White Shadows in the South Seas

by Frederick O'Brien

Here on the lower levels I was still among the cocoanut-groves. The trail passed through acres of them, their tall gray columns rising like cathedral arches eighty feet above a green mat of creeping vines. Again it dipped into the woods, where one or two palms struggled upward from a clutching jungle. Everywhere I saw the nuts tied by their natural stems in clumps of forty or fifty and fastened to limbs which had been cut and lashed between trees. These had been gathered by climbers and left thus to be collected for drying into copra.

Constantly the ripe nuts not yet gathered fell about me. These heavy missiles, many six or seven pounds in weight, fell from heights of fifty to one hundred feet and struck the earth with a dull sound. The roads and trails were littered with them. They fall every hour of the day in the tropics, yet I have never seen any one hurt by them. Narrow escapes I had myself, and I have heard of one or two who were severely injured or even killed by them, but the accidents are entirely out of proportion to the shots fired by the trees. One becomes an expert at dodging, and an instinct draws one's eyes to the branch about to shed a mei, or the palm intending to launch a cocoanut.

As I made my way up the trail, pausing now and then to look about me, I came upon an old woman leaning feebly on a tall staff. Although it was the hour of afternoon sleep, she was abroad for some reason, and I stopped to say “Kaoha,” to her. A figure of wretchedness she was, bent almost double, her withered, decrepit limbs clad in a ragged pareu and her lean arms clutching the stick that bore her weight. She was so aged that she appeared unable to hear my greeting, and replied only mutteringly, while her bleary eyes gleamed up at me between fallen lids.

Such miserable age appealed to pity, but as she appeared to wish no aid, I left her leaning on her staff, and moved farther along the trail, stopping again to gaze at the shadowed valley below while I mused on the centuries it had seen and the brief moment of a man's life. Standing thus, I was like to lose my own, for suddenly I heard a whirr like that of a shrapnel shell on its murderous errand, and at my feet fell a projectile.

I saw that it was a breadfruit and that I was under the greatest tree of that variety I had ever seen, a hundred feet high and spreading like a giant oak. In the topmost branches was the tottering beldame I had saluted, and in both her hands the staff, a dozen feet long. She was threshing the fruit from the tree with astounding energy and agility, her scanty rags blown by the wind, and her emaciated, naked figure in its arboreal surroundings like that of an aged ape.

How she held on was a mystery, for she seemed to lean out from a limb at a right angle, yet she had but a toe-hold upon it. No part of her body but her feet touched the branch, nor had she any other support but that, yet she banged the staff about actively and sent more six-pounders down, so that I fled without further reflection.

The score of houses strung along the upper reaches of Atuona Valley were silent at this hour, and everywhere native houses were decaying, their falling walls and sunken roofs remembering the thousands who once had their homes here. Occasionally in our own country we see houses untenanted and falling to ruin, bearing unmistakable evidences of death or desertion, and I have followed armies that devastated a countryside and slew its people or hunted them to the hills, but the first is a solitary case, and the second, though full of horror, has at least the element of activity, of moving and struggling life. The rotting homes of the Marquesan people speak more eloquently of death than do sunken graves.

In these vales, which each held a thousand or several thousand when the blight of the white man came, the abandoned paepaes are solemn and shrouded witnesses of the death of a race. The jungle runs over them, and only remnants remain of the houses that sat upon them. Their owners have died, leaving no posterity to inhabit their homes; neighbors have removed their few chattels, and the wilderness has claimed its own. In every valley these dark monuments to the benefits of civilization hide themselves in the thickets.

None treads the stones that held the houses of the dead. They are tapu; about them flit the veinahae, the matiahae, and the etuahae, dread vampires and ghosts that have charge of the corpse and wait to seize the living. Well have these ghoulish phantoms feasted; whole islands are theirs, and soon they will sit upon the paepae of the last Marquesan.

I reached the top of the gulch and paused to gaze at its extent. The great hills rose sheer and rugged a mile away; the cocoanuts ceased at a lower level, and where I stood the precipices were a mass of wild trees, bushes, and creepers. From black to lightest green the colors ran, from smoky crests and gloomy ravines to the stream singing its way a hundred feet below the trail.