A resourceful vahine, while all the rest of us were wasting our breaths calling for water and quilts, and bewailing the absence of hand grenades and chemical engines, had calmly whisked off her pareo, broken all of the unopened claret bottles over it and slapped out the fire.
Wasn't it Moll Pitcher who won the day and a monument by swabbing out the cannon with some of her surplus lingerie? They don't erect monuments to heroic fire-lassies in Tahiti, so W—— and I did the best thing possible under the circumstances in subscribing the price of a dozen new pareos.
It was a week or so after the incident just sketched had taken place that W—— and I were at luncheon at the Cercle Militaire with a distinguished German ethnologist who had spent many years in the study of the fascinating problem of a prehistoric Polynesian civilization. W——, after amusingly narrating several of the experiences incident to his own study of native life in the South Seas, made the statement that a genuine Tahitas hula could not be seen on the island for "love or money," an assertion in which I stoutly supported him. The learned Teuton listened indulgently.
"Dat's a priddy zweeping stadement, chentlemen," he ventured. "You haf tried money, no doubt, but haf you der oder alternative, der gindness tried?"
We were compelled to admit that nothing systematic in the way of kindness had been attempted, upon which the doctor launched into an extended dissertation on the futility of trying to do anything with South Sea natives on a "buy-and-sell" basis. Early in his sojourn in Tahiti, he said, he had come to a realization of the banality of anything not freely given by the islanders. Accordingly, he had taken up his residence in Hiteaea, the least "civilized" village of the island, and first by judicious presents, later by incessant intercourse with them in the affairs of their daily life, succeeded in winning the confidence and affection of the simple inhabitants. As a consequence many privileges which other foreigners had vainly endeavoured to win by purchase had been extended to him as a brother, among them being attendance at the village's not infrequent festivals at its semi-secret "sing-sing" grounds in an extinct crater far in the interior. An evening of singing and dancing was scheduled for the following week, at the full of the moon, and to this the good doctor, conditional on the consent of his native friends, invited us to come.
The invitation was seconded in good time, and on the appointed day we pushed through on horseback to Hiteaea—twenty-five miles down the rough windward side of the island—reaching there in time for a light mid-afternoon lunch which the doctor had waiting for us. The beautiful hamlet was nearly deserted, the villagers having gone on earlier in the day to enjoy a twilight feast before the dance. Our horses carried us four or five miles back into the interior where, at an elevation of 3000 feet, the roughness and steepness of the trail and the thickness of the creepers overhead made it necessary to abandon them and do the rest of the climb through the sweat-box of the jungle on foot. We arrived at our destination in time for a plunge in a hyacinth-fringed pool of the coolest water we had known for months, a change of clothes and the enjoyment of a number of thoughtfully saved dainties from the feast. The latter had evidently been a jolly and somewhat convivial affair, but nothing of an orgy. The dancers, with laughter and snatches of song, were assisting each other with their toilets in the shelter of a wing of rustling feis.
The "sing-sing" ground (this is a term of the "beach" vernacular used in all parts of the South Pacific to designate a native ceremonial meeting place) had once been a tiny blow-hole of the great parent volcano, Orohena, and in its present condition it is not unlike the "Punch Bowl" at Honolulu with a ten-degree segment cut cleanly out of one side. The smooth floor is half rock, half turf, and the towering sides of lava, curtained thickly with an impenetrable tangle of giant fern, lantana and guava scrub and woven together with miles of endless creepers.
By a strange chance the slice of the crater's side which, undermined by the river below, fell away to the valley, left a clean-cut chasm of great depth and scant width opening toward the east-southeast. Through this chasm the full moon, from the moment it shows its glowing disc above a saddle in the rocks to the east, throws a sharp beam across the flower-strewn sward which, in its brilliant contrast to the almost solid blackness of the unlighted sides, shines as clearly as a shaft of calcium. In this lunar spot-light, in air almost sentiently sweet with the perfumes of gardenia and fern, the magic of these Terpsichorean necromancers is practised.
Stretched at our ease on a patch of mat-carpeted greensward in the depths of the shadow, we puffed lazily at our native cigarettes, sipped tiny epus of fiery coco wine and waited for the dance to commence. The chatter in the depths of the plantain-screened dressing room had ceased, and only the liquid tinkle of the drip from the surrounding walls, the distant mutter of the surf along the shore and the throaty calls of waking wood pigeons broke the stillness. Overhead the stars were blurring and blotting and twinkling again, as the disordered ranks of the Trade-clouds shuffled on in their endless flight before the scourges of the southeast wind; but to the east, where the flickering silhouettes of flying-foxes showed with increasing brightness against the moon-glow, the sky was clear.
The leap of the moon to its seat in the saddle of the eastern hills was as startling in its suddenness as that of its glass bulb stage-property prototype to the gauze heaven above the Grand Canal. As the shadow-mottled shaft of light impinged upon the crater floor a single drum note boomed out suddenly on the stillness and a blur of motion was faintly distinguishable about the "green room" entrances. Presently, as the shadows dissolved in the strengthening light, scores of prone figures, motionless save for a gentle waving of the riva-riva plumes of the heads, could be dimly guessed, and the doctor whispered that the opening number was evidently to be the "Dance of the Coconuts."