come to a feast given in Atuona Valley to the men of Motopu, who had been marvelously favored by the god of the sea.
Months of storms, said Kivi, had felled many a stately palm of Taka-Uka and washed thousands of ripe cocoanuts into the bay, whence the current that runs swift across the channel had swept the fruitage of the winds straight to the inlet of Motopu, on the island of Tahuata. The men of that village, with little effort to themselves, had reaped richly.
Now they were come, bringing back the copra dried and sacked. Seven hundred francs they had received for a ton of it from Kriech, the German merchant of Taka-Uka, from whose own groves it had been stolen by the storms.
On the morrow, their canoes laden with his goods, they would sail homeward. One day they had tarried to raft redwood planks of California from the schooner in the bay to the site of Kivi's new house. So that night in gratitude he would make merry for them. There would be much to eat, and there would be kava in plenty. He prayed that I would join them in this feast, which would bring back the good days of the kava-drinking, which were now almost forgotten.
Kivi, the kava drinker with the hetairae of the valley