And then, as we rested on our paddles and talked, under pretence of getting closer to us they would dash into the water and seizing the gunwales of the canoe laughingly insist upon our coming ashore and entering their cool houses, and indeed it was hard to resist their blandishments. Then, once we were inside, they would tell us that they would not let us go till we had eaten and drunk a little.
A little! Basket after basket of cooked fish, crayfish, pigeons, baked pork, bunches of bananas and kits of oranges and heaps of luscious pineapples would be placed before us, and they seemed absolutely pained at my inability to eat more than a few mouthfuls. All the men at these isolated villages were away at Leassé or elsewhere in the vicinity of Coquille Harbour, and the women and young girls pretended to be very much frightened at being left by themselves for a couple of days. They were afraid, they said, that Captain Hayes's wild Pleasant Island natives might come up the lagoon and harry their villages—wouldn't we stay with them till their husbands and brothers came back?
Now, we knew all this was nonsense. There was no fear of the Pleasant Islanders' boats coming up the lagoon to these little villages when there was richer prey nearer at hand, so we only laughed. Many of the young boys and girls were of great personal beauty, and, indeed, so were many of the young unmarried women, but their light skins were stained and disfigured by the application of turmeric. At one of these places our pretty tormentors played us a trick. While we were in a house and having kava prepared in the Micronesian fashion, by pounding the green root into a hollowed stone, the girls carried our canoe up bodily from the beach and hid it in a clump of breadfruit trees about two hundred yards away. When we bade goodbye to the elder women, who had given us the kava, and walked down to the beach the canoe was gone.
"Here, you girls," said Nana, "where is our canoe? Don't play these foolish tricks; the white man must get to Leassé before darkness sets in."
But the imps only laughed at us, and for some minutes we had a great game with them, chasing them about. At last we tired of this, and, lighting our pipes, sat down to smoke under a great banyan, whose branches reached far out over the white beaches. One of the children, a merry-eyed girl of ten, with long hair that almost touched her knees, was a bit of a humorist, and told us that we might as well stay for the night, as the canoe was gone for ever.
"Where to?" we asked.
"Up there," she answered, with the gravest countenance imaginable, pointing skyward. "A big kanapu (fish eagle) was soaring overhead, and suddenly swooped down and seized it in his claws and flew away into the blue with it."
At last, however, they came back, carrying the canoe among them, and with much laughter dropped it into the water. Then they filled it with as many young drinking coco-nuts and as much fruit as we could stow, and bade us farewell, running along the beach with us till a high, steep bluff shut them off from following us any further.
By and by, as we paddled along, the sun began to get pretty hot, and we kept in as close as possible under the shade of the steep shores of the mainland. Overhead was a sky of matchless, cloudless blue, and sailing to and fro on motionless wing were numbers of tropic birds, their long scarlet retrices showing in startling contrast to their snow-white body plumage. All round about us turtle would rise every now and then, and taking a look at us, sink out of sight again. From the dense mountain forest, that earlier in the morning had resounded with the heavy booming note of the great grey pigeons and the cooing note of the little purple doves, not a sound now came forth, for the birds were roosting in the shade from the heat of the sun. Half a mile or so away, through a break in the chain of low islets, we could see the tumbling blue of the ocean, and over the tree-tops the white spume of the breakers as they leapt upon the iron-bound coast.
We made fast our canoe to a jutting point of rock and rested awhile and smoked. The tide was on the flow, and as the water came swirling and eddying in from the great passage in the reef five miles away, there came with it countless thousands of fish of the mullet species, seeking their food among the mangrove creeks and flats that lay behind us. They did not swim in an orderly, methodical fashion, but leapt and spun and danced about as if thrown up out of the water by some invisible power beneath. Sometimes they would rise simultaneously, thousands at a time, and, taking a leap, descend again with an extraordinary noise. Then, quick as lightning, they would make three or four such leaps in succession with the regularity and precision of machinery. Hovering and fluttering above them on tireless wing were numbers of sea-birds, which ever and again darted down amongst them and rose with hoarse, triumphant note, prey in mouth.