Chapter XIII tailpiece
CHAPTER XIV
In the Valley of Vaitia
It is not easy to analyze the magic which cozens every traveler into believing that he is the first to see Tahiti with clear eyes—one feels that it is made up of nature in a mood of unearthly loveliness; of a sense of ancient and unalterable life; of a realization that strange beliefs persist under a semblance of Christianity; of the lure of a race whose confidence the white man can never fully gain. The mail steamers, the wireless, the traders, the scattering of French officials—these things are a mere play of shadows on the surface. Even the churches, I was tempted to say; but the church plays more than a shadowy part in the life of the native, whose religion, at the present day, is a singular blending of Christian doctrine and old heathen belief. The Tahitian reads his Bible (he has no other book) and sings loudly every Sunday in church; but the dead are still things of horror in his mind; sorcerers—masquerading as doctors—still carry on a brisk trade; and Tautau, the Great-headed, is still a living presence in the valley of Punaruu.
When the people of the Society Islands accepted Christianity a century ago they did so with reservations of which the missionaries, perhaps, were not aware. Here and there, as at Faatoai on Moorea, there was a burning of idols, but a great mass of material—old gods and heathen weapons—was stored in secure hiding places among the hills. To-day, after three generations of increasing European influence, hundreds of natives know of these caves and repair to them for purposes of their own, yet a white man might spend his life on Tahiti without a glimpse of a cinnet-bound orooro or a slender ironwood spear.
My friend Airima is typical. The widow of a Yankee skipper, the owner of a neat wooden villa in Papeete, where she appears regularly, on her way to church, in shoes, stockings, and a black-silk gown, she finds it necessary, from time to time, to cast off the unnatural manners of Europe and live as she was meant to live; to be herself, an elderly and delightful savage. When the mood comes she closes the villa in Papeete, gathers the willing members of her family, and repairs to her native house, far off on the peninsula of Taiarapu.
The house of Airima stands on the river bank, shaded by a pair of mango trees, dark green and immemorially old. The roof is thatched with braided fronds of coconut; breezes play through the lofty single room, bare of furniture and floored with mats spread on white coral gravel, leveled and packed. Past the veranda, on which the family sleeps through the warm hours of the day, the river flows out gently to the sea; a broad, still water, deep and glassy clear, peopled with darting shoals of fish—mullet, young pampano, and nato, the trout of the South Seas. Opposite the river mouth the reef is broken by a pass, through which the steady lines of combers sweep in to crash and tumble on the bar. Morning and afternoon the breakers are alive with naked children, shouting and glistening brown in the sunlight as they ride the waves.
Inland, the valley marking the river's course is lost in a maze of broken and fantastic peaks; seaward, bordering the green and blue of the lagoon, the snowy line of the reef stretches off endlessly; and beyond a three-league expanse of bright sea the headlands of Tahiti Nui rise in vast, swelling curves, up and up to the perpetual clouds which veil the heights. Under a bright sun at midday, when the palm tops toss to the trade which paints the lagoon—in the deep passes and over the patches of sandy bottom—with ruffled sapphire and emerald, and sets the whitecaps to dancing beyond the reef, or in the calm of night, with the moon hanging low over pinnacles of basalt—when the polished surface of the lagoon is broken by the plunge and swirl of heavy fish, and native songs, rising and falling in savage cadences, float out across the water—it is a place not easily forgotten.
It was still dark when we rose—Maruae and I; the brothers of Maruae had returned from the reef, and the ovens behind the cook house were smoking, for in these places the hour of the day's first meal is set by the return of the fishermen. I took one shuddering plunge into the river, dressed myself in a shirt, a waistcloth, and a pair of hobnailed boots, and squatted with the rest to consume a fresh-caught mackerel and a section of breadfruit, dipped in the common bowl of sauce.
Maruae sucked his fingers and stood up, calling to the dogs. Airima glanced at me over the back of a large fish she was gnawing, holding it with both hands. "Go, you two," she said. "You stay," replied Maruae, as he turned to take the path to the mountains. The oceanic tongue possesses no other words of parting.