Cutting the meat from cocoanuts to make copra
CHAPTER XIII
The household of Lam Kai Oo; copra making; marvels of the cocoanut-groves; the sagacity of pigs; and a crab that knows the laws of gravitation.
Next morning, after bidding farewell to my hosts, I set out down the mountain in the early freshness of a sunny, rain-washed morning. I followed a trail new to me, a path steep as a stairway, walled in by the water-jeweled jungle pressing so close upon me that at times I saw the sky only through the interlacing fronds of the tree-ferns above my head.
I had gone perhaps a mile without seeing any sign of human habitation, hearing only the conversation of the birds and the multitudinous murmuring of leaves, when a heavy shower began to fall. Pressing on, hampered by my clinging garments and slipping in the path that had instantly become a miniature torrent, I came upon a little clearing in which stood a dirty, dark shanty, like a hovel in the outskirts of Canton, not raised on a paepae but squat in an acre of mud and the filth of years.
Two children, three or four years old, played naked in the muck, and Flower, of the red-gold hair, reputed the wickedest woman in the Marquesas, ironed her gowns on the floor of the porch. Raising her head, she called to me to come in.
This was the house of Lam Kai Oo, the adopted father of Flower. Seventy-one years old, Lam Kai Oo had made this his home since he left the employ of Captain Hart, the unfortunate American cotton planter, and here he had buried three native wives. His fourth, a woman of twenty years, sat in the shelter of a copra shed nursing a six-months' infant. Her breasts were dark blue, almost black, a characteristic of nursing mothers here.
Both the mother and Flower argued with me that I should make Many Daughters my wife during my stay in Atuona, and if not the leper lass, then another friend they had chosen for me. Flower herself had done me the honor of proposing a temporary alliance, but I had persuaded her that I was not worthy of her beauty and talents. Any plea that it was not according to my code, of even that it was un-Christian, provoked peals of laughter from all who heard it; sooth to say, the whites laughed loudest.