The way led ever higher above the emerald bay of Tai-o-hae set in the jade of the forest, and valley after valley opened below as the trail edged upward on the face of sheer cliffs or crossed the little plateaus of their summits. Hapaa lay bathed in a purple mist that hid from me the mute tokens of depopulation; Hapaa that had given Porter its thousands of naked warriors, and that now was devoid of human beings.
Dipping slightly downward again, the trail lay on the rim of a deep declivity, a sunless gulf in which the tree-tops fell away in rank below rank into dim depths of mistiness. There was no sign of human passing on the vine-grown trail, a vague track through a melancholy wilderness that seemed to breathe death and decay. A spirit of gloom seemed to rise from the shadowed declivity, from the silence of the mournful wood and the damp darkness of the leaf-hidden earth.
I had given myself over to musing upon the past, but suddenly in the narrowest part of the trail the beast I rode turned and took my canvas-covered toes in his yellow teeth. A vague momentary flash of horror came over me. Did I bestride a metempsychosized man-eater, a revenant from the bloody days of Nuka-hiva? In those wicked eyes I saw reflected the tales of transmigatory vengeance, from the wolf of Little Red Riding Hood to the ass that one becomes who kills a Brahman. I gave vent at the same second to a shriek of anguish and struck the animal upon the nose, the tenderest part of his anatomy within reach. He released my foot, whirled, cavorted, and, as I seized a tree fern on the bank, went heels over head over the cliff.
T'yonny had said to “stay by horsey,” but he could not have foreseen the road he would take. I was sorry for him as I heard the reverberations of his crashing fall. No living thing could escape death in such a drop, for though the cliff down which he had disappeared was not absolutely perpendicular, it was nearly so. Peering over it, I could not see his corpse, for fern and tree-top hid all below. At least, I thought, he had surcease of all ills now. And so I descended the steep trail on foot—mostly on one foot—until I reached the vale of Typee.
I found myself in a loneliness indescribable and terrible. No sound but that of a waterfall at a distance parted the somber silence. The trail was through a thicket of ferns, trees, and wild flowers. The perfume of Hinano, of the vaovao, with its delicate blue flowers, and the vaipuhao, whose leaves are scented like violets, filled the heavy air, and I passed acres of kokou, which looks like tobacco, but has a yellow fruit of delicious odor. It was such a garden as the prince who woke the Sleeping Beauty penetrated to reach the palace where she lay entranced, and something of the same sense of dread magic lay upon it. Humanity was not so much absent as gone, and a feeling of doom and death was in the motionless air, which lay like a weight upon leaf and flower.
The thin, sharp buzzing of the nonos was incessant. They had come when man departed; there were none when Porter devastated the valley, nor when Melville spent his happy months here thirty years later. One must move briskly to escape them now, and I was pushing through the bushes that strove to obliterate the trail when I came upon a native.
He was so old that he must have been a youth in the valley when it was visited by the American-liner captain as a boy. He was quite nude save for a ragged cincture, and his body had shrunk and puckered, and his skin had folded and discolored until he looked as if life had ebbed away from him and left him high and dry between the past and the hereafter. A ragged chin beard, ashen in hue, hung below his gaping, empty mouth. But there was a spirit in his bosom still, for upon his head he wore a circle of bright flowers to supplement the sparse locks.
His eyes were barely openable, and his face, indeed, his whole body, was a coppery green, the soot of the candlenut, black itself, but blue upon the flesh, having turned by age to a mottled and hideous color. Only the striking patterns, where they branched from the biceps to the chest, were plain.
That he had been one of the great of Nuka-hiva was certain; the fact was stamped indelibly upon his person, and though worn and faded to the ghastly green of old copper, it remained to proclaim his lineage and his rank.
“Kaoha te iki!” said this ancient, as he stood in the path.