CHAPTER XXXVI
The madman Great Moth of the Night; story of the famine and the one family that ate pig.
Le Brunnec, the trader, was opening a roll of Tahiti tobacco five feet long, five inches in diameter at the center, and tapering toward the ends. It was bound, as is all Tahiti tobacco, in a purau rope, which had to be unwound and which weighed two pounds. The eleven pounds of tobacco were hard as wood, the leaves cemented by moisture. Le Brunnec hacked it with an axe into suitable portions to sell for three francs a pound, the profit on which is a franc.
The immediate customer was Tavatini (Many Pieces of Tattooing), a rich man of Taaoa, in his fifties. His face was grilled with ama ink. One streak of the natural skin alone remained. Beside him on the counter sat a commanding-looking man, whose eyes, shining from a blue background of tattooing, were signals to make one step aside did one meet him on the trail. They had madness in them, but they were a revelation of wickedness.
Some men, without a word or gesture, make you think intently. There is that in their appearance which starts a train of ideas, of wonder, of guesses at their past, of horror at what is written upon their faces. This man's visage was seamed and wrinkled in a network of lines that said more plainly than words that he was a monster whose villainies would chill imagination. The brain was a spoiled machine, but it had been all for evil.
“That man,” said Le Brunnec, “is the worst devil in the Marquesas.” Between blows of the axe, the trader told me something of his history:
The madman was Mohuho, whose name means Great Moth of the Night. He is the chief whom Lying Bill saw shoot three men in Tahuata for sheer wantonness. He was then chief of Tahuata, and the power in that island, in Hiva-oa and Fatu-hiva. He slew every one who opposed him. He was the scourge of the islands. He harried valley after valley for lust of blood and the terrible pride of the destroyer. It was his boast that he had killed sixty people by his own hand, otherwise than in battle.
He was a man of ceaseless energy, a builder of roads, of houses, and canoes. At Hapatone he had constructed several miles of excellent road with the enforced labor of every man in the valley for a year. It is all lined with temanu trees, is almost solid stone, and endures. Its blocks are cemented with blood, for Great Moth of the Night drove men to the work with bullets.
His arsenal was stocked by the French, whose ally he was, and to whom he was very useful in furnishing men for work and in upholding French supremacy. In Hapatone he was virtually a king, and the fear of him extended throughout the southern Marquesas.
One day he came as a guest to a feast in Taaoa. There was a blind man, a poor, harmless fellow, who was eating the pig and popoi and saying nothing. Great Night Moth had a new gun, which he laid beside him while he drank plentifully of the namu enata, until he became quite drunk.