Faery Lands of the South Seas

by James Norman Hall; Charles Nordhoff

We followed the river across the flatlands of the coast. Dawn was flushing in the east; the profile of lofty ridges, fern clad and incredibly serrated, grew sharp against the sky. The mynahs were awakening; from the thick foliage of orange and mango trees came their extraordinary morning chorus—a thousand voices, whistling, screaming, and chattering that it was time the assembly broke up for the foraging of another day. In one place, where a turn of the path brought us suddenly to the edge of a still reach of water, a pair of native ducks (Anas superciliosa) rose vertically on beating wings and sped off over the palm tops. A little farther on, where volcanic bowlders began to appear through the alluvial soil and the river leaped and foamed over the first rapids, a family of Tahitian jungle fowl, led by a splendid burnished cock, sprang out of the grass and streamed away, in easy, rapid flight, toward the hills. The dogs bounded forward and stopped, whining as they watched the wild chickens dwindle to speeding dots.

The groves of coconut palms and open pasture land were behind us now; the valley was narrowing, hemmed in by thousand-foot cliffs to which a tangle of vegetation clung. The river had become a torrent, boiling and waist deep—plunging over cataracts, roaring down dark rapids under a roof of matted trees: giant hibiscus a yard through, too remote to tempt the ax of the canoe builder; candle nut, Barringtonia, and mapé, the island chestnut, with boles like fluted columns of a temple. The trail wound back and forth, across the river, over the trunks of fallen trees, around masses of rock tumbled from the cliffs above, mounting higher and higher into the heart of the island. Once, as we stopped to rest, I looked back and caught a glimpse of the sea—a wedge of blue, far behind us and below. The dogs had begun to range ahead, for they knew that any moment we might start a sounder of wild pig. I was growing tired—it was not easy to follow Maruae at his own gait. He walked with the rapid, springy tread of a mountain man; when he stooped to clear a low-branching limb or lopped off a section of creeper with an easy swing of his machete I admired the play of muscles on his back, rippling powerfully under the smooth, brown skin. Silken and unblemished—unless it be by scars—the skin of these people is not like ours, but softer and closer in texture; seeming, like marble, to glimmer with reflected light.

The gorge grew narrower; we rounded a buttress of jointed basalt and came suddenly into the light and open of a lonely valley. A quarter of a mile wide and twice as long, set high above the sea, and hemmed in by untrodden ridges, it lay here uninhabited and forgotten, in a silence broken only by the roar of savage cataracts and the far-off bellowing of wild bulls. Yet man had been here. Along the base of the cliffs we found the terraced stone of his dwellings, the blocks of volcanic rock pried apart by the roots of huge old trees.

Maruae was squatting on his heels beside me, contemplating in silence these relics of an older time. Finally he turned his head. "Those stones are very old," he remarked; "they have been here always, since the beginning. Men placed them there and men slept on them, but not the men of my people." My thoughts dwelt on the old idle tales I had heard—of the Lizard men, of the dark-skinned aborigines, the Manahune, said to have been in possession of the land when the eyes of Polynesian voyagers first rested on cloudy Orofena. There were other tales, too, of a later day; of a tribe of men dwelling in the valleys, neither tasting fish nor setting foot on the beach except when, at certain intervals, they were permitted to come down to worship by the sea. Even to-day it needs no effort of the imagination to see two distinct types among the island people: men and women of the kind one considers typically Polynesian—tall, clean limbed, and light brown, with clear, dark eyes, straight or waving hair, and heads not differing greatly from the heads of Europeans; and another kind, of a negroid or Melanesian cast—short, squat, and many shades darker in complexion, thick-lipped and apish, with muddy eyes, kinky hair, and flattened, undeveloped heads. And, strangely enough, after more than a century of missions and leveling foreign influence, the dark and awkward people seem still to fill the humbler walks of life—they are the servants and dependents, the feeders of pigs, the carriers of wood and water. Great stature, physical beauty, and light complexion are still the hall marks of aristocratic birth. Writing of the islands a hundred years ago, old Ellis, the often-quoted, closest observer of them all, remarked: "It is a singular fact in the physiology of the inhabitants of this part of the world that the chiefs, and persons of hereditary rank and influence of the islands, are, almost without exception, as much superior to the peasantry or common people in stateliness, dignified deportment, and physical strength as they are in rank and circumstances, although they are not elected to their station on account of their personal endowments, but derive their rank and elevation from their ancestry. This is the case with most of the groups of the Pacific, but peculiarly so in Tahiti and the adjacent isles. The father of the late king was six feet four inches high; Pomare was six feet two. The present king of Raiatea is equally tall.... Their limbs are generally well formed, and the whole figure is proportioned to their height, which renders the difference between the rulers and their subjects so striking that Bougainville and some others have supposed they were a distinct race, the descendants of a superior people, who at a remote period had conquered the aborigines and perpetuated their supremacy." There is a curious inconsistency in the matter of complexion, for in the old days a dark skin was considered the sign of a strong, warlike, and masterly man. Ellis records an extract from an old song: "If dark be the complexion of the mother, the son will sound the conch shell"; and yet, on the same page, he observes that "the majority of the reigning family in Raiatea are not darker than the inhabitants of some parts of southern Europe."

While Maruae and I rested among the ruins of the ancient settlement the dogs had been more usefully engaged. My musings were disturbed by a sudden burst of squeals, punctuated by excited yelpings. Maruae sprang to his feet, long knife in hand. It was only a small pig, a sixty-pounder, but he was bursting fat, stuffed with Vi apples fallen from the great tree under which he had been feeding. The dogs had him by the ears when we arrived; a thrust of the machete put an end to his short and idyllic life. I hung him from a branch and skinned him while Maruae went off in search of fei. Presently he returned, carrying on his shoulder a stout pole of hibiscus, from either end of which swung a bunch of the mountain plantains, like huge, thick bananas, the size of quart bottles and bright yellowish red. There was a clump of palms near by, another sign, perhaps, of man's former occupation—the relics of unnumbered vegetable generations; we had coconuts to drink, pork and fei were at hand, and plenty of fresh-water crayfish to be had in the river. In the islands, the obtaining of food is always the signal for a meal. Maruae beckoned to me and led the way to the river, where he readjusted his waistcloth to leave a kind of apron hanging in front and plunged up to his armpits in the still water. With the apron spread as a trap for the darting crayfish, he moved slowly along the grassy and overhanging bank of the stream, stopping every moment or so to hand a struggling victim up to me. This little fresh-water lobster is one of the most delicious shellfish in the world—of the same dimensions as the French ecrivisse, and not unlike it in flavor. In fifteen minutes we had enough, and the work of preparing our meal began.

I gathered wood and started a fire against a face of rock. Maruae cut a section of giant bamboo, half filled it with water, threw in the crayfish, and stood it beside the fire to boil. Our meal was genuinely primitive; I had cigarettes, matches, and a paper of salt stowed in the tuck of my pareu—excepting our knives, we had nothing else that the rudest of savages might not have possessed. Turning up the earth with his machete, my companion scraped out a shallow trench—a Maori oven. He set a ring of stones about the edge, lined the inside with pebbles, and filled the whole with coals from our camp-fire. While the coals glowed, heating the earth and stones, he cut off a loin and hindquarter of pork, wrapped the meat carefully in plantain leaves, and selected half a dozen of the riper plantains for our meal. Finally, when the oven was thoroughly hot, he scraped away the coals from the middle, laid in the leaf-wrapped pork, surrounded by a ring of plantains, pushed the hot stones close to the food, and covered the whole with a thick layer of plantain leaves. We ate the crayfish—boiled to a bright scarlet—while the balance of our meal was cooking. I added salt to the boiled-down liquor in the bottom of the bamboo, and dipped in this natural sauce. The first course whetted our appetites for the tender meat and juicy plantains which soon came from the oven.

As we lay smoking after our meal I could see that Maruae had something in his mind and was debating whether or not to speak. Finally he began, cautiously and with an air of skeptical restraint at first, but with more and more assurance as he saw that I listened seriously to his story.

"The old people say," he remarked, pointing to the head of the valley, where the cliffs narrowed to a deep crack through which the river rushed, "that far up in this same valley, beyond the upper gorge you see, a spirit dwells, one of the heathen spirits which are as old as the land. You and I may not believe in these things, but it is good, when the evenings are long, to listen to the stories of the old men. The name of this spirit is Tefatu; some call him varua ino, saying that he dogs the footsteps of the living and preys upon the souls of the newly dead, but that is not true, for many times in the memory of my fathers he has been known to aid those in perplexity or distress. The old men believe that if a traveler, lost in these mountains at nightfall, calls on Tefatu for succor, the spirit will appear before him in the likeness of a pale, moving fire, and lead him in safety down to the sea. Once in sight of the sea, the man must cry out in a loud voice, 'You have aided me, Tefatu, and I am content; stop here and I will go on my way.' It is not good to neglect these words of parting. Sometimes he is seen at night, flying from ridge to ridge of the mountain—a great glowing head, trailing a thin body of fire. Long ago, during the childhood of my grandmother, Tefatu left this land for a space of years; men said that he had flown to Hawaii, but now he is returned beyond a doubt. High up among the cliffs I found the cave in which he sleeps by day.... These eyes of mine have seen the Old Lord lying there among the whitened heads of men—I looked and turned away quickly, for my stomach was cold with fear.

"I cannot tell you clearly," Maruae went on, in answer to my obvious question, "for I was greatly afraid. It seemed to me that he was a figure of wood, longer and thinner than a man, black with age, covered with carved patterns, and bound, in places, with close wrappings of napé—the fine sennit my people have forgotten how to make. The place was full of bones; scores of men had been slain and their bodies offered there, as was the custom of our old kings. Once, not many years ago, a wise man came here from the islands of Hawaii—an old man, bearded and wearing spectacles. It was his work to write down the names of our ancestors, and he spoke our tongue, though haltingly and with a strange twist. He lived with us for a time and we grew fond of him, for he was a simple man, who made us laugh with his jokes and was kind to the children. One evening I told him how I had found the place of Tefatu. As I spoke his eyes grew bright behind their windows of glass, and when I had done he begged me, in great excitement, to lead him to the cave—offering a hundred of your dollars if I could prove that I had spoken true words. I was younger then, and in need of money, for I was courting a girl. We went together into the mountains, but as we drew near the place something within me made me hesitate and I grew afraid. In the end I deceived that man who was my friend, telling him that I could not find the way. He was indeed a wise man; another would have mocked me for a liar and a teller of idle tales, but he only smiled, looking at me kindly—he knew that my words were true and that I feared to betray the sleeping place of the Old Lord."

Maruae rose to his feet with the sigh of a man who has eaten well and is deprived of his rightful siesta. He shouldered his ponderous load of fei—which I could scarcely raise from the ground—and led the way toward the sea, while I followed, bearing the remnants of the pig. It was noon when we reached the flatlands of the coast.