Faery Lands of the South Seas

by James Norman Hall; Charles Nordhoff

"I will think it over," said Tari; "let us leave it so. Not this year, at any rate—she is too young."

As he bade her good night and turned to go to his sleeping place the old woman spoke again.

"Bear one thing in mind," she said, with a smile; "it will help you to decide. Consider, now and then, the thought of my daughter married to another."

In the end, as is often the case, it was Apakura who settled the matter. Next morning Tari was busy with some stock taking and did not board the schooner till the last moment, or notice—in his preoccupation—the mysterious smiles with which the crew greeted him. They were a dozen miles offshore before he folded the last of his papers, lit a pipe, and went on deck for a breath of air. The old woman's last words stuck unpleasantly in his mind, I fancy, as he stood there smoking, with his back to the companionway. All at once he saw the helmsman—an Ahu Ahu boy he had known since childhood—lift his eyes from the binnacle and grin from ear to ear; at the same moment Tari felt a hand slip into his own, and heard a small, familiar voice say, "I am here." It was Apakura—more serious than usual and a little frightened, but not to be put off longer. They were married in Tahiti a fortnight later.

It was Apakura's voice that awakened me. She was leaning over the bulwark in eager conversation with her mother, who had come off in the first canoe. The air was fresh with the cool of dawn; in the east the sky was flushing behind scattered banks of trade-wind clouds, tinted in wonderfully delicate shades of terra cotta. A dozen big outrigger canoes, of the type peculiar to this island, were coming out through the passage, each paddled by four men, who shouted as their heavy craft dashed through the breakers.

Little by little, not at all after the manner of traditional dawn in the tropics, the light increased, until Ahu Ahu lay fully revealed before us—the smoking reef, the shallow lagoon, and the cliffs, their summits plumed with coconut palms. A crowd of islanders was already gathering on the reef, and I could see others making their way down the steep path from the settlement. As the sun rose the colors of the scene grew stronger—green palms, gray cliffs, white walls of the village, pale blue of the sky, azure of the sea water. There is no color in the world—that I have seen—like the blue of the water off the Ahu Ahu reef; so vivid, so intense, one felt that a tumbler of it, held up to the sun, would be a mass of sapphire, or that a handkerchief dipped in it would emerge strongly dyed.

Apakura was going ashore with her mother. Standing in the narrow canoe, she directed the stowing of her luggage—a mat, a bright patchwork quilt, a box of cedar wood. Tari was awaiting the coming of the traders, for the schooner was stocked with good Tahiti rum, and the rites of welcome would take place on board.

"There they are," he said, pointing to two white figures wading gingerly across the shallow lagoon to the reef; "you're going to meet a pair of rare ones—they've been hard doers in their time!"

The distant figures reached the edge of the boat passage and I could see a boy beckoning them into a waiting canoe, but now they stopped and seemed to argue, with many gestures. Tari chuckled.

"No use trying to hurry them," he told me; "they are discussing the loss of the Esperanza. She went ashore here in the late 'nineties—a full-rigged ship. Peter was one of her crew; Charley had just come here to trade, and saw the whole thing. They've spent twenty years thrashing out the question of whether or not the wreck might have been avoided. Every morning, after breakfast, Charley strolls across to Peter's house to smoke a pipe and discuss some of the fine points; every evening, after tea, Peter returns the visit, and the argument goes on till bedtime. Charley's an American—an old man now, close to seventy. He put in thirty years on Hiva Oa, in the Marquesas, before he came to Ahu Ahu; I'd like to have some of his memories. Notice his arms if he pulls his sleeves up. He has sixteen children on Hiva Oa and fourteen here—all numbered; he says he never can remember their heathen names. When his wife died in the north he gave all his land to the children and left on the first schooner. She touched at Papeete, but he didn't go ashore. Then she made Ahu Ahu, where he landed and established himself a second time. He has never seen a motor car, a telephone, or an electric light."