White Shadows in the South Seas

by Frederick O'Brien

First night in Atuona valley; sensational arrival of the Golden Bed; Titi-huti's tattooed legs.

It was necessary to find at once a residence for my contemplated stay in Atuona, for the schooner sailed on the morrow, and my brief glimpse of the Marquesans had whetted my desire to live among them. I would not accept the courteous invitation of the governor to stay at the palace, for officialdom never knows its surroundings, and grandeur makes for no confidence from the lowly.

Lam Kai Oo, an aged Chinaman whom I encountered at the trader's store, came eagerly to my rescue with an offered lease of his deserted store and bakeshop. From Canton he had been brought in his youth by the labor bosses of western America to help build the transcontinental railway, and later another agency had set him down in Taha-Uka to grow cotton for John Hart. He saw the destruction of that plantation, escaped the plague of opium, and with his scant savings made himself a petty merchant in Atuona. Now he was old and had retired up the valley to the home he had long established there beside his copra furnace and his shrine of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

He led me to the abandoned shack, a long room, tumbledown, moist, festooned with cobwebs, the counters and benches black with reminiscences of twenty thousand tradings and Chinese meals. The windows were but half a dozen bars, and the heavy vapors of a cruel past hung about the sombre walls. Though opium had long been contraband, its acrid odor permeated the worn furnishings. Here with some misgivings I prepared to spend my second night in Hiva-oa.

I left the palace late, and found the shack by its location next the river on the main road. Midnight had come, no creature stirred as I opened the door. The few stars in the black velvet pall of the sky seemed to ray out positive darkness, and the spirit of Po, the Marquesan god of evil, breathed from the unseen, shuddering forest. I tried to damn my mood, but found no profanity utterable. Rain began to fall, and I pushed into the den.

A glimpse of the dismal interior did not cheer me. I locked the door with the great iron key, spread my mat, and blew out the lantern. Soon from out the huge brick oven where for decades Lam Kai Oo had baked his bread there stole scratching, whispering forms that slid along the slippery floor and leaped about the seats where many long since dead had sat. I lay quiet with a will to sleep, but the hair stirred on my scalp.

The darkness was incredible, burdensome, like a weight. The sound of the wind and the rain in the breadfruit forest and the low roar of the torrent became only part of the silence in which those invisible presences crept and rustled. Try as I would I could recall no good deed of mine to shine for me in that shrouded confine. The Celtic vision of my forefathers, that strange mixture of the terrors of Druid and soggarth, danced on the creaking floor, and witch-lights gleamed on ceiling and timbers. I thought to dissolve it all with a match, but whether all awake or partly asleep, I had no strength to reach it.

Then something clammily touched my face, and with a bound I had the lantern going. No living thing moved in the circle of its rays. My flesh crawled on my bones, and sitting upright on my mat I chanted aloud from the Bible in French with Tahitian parallels. The glow of a pipe and the solace of tobacco aided the rhythm of the prophets in dispelling the ghosts of the gloom, but never shipwrecked mariner greeted the dawn with greater joy than I.

In its pale light I peered through the barred windows—the windows of the Chinese the world over—and saw four men who had set down a coffin to rest themselves and smoke a cigarette. They sat on the rude box covered with a black cloth and passed the pandanus-wrapped tobacco about. Naked, except for loin-cloths, their tawny skins gleaming wet in the gray light, rings of tattooing about their eyes, they made a strange picture against the jungle growth.

They were without fire for they had got into a deep place crossing the stream and had wet their matches. I handed a box through the bars, and by reckless use of the few words of Marquesan I recalled, and bits of French they knew, helped out by scraps of Spanish one had gained from the Chilean murderer who milked the cows for the German trader, I learned that the corpse was that of a woman of sixty years, whose agonies had been soothed by the ritual of the Catholic church. The bearers were taking her to Calvary cemetery on the hill.