Lamps were shining in the village when I returned; in some of the houses I heard the voice of the father, reading aloud solemnly from the Bible in the native tongue; in others, the people were assembled to chant their savage and melancholy hymns. Tari was alone on the veranda, smoking in his absent-minded fashion, and motioned me to sit down beside him. I told him how I had spent the afternoon. When I had finished he puffed on in silence for a time.
"It is a strange place, Ahu Ahu," he said at last "My mother-in-law has finished her prayers, sung her himines, and put away the family Bible. Now she has gone to the house of one of her pals for a session with old Rakamoana. Like the land itself, the people are relics of an elder time—pure heathen at heart."
CHAPTER V
A Memory of Mauké
We sighted Mauké at dawn. The cabin lamp was still burning when the boy brought my coffee; I drank it, lit a cigarette, and went on deck in a pareu. The skipper himself was at the wheel; half a dozen men were in the shrouds; the native passengers were sitting forward, cross-legged in little groups, munching ship's biscuit and gazing ahead for the expected land.
The day broke wild and gray, with clouds scudding low over the sea, and squalls of rain. Since we had left Mangaia, the day before, it had blown heavily from the southeast; a big sea was running, but in spite of sixty tons of copra the schooner was reeling off the knots in racing style, running almost free, with the wind well aft of the beam, rising interminably on the back of each passing sea, and taking the following slope with a swoop and a rush. We had no log; it was difficult to guess our position within a dozen miles; the low driving clouds, surrounding us like a curtain, made it impossible to see more than a few hundred yards. Until an observation could be obtained, the landfall was a matter of luck and guesswork. Our course had been laid almost due north-northeast—to pass a little to the west of Mauké—which gave us the chance of raising Mitiaro or Atiu if we missed the first island; but ocean currents are uncertain things, and with a horizon limited to less than half a mile, nothing would be easier than to slip past the trio of low islands and into the stretch of lonely ocean beyond. Every trading skipper is accustomed to face such situations; one can only maintain a sharp lookout and hold on one's course until there is an opportunity to use the sextant, or until it becomes obvious that the land has been passed.
A squall of rain drove down on us; for five minutes, while we shivered and the scuppers ran fresh water, our narrow circle of vision was blotted out. Then suddenly, with the effect of a curtain drawn aside, the clouds broke to the east, flooding the sea with light. A shout went up. Close ahead and to starboard, so near that we could see the white of breakers on the reef, was Mauké—densely wooded to the water's edge, a palm top rising here and there above the thick bush of iron woods. Next moment the curtain descended; gray clouds and rearing seas surrounded us; it was as though we had seen a vision of the land, unreal as the blue lakes seen at midday on the desert. But the skipper was shouting orders in harsh Mangaian; the schooner was swinging up into the wind, the blocks were clicking and purring as half a dozen boys swayed on the mainsheet.
Presently the land took vague form through the mist of squalls; we were skirting the reef obliquely, drawing nearer the breakers as the settlement came in view. A narrow boat passage, into which an ugly surf was breaching, had been blasted through the hard coral of the reef; a path led up the sloping land beyond, between a double row of canoe houses to the bush. A few people were gathering by the canoe houses; it was evident that we had just been sighted, and that it would be some time before a boat could put out, if, indeed, the boatmen were willing to risk the surf. Meanwhile we could only stand off and on until they came out to us, for the skipper had no intention of risking his ship's boat and the lives of his men on such a forbidding shore. "Arari!" he sang out, dwelling long on the last syllable of this Cook Island version of "hard alee." The schooner rounded in to the wind with a ponderous deliberation calculated to make the nerves of a fair-weather sailor twitch; she seemed to hesitate, like a fat and fluttering grandmother; at last, after an age of bobbing and ducking into the head sea, while boom tackles were made fast and headsails backed, she made up her mind, and filled away on the port tack.
Riley, the American coconut planter, who was recruiting labor for the season on his island, turned to me with a wink. "If this old hooker was mine," he remarked in a voice meant to reach the skipper's ears, "I'd start the engine every time I came about; she can't sail fast enough to keep steerageway!"
The skipper sniffed a British sniff; they are old friends. "If this damn fine schooner was yours," he observed, without turning his head, "she'd have been piled up long ago—like as not in broad daylight, on an island a thousand feet high."