We entered through a low opening and found the one long chamber spacious, cool, and perfumed with the forest odors. There were no furnishings save two large and brilliantly polished cocoanut-tree trunks running the whole length of the interior, and between them piles of mats of many designs and of every bright hue that roots and herbs will yield.
While I admired these, noting their rich colors and soft, yet firm, texture, a murmurous rustle on the palm-thatched roof announced the coming of the rain. It was unthinkable to my host that a stranger should leave his house at nightfall, and in a downpour that might become a deluge before morning. To have refused his invitation had been to leave a pained and bewildered household.
Popoi bowls and wooden platters of the roasted breadfruit were brought within shelter, and while the hissing rain put out the fires on the paepae the candlenuts were lighted and all squatted for the evening meal. Breadfruit and yams, with a draught of cocoanut milk, satisfied the hunger created by my arduous climb. Then the women carried away the empty bowls while my host and I lay upon the mats and smoked, watching the gray slant of the rain through the darkening twilight.
Few houses like his remained on Hiva-Oe, he said in reply to my compliments. The people loved the ways of the whites and longed for homes of redwood planks and roofs of iron. For himself, he loved the ways of his fathers, and though yielding as he must to the payments of taxes and the authority of new laws, he would not toil in the copra-groves or work on traders' ships. His father had been a warrior of renown. The u'u was wielded no more, being replaced by the guns of the whites. The old songs were forgotten. But he, who had traveled far, who had seen the capital of the world, Tahiti, and had learned much of the ways of the foreigner, would have none of them. He would live as his fathers had lived, and die as they had died.
“It is not long. We vanish like the small fish before the hunger of the mako. The High Places are broken, and the pahue covers our paepaes. It does not matter. E tupu te fau; e toro to farero, e mou te taata. The hibiscus shall grow, the coral shall spread, and man shall cease. There is sleep on your eyelids, and the mats are ready.”
His hospitality would give me the place of honor, despite my protests, and soon I found myself lying between my host and his wife, while the other members of the household lay in serried rank beyond her on the mats that filled the hollow between the palm-trunks. All slept with the backs of their heads upon one timber, and the backs of their knees over the other, but I found comfort on the soft pile between them. My companions slumbered peacefully, as I have remarked that men do in all countries where the people live near, and much in, the sea. There was no snoring or groaning, no convulsive movement of arms or legs, no grimaces or frowns such as mark the fitful sleep of most city dwellers and of all of us who worry or burn the candle at both ends.
I lay listening for some time to their quiet breathing and the sound of rain drumming on the thatch, but at last my eyes closed, and only the dawn awoke me.
Splitting cocoanut husks in copra making process