Faery Lands of the South Seas

by James Norman Hall; Charles Nordhoff

Clipped to his undershirt he wore a fountain pen, which was as much a part of his costume on those dress occasions as his dungaree trousers and pandanus hat. It had a broken point, was always dry, and, although Huirai read fairly well, he could hardly write his own name. No matter. He would no more have forgotten his pen than a French soldier his Croix de guerre. But he was not alone in his love for these implements of the popaa's (white man's) culture. There was Havaiki, for example, who owned a small folding camera which he had bought from some trader. The two men were very jealous of each other. Huirai had traveled and had a fountain pen, but Havaiki's camera was a much more complicated instrument. There had never been any films for it, but he was quite satisfied without them. The camera stood on a shelf at his house, an ever-present proof of his better title to distinction. His chief regret, I believe, was that he couldn't wear it, as Huarai did his pen. But he often carried it with him on Sundays and went through the pretense of taking pictures. Some of the more sanguine still believed that he would one day surprise the village by producing a large number of magnificent photographs.

A further account of the feast at Soul-Eaters' Island would be nothing more than a detailed statement of the amount of food consumed, and it would not be credited as truthful. It is enough to say that it was a Latter Day miracle, comparable to the feeding of the five thousand, with this reversal of the circumstances—that food for approximately that number was eaten by twenty-two men. At last Puarei sat back with a groan of content and said, "Aué! Paia 'huru paia to tatou." It is impossible to translate this literally, but the exact meaning is, "We are all of us full up to the neck." It was true. We were. That is, all of the men. The women and children were waiting, and as soon as we gave them place they set to on the remnants. Fortunately, there was, as Hunga had said, food and yet more food, so that no one went hungry. At the close of the feast I saw old Rangituki take a fragment of coconut frond and weave it into a neat basket. Then she gathered into it all of the fish bones and hung the basket from one of the rafters of my house. Rangituki was pure heathen, one of the unredeemed of the Rutiaroans, but I noticed that some of the Catholics and Latter Day Saints, even the Reformed Saints of the later Latter Day persuasion, all in good standing in their churches, assisted her in making the collection. I had observed the same practice at other islands. At the beginning of a meal thanks were given to the God of Christians for the bounty of the sea; but fisherman's luck was a matter of the first importance, and, while the old gods might be overthrown, there seemed to be a fairly general belief that it would not do to trifle with immemorial custom.

It was midmorning before the last of the broken meats had been removed and the beach made tidy. The breeze died away, and the shadows of the palms moved only with the imperceptible advance of the sun. It was a time for rest, for quiet meditation, and all of the older people were gathered in the shade, gazing out over a sea as tranquil as their minds, as lonely as their lives had always been and would always be. I knew that they would remain thus throughout the day, talking a little, after the refreshment of light slumbers, but for the most part sitting without speech or movement, their consciousness crossed by vague thoughts which would stir it scarcely more than the cat's-paw ruffled the surface of the water. No sudden, half-anguished realization of the swift passage of time would disturb the peace of their reverie; no sense of old loss to be retrieved would goad them into swift and feverish action.

A land crab moved across a strip of sunlight and sidled into his hole, pulling his grotesque little shadow after him; and the children, restless little spirits, splashed and shouted in the shallows of the lagoon, maneuvering fleets of empty beef and salmon tins reminders of the strange beginning of my adventure in solitude.

Chapter VIII tailpiece

CHAPTER IX

The Starry Threshold

The only visible reminder which I have now of my residence on "the island where the souls were eaten" is a pocket notebook of penciled comment, with a dozen pages, blank and fair, at the back—in themselves a reminder of the fragmentary nature of that adventure in solitude, of the blank pages at the close of every chapter of experience, awaiting the final comment which is never set down. It is a small notebook of Chinese manufacture, with a pretty fantasy of flowers woven through the word "Memoranda," and butterflies with wings of gold-and-blue hovering over it, meant to suggest, perhaps, that one's memories, however happy or however seemingly enduring, are as ephemeral as they and must soon fade and die. But I am not willing to accept such a suggestion, to believe that I can ever forget even the most trivial of the events which took place at Rutiaro or at Soul-Eaters' Island. By some peculiar virtue of their own they stand out with the vividness of portions of childhood experience which remains fixed in the memory when other more important happenings have been long forgotten.

The casual reader of the notebook would never guess this from the comment written there. Did he know the length and the nature of my residence at the atoll, he would be surprised, merely, that with so much leisure for observation there should be such poverty of recorded fact. I, myself, am surprised and a little appalled when I think how the weeks slipped by, leaving me nothing to show for them. I became a spendthrift of time. I was under the delusion that my own just share of it had been immeasurably increased, that in some unaccountable way I had fallen heir to a legacy of hours and days which could never be exhausted. The delusion was of gradual growth, like the habit of reverie which fastens itself at last upon the most restless of wanderers among the atolls. In the beginning I was full of business. I remember with what earnestness of purpose I wrote on the first page of the notebook, "Rutiaro: Observations on Life and Character in the Low Archipelago." I had ambitious plans. I meant to go back and forth between my hermitage and the village island, notebook in hand saying, "Eaha tera?" ("What is that?"), "Nafea ia parau Paumotu?" ("How do you say this in Paumotuan?"). And when I had learned the language and had completed my studies of flora and fauna I was to be the Boswell of the atoll, curious, tireless, not to be rebuked by the wind rustling the fronds of the palms nor by the voice of the sea when the wind was low, saying, "Sh-h-h, sh-h-h," on thirty miles of coral reef. But I was rebuked—or so it seemed to me—and now, I fear, the learned monograph is never to be written. A faltering purpose is plainly indicated in the notebook. It becomes apparent in the first observation on "The Life and Character of the Paumotuans," which reads: