We halted under the palms crowning the inner brink. The trail wound down giddily ahead—so steep in places that ladders had been fastened to the rock. To right and left of us the cliffs were sheer walls of limestone, rising from a level little above that of the sea. The low hills of the interior, volcanic and fern covered, draining in every direction toward the foot of the makatea, have formed a circling belt of swamp land, on which all the taro of the island was grown. One could look down on the beds from where we stood, a mosaic of pale green, laid out by heathen engineers in days beyond the traditions of men.
Another time, perhaps, I will tell you of that afternoon—how we climbed down the trail and walked the dikes among the taro; how my escort increased to a merry company as the people began to come after food for the evening meal; of a boisterous swim in a pool beneath a waterfall; of how I found the remains of an ancient house, built of squared stone so long ago that over one end of it the wooded earth lay two yards deep.
Toward evening, in the bush at the edge of the taro swamps, I came upon a large house, built of bamboo and pandanus in the native fashion. A man was standing framed in the doorway—a tall, white man, dressed in pajamas of silk. His gold-rimmed spectacles, gray beard, and expression of intelligent kindliness were vaguely academic—out of place as the cultivated voice which invited me to stop. The boys and girls escorting me squatted on their heels outside; a brace of pretty children, shy and half naked, scurried past as I entered the house. My host waved his hand toward a mat. There was only one chair in the room, standing before a table on which I saw a small typewriter and a disordered heap of manuscript. Otherwise the place was unfurnished except for books, ranged in crude bookcases, tier upon tier, stacked here and there in precarious piles, standing in rows along the floor.
"I am glad to see you," he said, as he offered me a cigarette from a case of basketwork silver; "it is not often that a European passes my house."
I shall not give his name, or attempt to disguise him with a fictitious one; it is enough to say that he is one of the handful of real scholars who have devoted their lives to Polynesian research. I had read his books, published long before, and wondered—more than once—whether he still lived and where he hid himself. The years of silence had been spent (he told me) in a comparative study of the ocean dialects through which he hoped to solve the riddle of the Pacific—to determine whence came the brown and straight-haired people of the islands. Now, with the material in hand, he had chosen Ahu Ahu as a place of solitude, where he might complete his task of compilation undisturbed.
"On the whole," he said, with agreeable readiness to speak of his work, "I am convinced that they came from the west. The Frenchman's theory that the race originated in New Zealand, like the belief that they migrated westward from the shores of America, is more picturesque, more stirring to the imagination; but the evidence is too vague. If one investigates the possibilities of an eastward migration, on the other hand, one finds everywhere in the western islands the traces of their passage. Far out in the Orient, in isolated groups, off the coast of Sumatra, about Java and Celebes, and in the Arafura Sea, I can show you people of the true Polynesian type. Even in such places, where the last migration must have passed nearly two thousand years ago, scraps of evidence remain—a word, a curious custom, the manner of carrying a basket. These things might seem coincidences if the trail did not grow warmer as one travels east.
"Though no trace of their blood is left, New Guinea must at one time have been a halting place in the migration. Papua it is called, and one finds the word current in Polynesia, meaning a garden, a rich land. The natives of New Guinea are as unlike the people of the eastern Pacific, I should say, as the average American or Englishman, and yet throughout New Guinea there is a most curious cropping out of Polynesian words, pointing to a very ancient intercourse between the races. Consider the word for woman among the Polynesians. In Rarotonga, it is vaine; in Tahiti, vahine; in the Marquesas, vehine; in Hawaii, wahine; in Samoa, fafine. The same root runs through the dialects of Papua. In Motu, woman is habine; in Kerepunu, vavine; in Aroma, babine; and in Motumotu it is ua, which in this part of the Pacific means, variously, female, seed, and rain. I could cite you dozens of similar examples. Now and then one comes across something that sets one's imagination to work ... as you must know, the word for sun in the islands is ra, but in Tahiti they have another word, mahana. In New Guinea, thirty-five hundred miles away, and with all Melanesia between, the tribes of the South Cape call the sun mahana. What a puzzle it is!
"Though it may be the merest coincidence, that ra has a flavor of Egypt. I wonder if there could be a connection? I used to know a girl in Tahiti whose strange and rather beautiful name—hereditary as far back as the records of her family went—was that of a queen of Egypt who ruled many hundreds of years before Christ. But I mustn't ride my hobby too fast.
"It is a pity you can't stop on Ahu Ahu for a time—there are not many islands so unspoiled. I've grown very fond of the place; I doubt if I ever leave it permanently. If you are interested in ghosts, you had better change your mind. I have a fine collection here; the house is built on the site of a tumble-down marae. There is our white rooster, the spirit of an old chief, which appears during the new moon—perfectly harmless and friendly, but the people rather dread him. Then we have a ghostly pig, very bad indeed; and a pair of malignant women, who walk about at night with arms and long hair entwined, and are suspected of ghastly appetites. I shall not say whether or not I have seen any of these; perhaps it is living too much alone, but I am not so skeptical as I was...."
It was not easy to part with such a host, but the sun was low over the makatea, and the prospect of crossing the dikes among the taro and scaling the cliff by dark drove me at last to take reluctant leave.