Faery Lands of the South Seas - James Norman Hall; Charles Nordhoff

Cover art

Faery Lands
Of the South Seas

Woodcut

These lagoons swarm with strange forms of life unknown in northern waters

FAERY LANDS
OF THE SOUTH SEAS

By
James Norman Hall
and
Charles Bernard Nordhoff

Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London

FAERY LANDS OF THE SOUTH SEAS

Contents headpiece

CONTENTS

CHAP.

[Preface]

[A Leisurely Approach]
[In the Cloud of Islands]
[Marooned on Mataora]
[The Land of Ahu Ahu]
[A Memory of Mauké]
[Rutiaro]
[A Debtor of Moy Ling]
[An Adventure in Solitude]
[The Starry Threshold]
[Costly Hospitality]
[His Mother's People]
[In the Cook Group]
[At the House of Tari]
[In the Valley of Vaitia]
[Tahitian Tales]
[Anchored off the Reef]
[The Englishman's Story]
[Aboard the "Potii Ravarava"]

PREFACE

The islands of the South Seas are places of an interest curiously limited. The ethnological problem presented by the native is interesting only to men of science, commerce is negligible, there is little real agriculture, and no industry at all. There remains the charm of living among people whose outlook upon life is basically different from our own; of living with a simplicity foreign to anything in one's experience, amid surroundings of a beauty unreal both in actuality and in retrospect.

It is impossible to write of the islands as one would write of France or Mexico or Japan—the accepted viewpoint of the traveler is not applicable here. A simple attempt to impart information would prove singularly monotonous, and one is driven to essay a different task; to pry into the life of the mingling races, hoping to catch something of its significance and atmosphere. In making such an attempt it is necessary at times to dig deeper than would be consistent with good taste if names were mentioned, and for this reason—in the case of certain small islands—the ancient Polynesian names have been used instead of those given on the chart. All of the islands described are to be found in the Paumotu, Society, and Hervey groups.

J.N.H.
C.B.N.

TAHITI, April 10, 1921.

Landfall

Woodcut

Faery Lands
Of the South Seas

CHAPTER I

A Leisurely Approach

I don't remember precisely when it was that Nordhoff and I first talked of this adventure. The idea had grown upon us, one might say, with the gradual splendor of a tropical sunrise. We were far removed from the tropics at that time. We were, in fact, in Paris and had behind us the greatest adventure we shall ever know. On the Place de la Concorde and along the Champs-Élysées stood rank on rank of German cannon, silent enough now, but still menacing, their muzzles tilted skyward at that ominous slant one came to know so well. For a month we had seen them so, children perched astride them on sunny afternoons, rolling pebbles down their smooth black throats; veterans in soiled and faded horizon blue, with the joy of this new quiet world bright on their faces, opening breech-blocks, examining mechanism with the skill of long use at such employment; with a kind of wondering hesitation in their movements too, as though at any moment they expected those sinister monsters in the fantastic colors of Harlequin to spring into life again.

Those were glorious days! Never again, I think, will there be such a happy time as that in Paris. The boulevards were crowded, the tables filled under every awning in front of the cafés; and yet there seemed to be a deep silence everywhere, a silence intensified by the faint rustling of autumn leaves and the tramping of innumerable feet. One heard the sound of voices, of laughter, of singing, the subdued, continuous rumble of traffic; but not a harsh cry, not a discordant note. All the world seemed to be making holiday at the passing of a solemn, happy festival.

Well, we had kept it with the others—Nordhoff and I—and have the memory of it now, to be enjoyed over and over again as the years pass. But there was danger that we might outstay the freshness of that period. We were anxious to avoid that for the sake of our memories, if for nothing else. While we were not yet free to order our movements as we chose, we pretended that we were, and so one rainy evening in the December following the armistice we decided to call that chapter of experience closed and to go forward with the making of new plans.

For we meant to have further adventure of one kind or another—adventure in the sense of unexpected incident rather than of hazardous activity. That had been a settled thing between us for a long time. We had no craving for excitement, but turned to plans for uneventful wanderings which we had sketched in broad outlines months before. They had been left, of necessity, vague; but now that any of them might be made realities, now that we had leisure and a reasonable hope for the fulfillment of plans—well, we had cause for a contentment which was something deeper than happiness.

The best of it was that the close of the war found us with nothing to prevent our doing pretty much as we chose. We might have had houses or lands to anchor us, or promising careers to drag us back into the bewilderments of modern civilization; but, fortunately or unfortunately, there were none of these things. The chance of war had given us a freedom far beyond anyone's desert. We had some misgivings about accepting so splendid a gift, which the event sometimes proves to be the most doubtful of benefits. Viewed in the light of our longings, however, our capacity for it seemed incalculable, and so, by degrees, we allowed our minds to turn to an old allurement—the South Pacific. It became irresistible the more we talked of it, longing as we then were for the solitude of islands. The objection to this choice was that the groups of islands which we meant to visit have been endowed with an atmosphere of pseudoromance displeasing to the fastidious mind.

But there was not the slightest chance of our being pioneers wherever we might go. We could not hope to see with the eyes of the old explorers who first came upon those far-off places. We must expect great changes. But much as we might regret for the purposes of this adventure that we had not been born two hundred years earlier, comfort was not wanting to our situation. Had we been contemporaries and fellow-explorers with De Quiros, or Cook, or Bougainville we should have missed the Great War.

We came within view of Tahiti one windless February morning—such a view as Pedro Fernandez de Quiros himself must have had more than three hundred years before. The sky to the west was still bright with stars and but barely touched with the very ghost of light, giving it the appearance of a great water, with a few clouds, like islands, immeasurably distant. Half an hour later the islands themselves lay in full sunlight, jagged peaks falling away in steep ridges to the sea. Against sheer walls still in shadow in upland valleys one could see a few terns; but there was no other movement, no sound, nor any sign of a human habitation—nothing to shatter the illusion of primitive loveliness. It was illusion, of course, but the reality was nothing like so disappointing as I had feared it would be. Outwardly, two hundred years of progress have wrought no great amount of havoc. There is a little port, a busy place on boat days. But when the steamer has emptied the town of her passengers, the silence flows down again from the hills. Off the main harbor-front thoroughfare streets lie empty to the eye for half hours at a time. Chinese merchants sit at the doorways of their shops, waiting for trade. Now and then broad pools of sunlight flow over the gayly flowered dresses of a group of native women, scarcely to be seen otherwise as they move slowly through tunnels of moist green gloom; or a small schooner, like a detail gifted with sudden mobility in a picture, will back away from shore, cross the harbor, bright with the reflections of clouds, and stand out to sea. In the stillness of the noon siesta one hears at infrequent intervals the resounding thud of ripe fruits as they tear their way to the ground through barriers of foliage; and at night the melancholy thunder of the surf on the reef outside the harbor, and the slithering of bare feet in the moonlit streets.

Coming from a populous exile, doubly attracted for that reason by the lure of unpeopled places, Nordhoff and I sought here an indication of what we might find later elsewhere. The few thousands of natives, whites, Orientals, half-castes, live in a charmed circle of low land fronting the sea, conscious of their mountains, no doubt, but the whites without curiosity, the Orientals without desire, the natives without remembrance. There must have been a maze of trails in the old days, leading down from the rich valleys. Now they are overgrown, untraveled, lost. Since the old life is no more than a memory, one is glad for the desolation, and grateful to the French lack of enterprise which surely is the only way to account for it.

No, we couldn't have chosen a better jumping-off place for our unpremeditated wanderings. We had the whole expanse of the Pacific before us, or, better, around us, and there was, as I have said, a harbor full of shipping. Boats with pleasing names, like the Curieuse, the Avarua, the Potii Ravarava, the Kaeo, the Liane—and self-confident, seagoing aspect. Some tidy and smart with new paint and rigging; others with decks warped and sides blistered, bottoms foul with the accumulation of a six months' cruise, reeking with the warm odor of copra. Boats newly arrived from remote islands, with crowds of bare-legged natives on their decks, their eyes beaming with pleasure in anticipation of the delights of the great capital; outward-bound to the Marquesas, the Australs, the Cooks, the Low Archipelago, despite the fact that it was the middle of the hurricane season. Among these latter there was one whose name was like a friendly hail from Gloucester, or Portland, Maine. But it was not this which attracted me to her, for all its assurance of Yankee hospitality. She was off to the Paumotus, the Cloud of Islands, and a longing to go there persisted in the face of a number of vague discouragements. There were no practical difficulties. Easy enough to get passage by one schooner or another. Paumotu copra is famous throughout the Southern Pacific. There is a good deal of competition for it, boats racing one another for cargo to the richer islands. The discouragements weren't so vague, either, now that I think of them. They came from men kindly disposed, interested in the islands in their own way. But their concerns were purely commercial. I heard a deal of talk about copra—in kilos, in tons, in shiploads; its market value in Papeete, in San Francisco, in Marseilles, until the stately trees which gave it lost for a time their old significance. Talk, too, of coconut oil and its richness in butter-fat. Butter-fat! There was a word to bring one back to a workaday world. To meet it at the outset of a long-dreamed-of journey was disheartening. It followed me with the shrill insistence of a creamery whistle, and I came very near giving up my plans altogether. Nordhoff did change his. He said that it was silly, no doubt, but he didn't like the idea of wandering, however lonely, in a cloud of butter-fat islands. Therefore we said good-by, having arranged for a rendezvous at a distant date, and set out on diverging paths.

I ought to leave Crichton, the English planter, out of this story altogether. He doesn't belong in a commonplace record of travel such as this one set out to be. He had very little to do with the voyage of the Caleb S. Winship among the atolls. But when I think of that vessel he comes inevitably into mind. I see him sitting on the cabin deck with his freckled brown hands clasped about his knees, looking across a solitude of waters; and in my mental concept of the Low Archipelago he is always somewhere in the background, standing on the sun-stricken reef of a tiny atoll, his back to the sea, almost as much a part of the lonely picture as the sea itself.

But one can't be wholly matter of fact in writing of these islands. They are not real in the ordinary sense, but belong, rather, to the realm of the imagination. And it is only in the imagination that you can conceive of your ever having been there, once you are back again in a well-plowed sea track. As for the people, whether native or alien, in order to focus them in a world of reality it is necessary to remember what they said or did; what they ate; what sort of clothing they wore. Otherwise they elude you just as the islands do.

This point of view isn't, perhaps, commonly held among the few white men who know them—captains of small schooners, managers of trading companies, resident agents, whose interest, as I have said, is in what they produce rather than in what they are. As one old skipper of my acquaintance put it, in speaking of the atolls, "Take them by and large, they are as much alike as the reef-points on that sail." Findlay's South Pacific Directory, a supposedly competent authority, bears him out in this: "They are all of similar character," adding, for emphasis, no doubt, "and they exhibit very great sameness in their features." He does, however, make certain slight concessions to what may be his own private conception of their peculiar fascination, "This vast collection of coral islands; one of the wonders of the Pacific," and later, in his account of them, "The native name, 'Paumotu,' signifies a Cloud of Islands, an expressive term." But he doesn't forget that he is writing for practical-minded mariners who want facts and not fancies, however truthful these may be to reality.

"Now, there's Tikehau," one of them said to me before I had been out there. "That's a round atoll; and Rahiroa is sort o' square like, an' so on. Some with passes and a good anchorage inside the lagoon. Others you got to lay outside an' take your cargo off the reef in a small boat."

But, to go back to Crichton, no one knew who he was or where he came from. The manager of the Inter-Island Trading Company had lived in Papeete for years and had never seen him until the day when he turned up at the water front trundling a wheelbarrow loaded with four crates of chickens and an odd lot of plantation tools and fishing tackle. Following him were two native boys carrying a weather-blackened sea chest, and an old woman with an enormous roll of bedding tied loosely in a pandanus mat. That was about an hour before the schooner weighed anchor. He stacked his gear neatly on the beach and then went on board, asking for passage to Tanao.

"No, sir," the manager said, in telling about it afterward, "I never laid eyes on him until that moment, and I don't know anyone who had. Where's he been hiding himself? And why in the name of common sense does he want to go to Tanao? There's no copra or pearl shell there—not enough, anyway, to make it worth a man's while going after it."

Tino, the supercargo, was equally puzzled.

"I know Tanao from the sea," he said. "Passed it once coming down from the Marquesas when I was supercargo of the Tiare Tahiti. We were blown out of our course by a young hurricane. Didn't land. There's no one on the God-forsaken place. Now here's this Englishman, or Dane, or Norwegian—whatever he is—asking to be set down there with four crates of chickens and an old Kanaka woman for company!" He shook his head with a give-it-up expression, adding a moment later: "Well, you meet some queer people down in this part of the world. I don't believe in asking them their business, but it beats me sometimes, trying to figure out what their business is."

He was not able to figure it out in this case. The old woman was talkative; but the information he gathered from her only stimulated his curiosity the more. She owned Tanao, an atom of an atoll miles out of the beaten track even of the Paumotu schooners. There had never been more than a score of people living on it, she said, and now there was no one. Crichton had taken a long lease on it, and was going out there—as he told me afterward—"to do my writing and thinking undisturbed."

I didn't know this until later, however. When I first heard him spoken of we were only a few hours out from Papeete. We had left the harbor with a light breeze, but at four in the afternoon the schooner was lying about fifteen miles offshore, lazy jacks flapping against idle sails with a mellow, crusty sound. After a good deal of fretting at the fickleness of land breezes, talk had turned to Crichton, who was up forward somewhere looking after his chickens. I didn't pay much attention then to what was being said, for I had just had one of those moments which come rarely enough in a lifetime, but which make up for all the arid stretches of experience. They give no forewarning. There comes a flood of happiness which brings tears to the eyes, the sense of it is so keen. The sad part of it is that one refuses to accept it as a moment. You say, "By Jove! I'm not going to let this pass!" and it has gone as unaccountably as it came, half lost through foreboding of its end. One prepares for it unknowingly, I suppose, through months, sometimes years, of longing for something remote and beautiful—such as these islands, for example. And when you have your islands, the moment comes, sooner or later, and you see them in the light which never was, as the saying goes, but which is the light of truth for all that. Brief as it is, no one can say that the reward isn't ample. And it leaves an afterglow in the memory, tempering regret, fading very slowly; which one never wholly loses since it takes on the color of memory itself, becoming a part of that dim world of worth-while illusions.

All of which has very little to do with what was passing aboard the Caleb S. Winship, except that I was prevented from taking an immediate interest in my fellow passengers; but this being my first near view of a Polynesian trading schooner, the scene on deck had all the charm of the unusual. Our skipper was a Paumotuan, a former pearl diver, and the sailors—six of them, including the mate—Tahitian boys. In addition to these there were Crichton, the planter; the supercargo, master of three major languages and half a dozen Polynesian dialects; the manager of the Inter-Island Trading Company; William, the engineer; Oro, the cabin boy; a Chinese cook and two Chinese storekeepers—evidence of the leisurely, persistent Oriental invasion of French Polynesia; thirty native passengers; a horse in an improvised stall amidships; a monkey perched in the mainmast rigging; Crichton's four crates of chickens, and five pigs. In addition to the passengers and live stock, we were carrying out a cargo of lumber, corrugated iron, flour, rice, sugar, canned goods, clothing, and dry goods. Each of the native passengers brought with him as much dunnage as an Englishman carries when he goes traveling, and his food for the voyage—limes, oranges, bananas, breadfruit, mangoes, canned meat. With all of this, a two months' supply of gasoline for the engines, and fresh water and green coconuts for both passengers and crew, we made a snug fit. Even the space under the patient little native horse was used to stow his fodder for the long journey.

The women, with one exception, were barefooted, bareheaded, but otherwise conventionally dressed according to European or American standards. This, I suppose, is an outrageous betrayal of a trade secret, if one may say that writers of South Sea narratives belong to a trade. Those seriously interested in the islands have, of course, known the truth about them for years; but I believe it is still a popular misconception that the women who inhabit them—no one seems to be interested in the men—are even to this day half-savage, unself-conscious creatures who display their charms to the general gaze with naïve indifference. Half-savage they may still be, but not unself-conscious in the old sense. There are a few, to be sure, who, by means of the bribes or the entreaties of itinerant journalists and photographers, may be persuaded to disrobe before the camera for a moment's space; and in this way the primitive legend is preserved to the outside world. But, as I told Nordhoff, although we are itinerant, we may as well be occasionally truthful and so gain, perhaps, a certain amount of begrudged credit.

The one exception was a girl of about nineteen. She came on board balancing unsteadily on high French heels, her brown legs darkening the sheen of her white-cotton stockings. I had seen her the day before as she passed below the veranda of Le Cercle Bougainville, the everyman's club of the port. She walked with the same air of precarious balance, and her broad-brimmed straw hat was set at the jaunty angle American women affect.

"Voilà! L'indigène d'aujourd'hui," my French companion said. Then, breaking into English: "The old Polynesia is dead. Yes, one may say that it is quite, quite dead." A memory he called it. "Maintenant je vous assure, monsieur, ce n'est rien que ça." He rang changes on the word, in a soft voice, with an air of enforced liveliness.

I was rather saddened at the time, picturing in my mind the scene on the shore of that bright lagoon two hundred years ago, before any of these people had been forced to accept the blessings of an alien civilization. But the girl with the French heels wasn't a good illustration of l'indigène d'aujourd'hui, even in the matter of surface changes. Most of the women dress much more simply and sensibly, and it was amusing as well as comforting to see how quickly she got rid of her unaccustomed clothing once we had left the harbor. She disappeared behind a row of water casks and came out a moment later in a dress of bright-red material, barefooted and bareheaded like the rest of them. She had a single hibiscus flower in her hair, which hung in a loose braid. I don't believe she had ever worn shoes before. At any rate, as she sat on a box, husking a coconut with her teeth, I could see her ankle calluses glinting in the sun like disks of polished metal.

There was another girl sitting on the deck not far from me, with an illustrated supplement of an American paper spread out before her. It was an ancient copy. There were pictures of battlefields in France; of soldiers marching down Fifth Avenue; a tennis tournament at Longwood; aeroplanes in flight; motor races at Indianapolis; actresses, society women, dressmakers' models making a display of corsets and other women's equipment—pictures out of the welter of modern life. The little Paumotuan girl appeared to be deeply interested. With her chin resting on her hands and her elbows braced against her knees, she went from picture to picture, but looked longest at those of the women who smiled or posed self-consciously, or looked disdainfully at her from the pages. I would have given a good deal to know what, if anything, was passing in her mind. All at once she gave a little sigh, crumpled the paper into a ball, and threw it at the monkey, who caught it and began tearing it in pieces. She laughed and clapped her hands at this, called the attention of the others, and in a moment men, women, and children had gathered round, laughing and shouting, throwing bits of coconut shell, mango seeds, banana skins, faster than the monkey could catch them.

The spontaneity of the merriment did one's heart good. Even the old men and women laughed, not in the indulgent manner of parents or grandparents, but as heartily as the children themselves. Unconscious of the uproar, one of the Chinese merchants was lying on a thin mattress against the cabin skylight. Although he was sound asleep, his teeth were bare in a grin of ghastly suavity, and his left eye was partly open, giving him an air of constant watchfulness. He was dreaming, I suppose, of copra, of pearl shell—in kilos, tons, shiploads; of its market value in Papeete, in San Francisco, in Marseilles, etc. Well, the whites get their share of these commodities and the Chinamen theirs; but the natives have a commodity of laughter which is vastly more precious, and as long as they do have it one need not feel very sorry for them.

Dusk gathered rapidly while I was thinking of these things. Heavy clouds hung over Tahiti and Moorea, clinging about the shoulders of the mountains whose peaks, rising above them, were still faintly visible against the somber glory of the sky. They seemed islands of sheer fancy, looked at from the sea. It would have been worth all that one could give to have seen them then as De Quiros saw them, or Cook, or the early missionaries; to have added to one's own sense of their majesty, the solemn and more childlike awe of the old explorers, born of their feeling of utter isolation from their kind with the presence of the unknown on every hand. It is this feeling of awe rarely to be known by travelers in these modern days, which pervades many of the old tales of wanderings in remote places; which one senses in looking at old sketches made from the decks of ships, of the shores of heathen lands.

The wind freshened, then came a deluge of cool water, blotting out the rugged outlines against the sky. When it had passed it was deep night. The forward deck was a huddle of shelters made of mats and bits of canvas, but these were being taken down now that the rain had stopped. I saw an old woman sitting near the companionway, her head in clear relief against a shaft of yellow light. She was wet through and the mild misfortune broke the ice between us, if one may use a metaphor very inapt for the tropics. With her face half in shadow she reminded me of the typical, Anglo-Saxon grandmother, although no grandmother of my acquaintance would have sat unperturbed through that squall and indifferent to her wet clothing afterward. She didn't appear to mind it in the least, and now that it was over fished a paper of tobacco and a strip of pandanus leaf out of the bundle on which she was sitting. She rolled a pinch of tobacco in the leaf, twisting it into a tight corkscrew, and lit it at the first attempt. Then she began talking in a deep, resonant voice, and by a simplicity and an extraordinary lucidity of gesture conveyed the greater part of her meaning even to an alien like myself. It was not, alas! a typical accomplishment. I have not since found others similarly gifted.

She was Crichton's landlady, the owner of Tanao. "Pupure" she called him, because of his fair hair. I couldn't make out what she was driving at for a little while. I understood at last that she wanted to know about his family—where his father was, and his mother. I suppose she thought I must know him, being a white man. They have queer ideas of the size of our world. He was young. He must have people somewhere. She, too, couldn't understand his wanting to go to Tanao; and I gathered from her perplexity that he hadn't confided his purposes to her to any extent. I couldn't enlighten her, of course, and at length, realizing this, she wrapped herself in her mat to preserve the damp warmth of her body, and dozed off to sleep.

I went below for a blanket and some dry clothing, for the night air was uncomfortably cool after the rain. The cabin floor was strewn with sleeping forms. Three children were curled up in a corner like puppies in a box of sawdust. Little brown babies lay snugly bedded on bundles of clothing, the mothers themselves sleeping in the careless, trustful attitudes of children. The light from a swinging lamp threw leaping shadows on the walls; flowed smoothly over brown arms and legs; was caught in faint gleams in masses of loose black hair. And to complete the picture and make it wholly true to fact, cockroaches of the enormous winged variety ran with incredible speed over the oilcloth of the cabin table, or made sudden flying sallies out of dark corners to the food lockers and back again.

On deck no one was awake except Maui at the wheel. There was very little unoccupied space, but I found a strip against the engine-room ventilator where I could stretch out at full length. By that time the moon was up and it was almost as light as day. I was not at all sleepy, and my thoughts went forward to the Paumotus, the Cloud of Islands. We ought to be making our first landfall within thirty-six hours. I didn't go beyond that in anticipation, although in the mind's eye I had seen them for months, first one island and then another. I had pictured them at dawn, rising out of the sea against a far horizon; or at night, under the wan light of stars, lonely beyond one's happiest dreams of isolation; unspoiled, unchanged, because of their very remoteness. Well, I was soon to know whether or not they fulfilled my hopeful expectations.

Some one came aft, walking along the rail in his bare feet. It was Oro, the cabin boy, who is taken with an enviable kind of madness at the full of the moon. He looked carefully around to make sure that everyone was asleep, then stood clasping and unclasping his hands in ecstasy, carrying on a one-sided conversation in a confidential undertone. Now and then he would smile and straightway become serious again, gazing with rapt, listening attention at the world of pure light; nodding his head at intervals in vigorous confirmation of some occult confidence. At length his figure receded, blurred, took on the quality of the moonlight, and I saw him no more.

Chapter I tailpiece

CHAPTER II

In the Cloud of Islands

Ruau, the old Paumotuan woman, and the owner of Tanao, was the last of her family. There were relatives by marriage, but none of them would consent to live on so poor an atoll; and the original population, never large, had diminished, through death and migration, until at last she was left alone, living in her memories of other days, awed by the companionship of spirits present to her in strange and terrible shapes. At last she felt that she could endure it no longer; but it was many months before the smoke of one of her signal fires was seen by a passing schooner. She returned with it to Tahiti, and if she had been lonely before, she was tenfold lonelier there, so far from the graves of her husband and children. It was at this time that Crichton met her. He had been living at Tahiti for more than a year, on the lookout for just such an opportunity as Ruau offered him. Although only twenty-eight, he was in the tenth year of his wanderings, and had almost despaired of finding the place he had so long dreamed of and searched for. During that period he had been moving slowly eastward, through Borneo, New Guinea, the Solomons, the New Hebrides, the Tongas, the Cook Group. In some of these islands the climate was too powerful an enemy for a white man to contend with; in others there was no land available, or they lacked the solitude he wanted. This latter embarrassment was the one he had met at Tahiti. The fact is an illuminating commentary on his character. Most men would find exceptional opportunities for seclusion there; not on the seaboard but in the mountains; in the valleys winding deeply among them, where no one goes from year's end to year's end. Even those leading out to the sea are but little frequented in their upward reaches. But Crichton was very exacting in his requirements in this respect. He was one of those men who make few or no friends—one of those lonely spirits without the ties or the kindly human associations which make life pleasant to most of us. They wander the thinly peopled places of the earth, interested in a large way at what they see from afar or faintly hear, but looking on with quiet eyes; taking no part, being blessed or cursed by nature with a love of silence, of the unchanging peace of great solitudes. One reads of them now and then in fiction, and if they live in fiction it is because of men like Crichton, their prototypes in reality, seen for a moment as they slip apprehensively across some by-path leading from the outside world.

He had a little place at Tahiti, a walk of two hours and a quarter, he said, from the government offices in the port. He had to go there sometimes to attend to the usual formalities, and I have no doubt that he knew within ten seconds the length of the journey which would be a very distasteful one to him. I can imagine his uneasiness at what he saw and heard on those infrequent visits. An after-the-war renewal of activity, talk of trade, development, progress, would startle him into a waiting, listening attitude. Returning home, maps and charts would be got out and plans made against the day when it would be necessary for him to move on. He told me of his accidental meeting with Ruau, as he called the old Paumotuan woman. It came only a few days after the arrival from San Francisco of one of the monthly steamers. A crowd of tourists—stop-over passengers of a day—had somehow discovered the dim trail leading to his house. "They were much pleased with it," he said, adding, with restraint: "They took a good many pictures. I was rather annoyed at this, although, of course, I said nothing." No doubt they made the usual remarks: "Charming! So quaint!" etc.

It was the last straw for Crichton. So he made another visit to the government offices where he had his passport viséed. He meant to go to Maketea, a high phosphate island which stands like a gateway at the northwestern approach to the Low Archipelago. The phosphate would be worked out in time and the place abandoned, as other islands of that nature had been, to the seabirds. But on that same evening, while he was having dinner at a Chinaman's shop in town, he overheard Ruau trying to persuade some of her relatives to return with her to Tanao. He knew of the island. He is one of the few men who would know of it. He had often looked at it on his charts, being attracted by its isolated position. The very place for him! And the old woman, he said, when she learned that he wanted to go there, that he wanted to stay always—all his life—gripped his hands in both of hers and held them, crying softly, without saying anything more. The relatives made some objections to the arrangement at first. But the island being remote, poverty-stricken, haunted, they were soon persuaded to consent to a ten years' lease, with the option of renewal. Crichton promised, of course, to take care of Ruau as long as she lived, and at her death to bury her decently beside her husband.

He proceeded at once with his altered plans. There were government regulations to be complied with and these had taken some time. On the day when he was at last free to start he learned that the Caleb S. Winship was about to sail on a three months' voyage in the Low Archipelago. He had no time to ask for passage beforehand. He had to chance the possibility of getting it at the last moment. It is not to be supposed that either the manager of the Inter-Island Trading Company or the supercargo of the Winship would have consented to carry him to such an out-of-the-way destination had they known his reason for wanting to be set down there. It amuses me now to think of those two hard-headed traders, men without a trace of sentiment, going one hundred and fifty miles off their course merely to carry the least gregarious of wanderers on the last leg of his long journey to an ideal solitude. It was their curiosity which gained him his end. They believed he had some secret purpose, some reason of purely material self-interest in view. They had both seen Tanao from a distance and knew that it had never been worth visiting either for pearl shell or copra. It is hard to understand what miracle they believed might have taken place in the meantime. During the voyage I often heard them talking about the atoll, about Crichton—wondering, conjecturing, and always miles off the track. It was plain that he was a good deal disturbed by their hints and furtive questionings. He seemed to be afraid that mere talk about Tanao on the part of an outsider might sully the purity of its loneliness. He may have been a little selfish in his attitude, but if that is a fault in a man of his temperament it is one easily forgiven. And what could he have said to those traders? It was much better to keep silent and let them believe what they liked.

It must not be thought that Crichton poured out his confidences to me like a schoolgirl. On the contrary, he had a very likable reserve, although a good half of it, I should say, was shyness. Then, too, he had almost forgotten how to talk except in the native dialects of several groups of widely scattered islands. In English he had a tendency to prolong his vowels and to omit consonants, which gave his speech a peculiar exotic sound. He made no advances for some time. Neither did I. For more than three weeks we lived together on shipboard, went ashore together at islands where we had put in for copra, and all that while we did not exchange above two hundred words in conversation. There was so little talk that I can remember the whole of it, almost word for word. Once while we were walking on the outer beach at Raraka, an atoll of thirty-five inhabitants, he said to me:

"I wish I had come out here years ago. They appeal to the imagination, don't you think, all these islands?"

His volubility startled me. It was a shock to the senses, like the crash of a coconut on a tin roof heard in the profound stillness of an island night. There was my opportunity to throw off reserve and I lost it through my surprise. I merely said, "Yes, very much." An hour later we saw the captain, no larger than a penny doll, at the end of a long vista of empty beach, beckoning us to come back. We went aboard without having spoken again. It was an odd sort of relationship for two white men thrown into close contact on a small trading schooner in the loneliest ocean in the world, as Nordhoff put it. We were no more companionable in the ordinary sense than a pair of hermit crabs.

But the need for talking drops away from men under such circumstances and neither of us found the long silences embarrassing. The spell of the islands was upon us both. I can understand Crichton's speaking of their appeal to the imagination while we were in the midst of them; for our presence there seemed an illusion—a dream more radiant than any reality could be. In fact, my only hold upon reality during that voyage was the Caleb S. Winship, and sometimes even that substantial old vessel suffered sea changes; was metamorphosed in a moment; and it was hard to believe that she was a boat built by men's hands. Often as she lay at anchor in a lagoon of dreamlike beauty I paddled out from shore in a small canoe, and, making fast under her stern, spent an afternoon watching the upward play of the reflections from the water and the blue shadows underneath, rippling out and vanishing in the light like flames of fire. For me her homely, rugged New England name was a pleasant link with the past. I liked to read the print of it. The word "Boston," her old home port, was still faintly legible through a coat of white paint. It brought to mind old memories and the faces of old friends, hard to visualize in those surroundings without such practical help. Far below lay the floor of the lagoon where all the rainbows of the world have authentic end. The water was so clear, and the sunlight streamed through it with so little loss in brightness that one seemed to be suspended in mid-air above the forests of branching coral, the deep, cool valleys, and the wide, sandy plains of that strange continent.

Crichton, I believe, was beyond the desire to keep in touch with the world he had left so many years before. His experiences there may have been bitter ones. At any rate, he never spoke of them, and I doubt if he thought of them often. People had little interest for him, not even those of the atolls which we visited. When on shore I usually found him on the outer beaches, away from the villages which lie along the lagoon. In most of the atolls the distance from beach to beach is only a few hundred yards, but the ocean side is unfrequented and solitary. On calm days when the tide begins to ebb the silence there is unearthly. The wide shore, hot and glaring in the sun, stretches away as far as the eye can reach, empty of life except for thousands of small hermit crabs moving into the shade of the palms. They snap into their shells at your approach and make fast the door as their houses fall, with a sound like the tinkling of hailstones, among heaps of broken coral. We waded along the shallows at low tide. When the wind was onshore and a heavy surf breaking over the outer edge of the reef, we sat as close to it as we could, watching the seas gathering far out, rising in sheer walls fringed with wind-whipped spray, which seemed higher than the island itself as they approached. It was a fascinating sight—the reef hidden in many places in a perpetual smoke of sunlight-filtered mist, through which the oncoming breakers could be seen dimly as they swept forward, curled, and fell. But one could not avoid a feeling of uneasiness, of insecurity, thinking of what had happened in those islands—most of them only a meter or two above sea level—in the hurricanes of the past; and of what would happen again at the coming of the next great storm.

We made landfalls at dawn, in midafternoon, late at night—saw the islands in aspects of beauty exceeding one's strangest imaginings. We penetrated farther and farther into a thousand-mile area of atoll-dotted ocean, discharging our cargo of lumber and corrugated iron, rice and flour and canned goods; taking on copra; carrying native passengers from one place to another. Sometimes we were out of sight of land for several days, beating into head winds under a slowly moving pageantry of clouds which alone gave assurance of the rotundity of the earth. When at last land appeared it seemed inaccessibly remote, at the summit of a long slope of water which we would never be able to climb. Sometimes for as long a period we skirted the shore line of a single atoll, the water deepening and shoaling under our keel in splotches of vague or vivid coloring. From a vantage point in the rigging one could see a segment of a vast circle of islands strung at haphazard on a thread of reef which showed a thin, clear line of changing red and white under the incessant battering of the surf. Several times upon going ashore we found the villages deserted, the inhabitants having gone to distant parts of the atoll for the copra-making season. In one village we came upon an old man too feeble to go with the others, apparently, sitting in the shade playing a phonograph. He had but three records: "Away to the Forest," "The Dance of the Nymphs Schottische," and "Just a Song at Twilight." The disks were as old as the instrument itself, no doubt, and the needles so badly worn that one could barely hear the music above the rasping of the mechanism. There was a groove on the vocal record where the needle caught, and the singer, a woman with a high, quavery voice, repeated the same phrase, "when the lights are low," over and over again. I can still hear it, even at this distance of time and place, and recall vividly to mind the silent houses, the wide, vacant street bright with fugitive sunshine, the lagoon at the end of it mottled with the shadows of clouds.

The sense of our remoteness grew upon me as the weeks and months passed. Once, rounding a point of land, we came upon two schooners lying inside the reef of a small atoll. One of them had left Papeete only a short while before. Her skipper gave us a bundle of old newspapers. Glancing through them that evening, I heard as in a dream the far-off clamor of the outside world—the shrieking of whistles, the roar of trains, the strident warnings of motors; but there was no reality, no allurement in the sound. I saw men carrying trivial burdens with an air of immense effort, of grotesque self-importance; scurrying in breathless haste on useless errands; gorging food without relish; sleeping without refreshment; taking their leisure without enjoyment; living without the knowledge of content; dying without ever having lived. The pictures which came to mind as I read were distorted, untrue, no doubt; for by that time I was almost as much attracted by the lonely life of the islands as my friend Crichton. My old feeling of restlessness was gone. In its place had come a certitude of happiness, a sense of well-being for which I can find no parallel this side of boyhood.

It was largely the result of living among people who are as permanently happy, I believe, as it is possible for humankind to be. And the more remote the island, the more slender the thread of communication with civilization as we know it, the happier they were. It was not in my imagination that I found this true, or that I had determined beforehand to see only so much of their life as might be agreeable and pleasant to me. On the contrary, if I had any bias at first, it was on the other side. Disillusionment is a sad experience and I had no desire to lay myself open to it. Therefore I listened willingly to the less favorable stories of native character which the traders, and others who know them, had to tell. But summed up dispassionately later, in the light of my own observations, it seemed to me that the faults of character of which they were accused were more like the natural shortcomings of children. In many respects the Paumotuans, like other divisions of the Polynesian family, are children who have never grown up, and one can't blame them for a lack of the artificial virtues which come only with maturity. They are without guile. They have little of the shrewdness or craftiness of some primitive peoples. At least so it appeared to me, making as careful a judgment of them as I could. I have often noticed how like children they are in their amazing trustfulness, their impulsive generosity, and in the intensity and briefness of their emotions.

The more I saw of their life, the more desirable it seemed that they might continue to escape any serious encroachments of European or American civilization. They have no doctors, because illness is almost unknown in their islands. Crime, insanity, feeble-mindedness, evils all too common with us, are of such rare occurrence that one may say they do not exist. It may be said, too, without overstatement, that their community life very nearly approaches perfection. Every atoll is a little world to itself with a population varying from twenty-five to perhaps three hundred inhabitants. The chief, who is chosen informally by the men, serves for a period of four years under the sanction of the French government. He has very little to do in the exercise of his authority, for the people govern themselves, are law-abiding without law.

When I first learned that there are no schools throughout the islands I thought the French guilty of criminal neglect, but later I reversed this opinion. Alter all, why should they have schools? No education of ours could make them more generous, more kindly disposed to one another, more hospitable and courteous toward strangers, happier than they are now. Certainly it could not make them less selfish, covetous, rapacious, for most of them are as innocent of those vices as their own children. In a few of the richer, more accessible islands they are slowly changing in these respects, owing to the example set them by men of our own race. In another fifty years, perhaps, they may have learned to believe that material wealth is the only thing worth striving for. Then will come pride in their possessions, envy of those who have greater, contempt and suspicion for those who have less, and so an end to their happiness.

I had never before seen children growing up in a state of nature and I made full use of the rare opportunity. I spent most of my time with them; played on shore with them; went fishing and swimming with them; and found in the experience something better than a renewal of boyhood because of a keener sense of beauty, a more conscious, mature appreciation of the happiness one has in the simplest kinds of pleasures. Sometimes we started on our excursions at dawn; sometimes we made them by moonlight. I became a collector of shells in order to give some purpose to our expeditions along the reef. I couldn't have chosen a better interest, for they knew all about shells, where and when to find the best ones, and they could indulge their love of giving to a limitless extent. In the afternoons we went swimming in the lagoon. There I saw them at their best and happiest, in an element as necessary and familiar to them as it is to their parents. It is always a pleasure to watch children at play in the water, but those Paumotuan youngsters with their natural grace at swimming and diving put one under an enchantment. Many of the boys had water glasses and small spears of their own and went far from shore, catching fish. They lay face down on the surface of the water, swimming easily, with a great economy of motion, turning their heads now and then for a breath of air; and when they saw their prey they dived after it as skillfully as their fathers do and with nearly as much success. Seen against the bright floor of the lagoon, with swarms of brilliantly colored fish scattering before them, they seemed doubtfully human, the children of some forsaken merman rather than creatures who have need of air to breathe and solid earth to stand on. If education is the suitable preparation for life, the children of the atolls have it at its best and happiest without knowing that it is education. They are skillful in the pursuits and learned in the interests which touch their lives, and one can wish them no better fortune than that they may remain in ignorance of those which do not.

Their parents, as I have said, are but children of mature stature, with the same gift of frank, generous laughter, the same delight in the new and strange. Very little is required to amuse them. I had a mandolin which I used to take ashore with me at various atolls, after I had become convinced that their enjoyment of my music was not feigned. At first I was suspicious, for I had no illusions about my virtuosity, and even when I thought of it in the most flattering way their pleasure seemed out of all proportion to the quality of the performance. But there was no doubting the genuineness of it. The whole village would assemble to hear me play. I had a limited repertoire, but that seemed to matter very little. They liked to hear the same tunes played over and over again. I learned some of the old missionary hymns which they knew: "From Greenland's Icy Mountains," "Oh, Happy Day," "We're Marching to Zion," and others.

It was strange to find those songs, belonging, fortunately, to a bygone period in English and American life, living still in that remote part of the world, not because of anything universal in their appeal, but merely because they had been carried there years ago by representatives of the missionary societies. Many eccentric changes had been made in both the rhythm and melody, greatly to the improvement of both, but no amount of changing could make them other than what they are—the uncouth expression of a narrow and ugly kind of religious sentiment. I don't think the Paumotuans care much for them, either. They always seemed glad to turn from them to their own songs, which have nothing either of modern or old-time missionary feeling. A woman usually began the singing, in a high-pitched, nasal, or throaty voice, which she modulated in an extraordinary way. Immediately other women joined in, then several men whose voices were of tenor quality, followed by other men in basses and barytones, chanting in two or three tones which, for rhythm and tone, quality, were like the beating of kettledrums. The weird blending of harmonics was unlike anything I had ever heard before. There is nothing in our music which even remotely resembles theirs, so that it is impossible to describe the effect of the full chorus. Some of the songs make a strong appeal to savage instincts. The less resolute of the early missionaries, hearing them, must have thrown up their hands in despair at the thought of the long, difficult task of conversion awaiting them. But if there were any irresolute missionaries, they were evidently overruled by their sterner brothers and sisters.

On nearly every island there is now a church, either Protestant or Catholic. In the Protestant ones the native population practice the only true faith, largely to the accompaniment of this old barbaric music. Those unsightly little structures rock to the sound of exultant choruses which ought never to be sung withindoors. The Paumotuans themselves know best the natural setting for their songs—the lagoon beach with a great fire of coconut husks blazing in the center of the group of singers. I liked to hear them from a distance where I could get their full effect; to look on from the schooner lying a few hundred yards offshore. All the inhabitants of the village would be gathered within the circle of the firelight, which brought their figures and the white, straight stems of the coconut palms into clear relief against a background of deep shadow. The singing continued far into the night, so that I often fell asleep while listening, and heard the music dying away, mingling at last with the interminable booming of the surf.

By degrees we worked slowly through the heart of the archipelago, pursuing a general southeasterly course, the islands becoming more and more scattered, until we had before us an expanse of ocean almost unbroken to the coast of South America. But Tanao lay at the edge of it, and at length, on a lowering April day, we set out on that last leg of our outward journey. The Caleb S. Winship lay very low in the water. By that time she had a full cargo of copra, one hundred tons in the hold and twelve, sacked, on deck. A portion of the deck cargo was lost that same afternoon, during a gale of wind and rain which burst upon us with fury and followed us with a seeming malignity of intent. We ran before it, far out of our course, for three hours. To me the weight of air was something incredible, an unusually vigorous flourish of the departing hurricane season. Water spouted out of the scuppers in a continuous stream, and loose articles were swept clear of the ship, disappearing at once in a cloud of blinding rain. There was a fearful racket in the cabin of rolling biscuit tins and smashing crockery. Then an eight-hundred-pound safe broke loose and started to imitate Victor Hugo's cannon. Luckily it hadn't much scope and no smooth runway, so that it was soon brought to a halt by Ruau, the old Paumotuan woman, who was the only one below at the time. She made an effective barricade of copra sacks and bedding, dodging the plunging monster with an agility surprising in a woman of sixty. But what I remember best was Tané, a monkey belonging to one of the sailors, skidding along the cabin deck until he was blown against the engine-room whistle, which rose just clear of the forward end of it. He wrapped arms and legs around it in his terror, opening the valve in some way, and the shrill blast rose high above the mighty roar of wind, like the voice of man lifted with awe-inspiring impudence in defiance of the mindless anger of nature.

The storm blew itself out toward sundown and the night fell clear—a night for stars to make one wary of thought; but the moon rose about nine, softening the pitiless distances, throwing a veil of mild light across the black voids in the Milky Way, seen so clearly in those latitudes. The schooner was riding a heavy swell, and, burdened as she was, rose clumsily to it, sticking her nose into the slope of every sea. Ruau was at her accustomed place against the cabin ventilator, unmindful of the showers of spray, maintaining her position on the slanting deck with the skill of three months' practice. The thought that I must soon bid her good-by saddened me, for I knew there was small chance that I should ever meet her again. I envied Crichton his opportunity for friendship with that noble old woman, so proud of her race, so true to her own beliefs, to her own way of living. Her type is none too common among Polynesians in these days. One gets all too frequently an impression of a consciousness of inferiority on their part, a sense of shame because of their simple way of living as compared with ours. Ruau was not guilty of it. She never could be, I think, under any circumstances. I learned afterward of an attempt which had been made to convert her to Christianity during her stay at Tahiti. Evidently she had not been at all convinced by the priest's arguments, and when he made some slighting remark about the ghosts and spirits which were so real to her, she refused to listen any longer. Frightened though she was of spirits, she was not willing that they should be ridiculed.

We sighted her atoll at dawn, such a dawn as one rarely sees outside the tropics. The sky was overcast at a great height with a film of luminous mist through which the sun shone wanly, throwing a sheen like a dust of gold on the sea. Masses of slate-colored cloud billowed out from the high canopy, overhanging a black fringe of land which lay just below the line of the horizon. The atoll was elliptical in shape, about eight miles long by five broad. There were seven widely separated islands on the circle of reef and one small motu in the lagoon. We came into the wind about a half mile offshore and put off in the whaleboat. The sea was still running fairly high, and the roar of the surf came across the water with a sound as soothing as the fall of spring rain; but it increased in volume as we drew in until the ears were stunned by the crash of tremendous combers which toppled and fell sheer, over the ledge of the reef. It was by far the most dangerous-looking landing place we had seen on the journey. There was no break in the reef; only a few narrow indentations where the surf spouted up in clouds of spray. Between the breaking of one sea and the gathering of the next, the water poured back over a jagged wall of rock bared for an instant to an appalling depth. Only a native crew could have managed that landing. We rode comber after comber, the sailors backing on their oars, awaiting the word of the boat steerer, who stood with his feet braced on the gunwales, his head turned over his shoulder, watching the following seas. All at once he began shouting at the top of his voice. I looked back in time to see a wall of water, on the point of breaking, rising high above us. It fell just after it passed under us, and we were carried forward across the edge of the reef, through the inner shallows to the beach.

The two traders started off at once on a tour of inspection and we saw nothing more of them until late in the evening. Meanwhile I went with Ruau and Crichton across the island to the lagoon beach where her house was. As in most of the atolls, the ground was nearly free from undergrowth, the soil affording nourishment only to the trees and a few hardy shrubs. Coconuts and dead fronds were scattered everywhere. A few half-wild pigs, feeding on the shoots of sprouted nuts, gazed up with an odd air of incredulity, of amazement as we approached, then galloped off at top speed and disappeared far in the distance. Ruau stopped when we were about halfway across and held up her hand for silence. A bird was singing somewhere, a melodious varied song like that of the hermit thrush. I had heard it before and had once seen the bird, a shy, solitary little thing, one of the few species of land birds found on the atolls.

While we were standing there, listening to the faint music, Crichton took me by the arm. He said nothing, and in a moment withdrew his hand. I was deeply moved by that manifestation of friendliness, an unusual one for him to make. He had some unaccountable defect in his character which kept him aloof from any relationship approaching real intimacy. I believe he was constantly aware of it, that he had made many futile attempts to overcome it. It may have been that which first set him on his wanderings, now happily at an end. It was plain to me the moment we set foot on shore that he would have to seek no farther for asylum. Tanao is one of the undoubted ends of the earth. No one would ever disturb him there. He himself was not so sure of this. Once, I remember, when we were looking at the place on the chart, he spoke of the island of Pitcairn, the old-time refuge of the Bounty mutineers. Before the opening of the Panama Canal it had been as far removed from contact with the outside world as an island could be. Now it lies not far off the route through the Canal to New Zealand and is visited from time to time by the crews of tramp steamers and schooners. Tanao, however, is much farther to the north, and there is very slight possibility that its empty horizons will ever be stained by a smudge of smoke. As for an actual visit, one glance at the reef through the binoculars would convince any skipper of the folly of the attempt.

Even our own crew of natives, skilled at such hazardous work, came to grief in their second passage over it. They had gone out to the schooner for supplies Crichton had ordered—a few sacks of flour, some canned goods, and kerosene oil; in coming back the boat had been swept, broadside, against a ledge of rock. It stuck there, just at the edge of the reef, and the sailors jumped out with the line before the next wave came, capsizing the boat and carrying it inshore, bottom up. All the supplies were swept into deep water by the backwash and lost. There had been a similar accident at the other atoll—flour and rice brought so many thousands of miles having been spoiled within a few yards of their destination. I remember the natives plunging into the water at great risk to themselves to save a few sacks of soggy paste in the hope that a little of the flour in the center might still be dry; and a Chinese storekeeper, to whom it was consigned, standing on the shore, wringing his hands in dumb grief. It was the first time I had ever seen a Chinaman make any display of emotion, and the sight brought home to me a conception of the tragic nature of such accidents to the inhabitants of those distant islands.

Crichton took his own loss calmly, concealing whatever disappointment he may have felt. Ruau was not at all concerned about it, and, while we were making an examination of the house, went out on the lagoon in a canoe and caught more than enough fish for supper. Then we found that all of our matches had been spoiled by sea water, so we could make no fire. Judging by the way Crichton brightened up at his discovery, one would have thought the loss a piece of luck. He set to work at once to make an apparatus for kindling fire, but before it was finished Ruau had the fish cleaned and spread out on a coverlet of green leaves. We ate them raw, dipping them first into a sauce of coconut milk, and for dessert had a salad made of the heart of a tree. I don't remember ever having eaten with heartier appetite, but at the same time I couldn't imagine myself enjoying an unrelieved diet of coconuts and fish for a period of ten years—not for so long as a year, in fact. Crichton, however, was used to it, and Ruau had never known any other except during her three months' stay at Tahiti, where she had eaten strange hot food which had not agreed with her at all, she said.

Dusk came on as we sat over our meal. Ruau sat with her hands on her knees, leaning back against a tree, talking to Crichton. I understood nothing of what she was saying, but it was a pleasure merely to listen to the music of her voice. It was a little below the usual register of women's voices, strong and clear, but softer even than those of the Tahitians, and so flexible that I could follow every change in mood. She was telling Crichton of the tupapaku of her atoll which she dreaded most, although she knew that it was the spirit of one of her own sons. It appeared in the form of a dog with legs as long and thick as the stem of a full-grown coconut tree, and a body proportionally huge. It could have picked up her house as an ordinary dog would a basket. Once it had stepped lightly over it without offering to harm her in any way. Her last son had been drowned while fishing by moonlight on the reef outside the next island, which lay about two miles distant across the eastern end of the lagoon. She had seen the dog three times since his death, and always at the same phase of the moon. Twice she had come upon it lying at full length on the lagoon beach, its enormous head resting on its paws. She was so badly frightened, she said, that she fell to the ground, incapable of further movement; sick at heart, too, at the thought that the spirit of the bravest and strongest of all her sons must appear to her in that shape. It was clear that she was recognized, for each time the dog began beating its tail on the ground as soon as it saw her. Then it got up, yawned and stretched, took a long drink of salt water, and started at a lope up the beach. She could see it very plainly in the bright moonlight. Soon it broke into a run, going faster and faster, gathering tremendous speed by the time it reached the other end of the island. From there it made a flying spring, and she last saw it as it passed, high in air, across the face of the moon, its head outstretched, its legs doubled close under its body. She believed that it crossed the two-mile gap of water which separated the islands in one gigantic leap.

That is the whole of the story as Crichton translated it for me, although there must have been other details, for Ruau gave her account of it at great length. Her earnestness of manner was very convincing; and left no doubt in my mind of the realness to her of the apparition. As for myself, if I could have seen ghosts anywhere it would have been at Tanao. Late that night, walking alone on the lagoon beach, I found that I was keeping an uneasy watch behind me. The distant thunder of the surf sounded at times like a wild galloping on the hard sand, and the gentle slapping of little waves near by like the lapping tongue of the ghostly dog having its fill of sea water.

We left Tanao with a fair wind the following afternoon, having been delayed in getting away because of the damaged whaleboat, which had to be repaired on shore. Tino, the supercargo, insisted on pushing off at once, the moment the work was finished. Crichton and Ruau were on the other beach at the time, so that I had no opportunity to say good-by; but as we were getting under way I saw him emerge from the deep shadow and stand for a moment, his hand shading his eyes, looking out toward the schooner. I waved, but evidently he didn't see me, for there was no response. Then he turned, walked slowly up the beach, and disappeared among the trees. For three hours I watched the atoll dwindling and blurring until at sunset it was lost to view under the rim of the southern horizon. Looking back across that space of empty ocean, I imagined that I could still see it dropping farther and farther away, down the reverse slope of a smooth curve of water, as though it were vanishing for all time beyond the knowledge and the concern of men.

My first packet of letters from Nordhoff was brought by the skipper of the schooner Alouette. He had been carrying it about for many weeks, and had it in the first place from the supercargo of another vessel, met at Rurutu, in the Austral group. The envelope, tattered and weather-stained, spoke of its long journey in search of me.

Before separating at Papeete we had arranged for a rendezvous, but at that time we still possessed American ideas of punctuality and well-ordered travel. Now we know something of the casual movements of trading schooners and have learned to regard the timely arrival of a letter as an event touching on the miraculous—the keeping of a rendezvous, a possibility too remote for consideration. One hears curious tales, in this part of the world, of the outcome of such temporary leave-takings as ours was meant to be—husbands seeking their wives and wives their husbands; families scattered among these fragments of land and striving for many months to reunite.

I witnessed, not long ago, the sequel of one of these unsuccessful quests. A native from a distant group of islands set out for one of the atolls of the Low Archipelago, the home of his sweetheart. Arrangements for the marriage had been made long before, but letters had gone astray, and upon his arrival the young man found that the family of his prospective father-in-law had gone to another atoll for the diving season. With no means of following, he submitted to the inevitable, and married another girl. Months later, the woman of his first choice returned with her second choice of a husband; and the former lovers met, for the young man had not yet been able to return to his own island. Neither made any question of the other's decision—life is too short; and from the native point of view, it is foolish to spend it in wanderings which, at the last, may never fulfill their purpose.

Nevertheless, I shall make a search for Nordhoff—a leisurely search, with some expectation of finding him. Our islands, like those of Mr. Conrad's enchanted Heyst, are bounded by a circle two thousand or more miles across, and it is likely that neither of us will ever succeed in breaking through to the outside world—if, indeed, there is an outside world. I am beginning to doubt this, for the enchantment is at work. As for Nordhoff, his letters, which follow, may speak for themselves.

Eaters of the Lotos

Woodcut

CHAPTER III

Marooned on Mataora

The sun was low when the Faaite steamed out through the pass and headed for the Cook group, six hundred miles west and south. Dark clouds hung over Raiatea—Rangi Atea of Maori tradition, the Land of the Bright Heavens—but the level sunlight still illuminated the hillsides of Tahaa, the lovely sister island, protected by the same great oval reef. Far off to the north, the peak of Bora Bora towered abruptly from the sea.

It was not yet the season of the Trades, and the northeast breeze which followed us brought a sweltering heat, intolerable anywhere but on deck. Worthington was sitting beside me—a lean man, darkly-tanned, with very bright blue eyes. His feet were bare; he wore a singlet, trousers of white drill, and a Manihiki hat—beautifully plaited of bleached pandanus leaf—a hat not to be bought with money. The dinner gong sounded.

"I'm not going down," he remarked; "too hot below. I had something to eat at Uturoa. How about you?"

I shook my head—it needed more than a normal appetite to drive one to the dining saloon. Banks of squall cloud, shading from gray to an unwholesome violet, were gathering along the horizon, and the air was so heavy that one inhaled it with an effort.

"This is the worst month of the hurricane season," Worthington went on; "it was just such an evening as this, last year, that the waterspout nearly got us—the night we sighted Mataora. I was five months up there, you know—marooned when Johnson lost the old Hatutu.

"I was pretty well done up last year, and when I heard that the Hatutu was at Avarua I decided to take a vacation and go for a six weeks' cruise with Johnson. Ordinarily he would have been laid up in Papeete until after the equinox, but the company had sent for him to make a special trip to Penrhyn. We had a wretched passage north—a succession of squalls and broiling calms. The schooner was in bad shape, anyway: rotten sails, rigging falling to pieces, and six inches of grass on her bottom. On a hot day she had a bouquet all her own—the sun distilled from her a blend of cockroaches and mildewed copra that didn't smell like a rose garden. On the thirtieth day the skipper told me we were two hundred miles from Penrhyn and so close to Mataora that we might sight the palm tops. I'd heard a lot about the place (it has an English name on the chart)—how isolated it was, what a pleasant crowd the natives were, and how it was the best place in the Pacific to see old-fashioned island life.

"We had been working to windward against a light, northerly breeze, but the wind began to drop at noon, and by three o'clock it was glassy calm. There was a wicked-looking mass of clouds moving toward us from the west, but the glass was high and Johnson said we were in for nothing worse than a squall. As the clouds drew near I could see that they had a sort of purplish-black heart, broad at the top, pointed at the bottom, and dropping gradually toward the water. There was something queer about it; the mate was pointing, and Johnson's Kanakas were all standing up. Suddenly I heard a rushing sound, like a heavy squall passing through the bush; the point of the funnel had touched the sea three or four hundred yards away from us—a waterspout! There wasn't a breath of air, and the Hatutu had no engine. It was moving straight for us, so slowly that I could watch every detail of its formation. The boys slid our boat overboard; the mate sang out something about all hands being ready to leave the schooner.

"I've heard of waterspouts ever since I was a youngster, but I never expected to see one as close as we did that day. As the point of cloud dropped toward the sea it was ragged and ill defined; but when it touched the water and the noise began I saw its shape change and its outlines grow hard. It was now a thin column, four or five feet in diameter, rising a couple of hundred feet before it swelled in the form of a flat cone, to join the clouds above. Curiously enough, it was not perpendicular, but had a decided sagging curve. Nearer and nearer it came, until I could make out the great swirling hole at its base, and see the vitreous look of this column of solid water, revolving at amazing speed. It hadn't the misty edges of a waterfall. The outside was sharply defined as the walls of a tumbler. I wondered what would happen when it struck the Hatutu. The mate was shouting again, but just then the skipper pushed a rifle into my hands. 'Damned if I leave the old hooker,' he swore. 'Shoot into the thing—maybe we can break it up.' And, believe me or not, we did break it up.

"It didn't come down with a crash, as one might have expected. When we had pumped about twenty shots into it, and it was not more than fifty yards away, it began to dwindle. The column of water became smaller and drew itself out to nothing; the rushing noise ceased; the hole in the sea disappeared in a lazy eddy; the dark funnel rose and blended with the clouds above.

"A fine southeast breeze sprang up as the clouds dispersed, and we were reaching away for Penrhyn when a boy up forward gave a shout and pointed to the northwest. Sure enough there was a faint line on the horizon—the palms of Mataora. A sudden idea came to me. I was fed up with the schooner. Why not ask to be put ashore and picked up on the Hatutu's return from Penrhyn? She would be back in a fortnight, and it was only a few miles out of her way to drop me and pick me up.

"Johnson is a good fellow; his answer to my proposition was to change his course at once and slack away for the land twelve miles to leeward. 'You'll have a great time,' he said; 'I wish I were going with you. Old Tari will put you up—I'll give you a word to him. Take along two or three bags of flour and a few presents for the women.'

"At five o'clock we were off the principal village, with canoes all about us and more coming out through the surf. The men were a fine, brawny lot, joking with the crew, and eager for news and small trade. I lowered my box, some flour, tobacco, and a few bolts of calico, into the largest canoe, and said good-by to Johnson.

"It was nearly a year before I saw him again; as you know, he lost the Hatutu on Flying Venus Shoal. They made Penrhyn in the boat and got a passage to Tahiti two months later. Everyone knew I was on Mataora, but it was five months before a schooner could come to take me off.

"There is no pass into the lagoon. As we drew near the shore I saw that the easy, deceptive swell reared up to form an ugly surf ahead of us. At one point, where a crowd of people was gathered, there was a large irregular fissure in the coral, broad and deep enough to admit the passage of a small boat, and filled with rushing water each time a breaker crashed on the reef. My two paddlers stopped opposite this fissure and just outside the surf, watching over their shoulders for the right wave. They let four or five good-sized ones pass, backing water gently with their paddles; but at last a proper one came, rearing and tossing its crest till I thought it would break before it reached us. My men dug their paddles into the water, shouting exultantly as we darted forward. The shouts were echoed on shore. By Jove! it was a thriller! Tilting just on the break of the wave, we flew in between jagged walls of coral, up the fissure, around a turn—and before the water began to rush back, a dozen men and women had plunged in waist deep to seize the canoe.

"Mataora is made up of a chain of low islands—all densely covered with coconut palms—strung together in a rough oval to inclose a lagoon five miles by three. Though there is no pass, the surf at high tide breaches over the gaps between the islands. The largest island is only a mile and a half long, and none of them are more than half a mile across. Dotted about the surface of the lagoon are a number of motu—tiny islets—each with its flock of sea fowl, its clump of palms, and shining beach of coral sand. Set in a lonely stretch of the Pacific, the place is almost cut off from communication with the outside world; twice or three times in the course of a year a trading schooner calls to leave supplies and take off copra. Undisturbed by contact with civilization, the life of Mataora flows on—simple, placid, and agreeably monotonous—very little changed, I fancy, since the old days. It is true that they have a native missionary, and use calico, flour, and tobacco when they can get them; but these are minor things. The great events in their annals are the outrage of the Peruvian slavers in eighteen sixty-two, when many of the people were carried off to labor and die in the Chinchas Islands, and the hurricane of nineteen thirteen.

"After presenting myself to the missionary and the chief I was escorted by a crowd of youngsters to the lagoon side of the island, where Tairi lived, in a spot cooled by the trade wind and pleasantly shaded by coconuts. The old chap was a warm friend of Johnson's and made me welcome; I soon arranged to put up with him during my stay on the island. His house, like all the Mataora houses, was worth a bit of study.

"Pandanus logs, five or six inches in diameter and set four feet apart, made the uprights. On each side of these logs, and extending from top to bottom a groove was cut. Thin laths, split from the aerial roots of the pandanus, were set horizontally into the grooves, making a wall which permitted the free circulation of air. At the windward end of the house, a large shutter of the same material was hung on hinges of bark; on warm days it could be opened to admit the breeze. The plates and rafters were made of the trunks of old coconut palms—a beautiful hard wood which blackens with age and can be polished like mahogany. The roof was thatched with kakao—strips of wood over which were doubled selected leaves of pandanus, six feet long and four inches across. The kakao are laid on like shingles, so deeply overlapped that only six inches of each is exposed, and the result is a cool and perfectly water-tight roof which lasts for years.

"The floor of Tari's house was of fine white gravel, covered with mats. A bed of mats, a few odds and ends of fishing gear, and a Bible in the Rarotongan language made up the furniture. The old man had been a pearl diver for many years; he knew all the lagoons of this part of the Pacific, and could give the history of every large pearl discovered in these waters. Twenty fathoms he considered an ordinary depth for the naked divers—twenty-five, the limit. One day he went too deep, and since then he had been a cripple with paralyzed legs, dependent for care on the kindly people of his island. He busied himself in carving out models of the ancient Polynesian sailing canoes, beautifully shaped and polished, inlaid with shell, and provided with sails of mother-of-pearl. Now and then he presented a canoe to the captain of a trading schooner visiting the island, and received in return a bag of flour or a few sticks of tobacco.

"I had some interesting yarns with Tari—I speak Rarotongan, and the Mataora language is a good deal the same. They have three extra consonants, by the way—the f, l, and h. What a puzzle these island dialects are!

"Tairi told me a lot about pearl fishing. The people had divided their lagoon into three sections, one of which was fished each year. In this way each section got a two years' rest. The shell is the object of the diving—pearls are a secondary issue. The divers are not much afraid of sharks, but dread the tonu and the big conger eel. Some years before, when Tari was resting in a boat after a spell under water, one of his companions failed to return to the surface. Looking through his water glass, he saw a great tonu lying on the bottom, sixty feet beneath him—the legs of his comrade hanging from its jaws. Fancy the ugly brute, ten feet long and all head, like an overgrown rock cod, with a man in his mouth. Tairi and several others seized their spears and were over the side next moment; they killed the tonu, but too late to save the life of their companion.

"Conger eels grow to enormous size in the pearl lagoons, and the divers keep a close watch for them. They lie in holes and crevices of the coral and dart out their heads to seize a passing fish, or the wrist of a diver stooping and intent on his task. When the conger's jaws close on wrist or ankle, the diver needs a cool head; no amount of struggling will pull the eel from his hole. One must wait quietly, Tairi told me, until the conger relaxes his jaws preparatory to taking a better grip. Then a quick wrench, and one is free.

"On an atoll like Mataora, where the food supply is limited to fish and coconuts, with a chicken or a piece of pork as an occasional treat, fishing plays a large part in the life of the people. The men were all expert fishermen, and used a variety of ingenious methods to catch the different kinds of fish. Tairi, of course, was no longer able to go out; but a friend of his—an old fellow named Tamatoa—used to take me with him. He was a fine specimen—six feet tall, muscular and active as a boy, with clear eyes and thick gray hair. One day he proposed trying for koperu, a small variety of mackerel.

"The settlement is on the lee side of the island, where a coral shoal runs out half a mile to sea, covered with twenty to forty fathoms of water. It was early in the morning—a dead calm—when we launched the big canoe and slipped out through the surf. About a quarter of a mile offshore Tamatoa asked me to hold the canoe stationary while he went about his fishing. Fastening a twenty-foot rope to the thwart, he made a noose at the other end and passed it under his arms. Then he took a ripe coconut, split it, and gouged out the meat with his knife. With the white pulp in one hand, he slipped overboard and swam down as far as the rope would let him. Through my water glass I watched him put pieces of coconut into his mouth and blow out clouds of the finely chewed stuff, which drifted and eddied about him in the gentle current. He seemed to stay under indefinitely—the lungs of a pearl diver are wonderful things! Now and then he came to the surface for a fresh supply of chum, and finally—at first in twos and threes, and then in shoals—the koperu began to appear from the depths. Little by little he enticed them close to the surface, until they swam all about him fearlessly, gobbling the morsels of coconut. At last the old man reached up for his fishing tackle—an eighteen-inch twig, with a bit of doubled sewing cotton and a tiny barbless hook. He baited the hook with a particle of coconut and dangled it under the nose of the nearest koperu. While he hung on the shortened rope, just beneath the surface, his right arm broke water in a series of jerks, and each time it rose a fish tumbled into the canoe until they lay in the bottom by dozens.

"Though the people of Mataora made sport of their work, they had plenty of leisure for other things. In the evening, when the tasks of the day had been completed by lighting the lamps in the roofed-over sleeping places of the dead, the young people loved to gather for a session of akatu talanga—story telling. They met in some one's house or brought mats to spread in the bright moonlight outside; and while the others lay about, intent on the tale, one after another related the adventures of some Polynesian hero or the loves of some legendary island princess—strange fragments from the old days, full of specters and devils and monstrous heathen gods. There was a girl named Porima who told her stories marvelously well—a tall youngster of seventeen, with a dash of off-island blood; Hawaiian, I think. She was an artist in her way; one could imagine in her the pioneer of a literature to come. Her broad forehead, the masses of black hair which from time to time, with an impatient gesture, she shook back over her shoulders, and the slumberous eyes, with a suggestion of hypnotic power, made her a person not easily forgotten. Although she had told them many times, Porima's stories never failed to hold her audience; the whispering ceased when she began, and every head turned toward where she sat, her hands continually in motion, her voice rising in excitement, or dying away to a murmur, while the listeners held their breath. As the hours passed, both audience and performers used to grow weary and drop off to sleep, one by one; finally a rooster crowed and one awoke with a start to realize that it was day.

"One evening, at a story telling, I heard a shout from the beach and remembered that I had been invited to go after flying fish. A dozen canoes were putting out through the surf, each manned by four paddlers. I made a fourth in the last canoe; we shot out of the opening with a receding wave, paddled desperately through the surf, and a moment later were rocking gently beyond the breakers. The canoes were formed into a rough line; each stern-man lit a torch of coconut leaves bound with bark, and a man forward took his place standing—net in hand. The net is like a shallow landing net, set on a haft of stiff bamboo, and can be handled only after years of unconscious training. My position, paddling amidships, enabled me to watch how the net was managed—one doesn't often see such an exhibition of dexterity and strength. The art consists in clapping the net over the fish just at the moment when he is lying at the surface, hesitating before taking flight; at any instant the netter may see a fish to port, to starboard, or directly ahead. Our man swung his net continually, and each time it passed over the canoe he flipped it upside-down to drop a fish. Think of the muscles needed for this sort of thing; the quickness of eye and hand, where a delicate balance must be maintained, and one is constantly alert to guard one's face against the fish, which whizz past at all angles. Then remember that it is a pretty serious matter to capsize in this torch-lit water, swarming with sharks, where it is imprudent even to trail one's hand overboard.

"In the bend of a bow-shaped islet at the north end of the lagoon, under the palms behind a shore of blue water and dazzling sand, lived an old chap named Ruri, who introduced me to another kind of fishing. Ruri was close to seventy, but a strong man still; his only complaint was lack of teeth, which compelled him to live on varuvaru—the grated-up meat of the young coconut, mixed with its own milk. The ambition of his life was a trip to Tahiti to get a set of false teeth. He was not a native of Mataora—his mother was a Gilbert-Islander and his father a Samoan. For many years Ruri had followed the sea—cabin boy under Bully Hayes; deserter (to keep a whole skin) from the famous Leonora; blackbirder in the New Hebrides and Solomon Islands; pearl fisher in Penrhyn and the lagoons of the Paumotu. At last, on a black night of storm, his vessel struck and went to pieces on the coral of Mataora, and Ruri's days of wandering were over. He married a woman of the island, but now she was dead and the old man lived alone, a mile from the settlement, occupied with his simple wants and immersed in dreams of the past. Close beside his house was the grave of his wife—a tomb of cement inclosed in a neat building of octagonal shape, with a door and a small curtained window. A fine lamp, carefully tended and lit every evening at sunset, hung above the grave, and a few stunted gardenias and frangipanis, brought from enormous distances, were planted about the door. Ruri's little plantation of coconuts and coarse taro was free from weeds, and the neatness of his house, shipshape and scrupulously clean, betrayed the old sailor.

"After a spell of calm weather, when the breaching surf had ceased to cloud the waters of the lagoon, and the suspended particles of coral sand had settled to the bottom, Ruri offered to show me how to catch tenu—a fine fish, inhabiting the lagoon in ten to twenty fathoms of water—speckled like a trout on a ground of brown and gold, and reaching a weight of twenty pounds.

"In the absurdly complicated process of obtaining bait, tenu-fishing is typical of the South Pacific. The night before, Ruri had spent two hours with a torch, catching hermit crabs; now, using these crabs for bait we had to catch some ku ta—a small, prickly fish which alone has power to interest the tenu. We set out in Ruri's leaky canoe and paddled to a big, coral mushroom, which rose to within a yard of the surface. Here the old man smashed the shells of his hermit crabs with a stone, broke off the claws, set the soft bodies to one side, and mashed the claws to a paste, which he dropped overboard and allowed to drift into a dark hole in the coral. Then he produced a short line, baited the hook with a body of a crab, and let it sink out of sight into the darkness of the hole. In ten minutes a dozen ku ta were gasping in the bottom of the canoe—fantastic little fish, colored scarlet and vermilion, with enormous black eyes and a dorsal fin which seemed to be carved out of red sealing wax. We put them in a basket, trailed overboard to keep them alive, and began the real fishing of the day. I paddled slowly, while Ruri—who did not believe in fishing till the fish was in sight—leaned over the side, scrutinizing the bottom through his water glass. Finally he signaled me to stop—his eye had caught the movement of a tenu among the masses of live coral, forty feet below us. The rest was simple: one hooked a ku ta under the dorsal fin, tossed him overboard, and allowed the weight of the hook and line to carry him to the bottom. By means of the water glass, one could watch the approach of the tenu, see him seize the bait, and judge the proper moment to strike.

"The bonito, which they call atu, is the most important of all fish to the people of Mataora. Almost any fine day one could see a fleet of canoes working offshore, busy at bonito catching, surrounded by a cloud of the sea birds which guide one to the schools. They use a pretty lure for this fishing—a sort of jig cut out of mother-of-pearl, equipped with a tuft of red-dyed coconut husk and a barbless hook of shell. Each fisherman carries a stiff bamboo rod and half a dozen of these lures—ranging in color from pale green to black—attached to ten-foot lengths of line. The islanders have discovered that the condition of the water and the variations of light make certain colors more attractive than others at a given time; and when a school is found they try one shade after another till they discover which the bonito prefer. Then the jigs not in use are hooked to a ring at the base of the pole, and the fisherman begins to pull bonito from the water, heaving them out by main strength, without a moment's play. The barbless hook releases itself the moment the fish is in the canoe, and the lure goes overboard without the loss of an instant.

"One day, after a period of low tides, I saw another method of fishing—rarely practised nowadays—an ora, or fish-poisoning picnic. You know the barringtonia, probably—the big tree from which they make their drums; it grows on all the high islands, and sometimes one finds it on the richer atolls. There were a few on Mataora. Ever notice the flower? It is a lovely thing—a tassel of silky cream-colored stamens, shading to old rose at the ends, and tipped with golden beads. The fruit is odd-looking, like a squarish pomegranate, and it has odd properties, for when pounded up and put into shallow water it seems to stupefy the fish.

"I was sitting in the shade beside Tari's house when a boy came through the settlement, blowing melancholy blasts on a conch shell and announcing that the chief wanted everyone to be on hand that afternoon at a certain part of the lagoon, where an ora was to be held. We set out at noon, the women carrying the crushed seeds of the barringtonia in hastily woven baskets of green coconut frond. A crowd from the other settlements was awaiting our arrival; and when the babies had been put to sleep in the shade, with small children stationed beside them to fan away the flies, the fun began. A shallow stretch of lagoon lay before us, half a mile long by a quarter wide, and into this plunged the women and girls, wading and swimming in all directions, trailing behind them their baskets of poison. As time went on, a faint and curious odor began to rise from the water—a smell which reminded me vaguely of potassium cyanide. Soon the spearmen were busy—wild brown figures, naked except for scarlet loin cloths—pursuing the half-stupefied fish among the crevices of the coral. Before the effect of the poison wore off and the reviving fish began to make their escape to deeper water the men were returning to the beach, the strings of hibiscus bark at their belts loaded and dragging.

"On another day I joined a party of young people for a picnic across the lagoon. It was glassy calm; the water was like a mirror in which the palms of the wooded islets were reflected with motionless perfection. The beaches on the far side, invisible on an ordinary day, seemed to rise far out of water in the mirage. We landed on an uninhabited island, hauled up our canoes, and set out on a hunt for coconut crabs.

"They are extraordinary creatures, these crabs, enormous, and delicious to eat. You will not find many on the high islands; but in a place like Mataora there are hundreds of them, and they do a lot of damage to the coconuts. During the day they hide in their holes, deep among the roots of some big trees; at night they come out, climb the palms, nip off the nuts with their powerful claws, descend to the ground, tear off the husks, break open the shells, and devour the meat. To catch them, one can either dig them out or build a fire at the mouth of the hole, which never fails to draw them. Fire simply fascinates the brutes. They must be handled warily, for their claws can grip like a pair of pipe tongs and shear off a man's finger without an effort.

"We lit a fire under the shade of a puka tree and liberated the crabs we had captured. It sounds incredible, but they walked into the fire, and sat down quietly on the embers to roast! One of the boys climbed a palm and brought us some coconuts of a variety called nu mangaro, with an edible husk, sweet and fibrous, like sugar cane. After lunch we had a swim in the deep water close inshore and lay about smoking while the girls wove us wreaths of sweet fern. It was an idyllic sort of a day.

"I spent five months on Mataora. At first, when the schooner did not appear, I was worried and used to fret a little; but as time went on I grew to like the easy-going, dreamy life, and when at last a schooner came to take me off I didn't know whether to be glad or sorry—there were moments when I almost decided to send for a few things and follow the example of old Ruri.

"During those five months I knew more disinterested kindliness than I had supposed existed in the world; my heart warmed to the people of Mataora.

"Finally the day came when the schooner dropped anchor in the lee of the village—Whitmore's Tureia. Canoe after canoe shot out through the surf; the women gathered in the shade of the canoe houses on the beach, awaiting the landing of the boatmen, who would bring news of husbands diving for shell in distant lagoons, or relatives scattered among far-off groups of islands. As I shook hands with Whitmore I heard a prolonged wailing from the village—the tangi of a new widow.

"When I went to the house to get my things together Tari informed me that, as the schooner would not leave till next day, the people were preparing a farewell feast in my honor. It was held in the assembly house of the village, decorated with arches of palm frond, garlands of scented fern, and the scarlet flowers of the hibiscus. Everyone brought a gift for the departing stranger—a fan, a hat, a pearl fishhook, a drinking cup of ornamented coconut shell, a carved paddle of porcupine wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl. I distributed what little I had to offer, wishing it were a dozen times as much.

"On the beach next morning the people of Mataora gathered for a last handclasp; smile cynically if you will—there were tears shed; I wasn't too happy myself when I heard their plaintive song of farewell floating out across the water."

Worthington ceased speaking and leaned forward to scratch a match. The squall had passed long since; the immense arch of the Milky Way stretched overhead, and low in the south—beyond Hull Island and Rimatara, over the loneliest ocean in the world—the Southern Cross was rising. Lying on mats behind us, a party of Cook-Islanders spoke in soft tones, their faces illuminated fitfully by the glow of their cigarettes. My companion was lighting his pipe, and in the flare of the match I could see that he was smiling to himself.

"Some day," he said, "you will hear that I have closed up my affairs and disappeared. Don't worry when that happens; you'll know I have gone to Mataora—this time to stop for good."

CHAPTER IV

The Land of Ahu Ahu

I might attempt to set down a matter-of-fact description of this place if only the subject permitted one to be matter-of-fact. Strange and remote, set in a lonely space of the sea and isolated from the world for the seven or eight centuries following the decline of Polynesian navigation, there is no other land like this hollow island of Ahu Ahu. Week after week, month after month, the watcher on its cliffs may gaze out toward the horizon and see never a sail nor a distant trail of smoke to liven the dark-blue desert of the Pacific. The cliffs themselves are strange—the reef of an ancient atoll, upraised in some convulsion of the earth to form a ring of coral limestone—sheer precipices facing the sea, half a mile of level barren summit, and an inner wall of cliffs, overlooking the rich lowlands of the interior. During the unnumbered years of their occupation, the land has set a stamp upon its people—so long on Ahu Ahu that they have forgotten whence they came. Hardy, hospitable, and turbulent, they are true children of the islands, and yet a family apart—ruder and less languid than the people of Samoa or Tahiti, and speaking a harsher tongue. And, more than any other island folk, they live in the past, for ghosts walk on Ahu Ahu, and the living commune nightly with the old dead who lie in the marae.

It was an hour before sunset when we sighted the land—the merest blue irregularity on the horizon, visible from one's perch in the shrouds each time the schooner rose to the crest of a sea. The mellow shout of landfall brought a score of native passengers to their feet; at such a moment one realizes the passionate devotion of the islander to his land. Men sprang into the rigging to gaze ahead with eager exclamations; mothers held up their babies—born on distant plantations—for a first glimpse of Ahu Ahu; seasick old women, emerging from disordered heaps of matting, tottered to the bulwarks with eyes alight. The island had not been visited for six months, and we carried a cargo of extraordinary variety—hardware, bolts of calico, soap, lumber, jewelry, iron roofing, cement, groceries, phonograph records, an unfortunate horse, and several pigs, those inevitable deck-passengers in the island trade. There were scores of cases of bully beef and ship's biscuit—the staple luxuries of modern Polynesia, and, most important of all, six heavy bags of mail.

As we drew near the land, toward midnight, I gave up the attempt to sleep in my berth and went on deck to spread a mat beside Tari, our supercargo, who lay aft of the mainmast, talking in low tones with his wife. It was calm, here in the lee of the island; the schooner slipped through the water with scarcely a sound, rising and falling on the long gentle swell. Faint puffs of air came off the land, bringing a scent of flowers and wood smoke and moist earth. We had been sighted, for lights were beginning to appear in the village; now and then, on a flaw of the breeze, one heard a sigh, long drawn and half inaudible—the voice of the reef. A party of natives, seated on the forward hatch, began to sing. The words were modern and religious, I believe, but the music—indescribably sad, wild, and stirring—carried one back through the centuries to the days when man expressed the dim yearnings of his spirit in communal song. It was a species of chant, with responses; four girls did most of the singing, their voices mingling in barbaric harmonies, each verse ending in a prolonged melodious wail. Precisely as the last note died away, in time with the cadence of the chant, the deep voices of the men took up the response, "Karé, aué!" ("No, alas!") Tari turned to me.

"They sing well," he said, "these Ahu Ahu people; I like to listen to them. That is a hymn, but a stranger would never suspect it—the music is pure heathen. Look at the torchlights in the village; smell the land breeze—it would tell you you were in the islands if you were set down here blindfold from a place ten thousand miles away. With that singing in one's ears, it is not difficult to fancy oneself in a long canoe, at the end of an old-time voyage, chanting a song of thanksgiving to the gods who have brought us safely home."

He is by no means the traditional supercargo of a trading schooner, this Tari; I have wasted a good deal of time speculating as to his origin and the reasons for his choosing this mode of life. An Englishman with a hint of Oxford in his voice—quite obviously what we call a gentleman—a reader of reviews, the possessor (at his charming place on Nukutere) of an enviable collection of books on the natural history and ethnology of the South Seas, he seldom speaks of himself or of his people at home. For twenty years he has been known in this part of the world—trading on Penrhyn, Rakahanga, Tupuai, the atolls of the Paumotu. He speaks a dozen of the island dialects, can join in the singing of Utes, or bring a roar of applause by his skill in the dances of widely separated groups. When the war broke out he enlisted as a private in a New Zealand battalion, and the close of hostilities found him with decorations for gallantry, the rank of captain, and the scars of honorable wounds. As a subject for conversation, the war interests him as little as his own life, but this evening he had emptied a full bottle of rum, and was in the mildly mellow state which is his nearest approach to intoxication.

"I never thought I'd see the old country again," he said, "but the war changed all that. I got a nasty wound in Gallipoli, you see, and they sent me home to convalesce. The family wasn't meant to know I was hurt, but they saw a bit of a thing in the paper [an account of the exploit which won Tari his D.C.M.], and there they were at the dock when the transport off-loaded. I hadn't laid eyes on them for fifteen years.... The old governor—by Jove! he was decent. It was all arranged that I should stop in England when the war was over; I thought myself it was a go. When the job was finished, and I'd got a special dispensation to be demobbed at home, I stood it for a fortnight and then gave up....

"Home is all very well for a week or two, but for a steady thing I seem to fit in better down here. What is it that makes a chap stop in the islands? You must have felt it yourself, and yet it is hard to put into words. This sort of thing, perhaps [he swept his hand through the soft darkness] ... the beauty, the sense of remoteness, the vague and agreeable melancholy of these places. Then I like the way the years slip past—the pleasant monotony of life. My friends at home put up with a kind of dullness which would drive me mad; but here, where there is even less to distinguish one day from another, one seems never to grow fretful or impatient of time. One's horizon narrows, of course; I scarcely look at the newspaper any more. If you stop here you will find yourself unconsciously drifting into the native state of mind, readjusting your sense of values until the great events of the world seem far off and unreal, and your interests are limited to your own business, the vital statistics of your island, and the odd kinks of human nature about you. Perhaps this is the way we are meant to live; at any rate, it brings serenity.

"I've been here too long to sentimentalize about the natives—they have their weak points, and plenty of them. Allowing for these, you'll find the Kanakas a good sort to have about—often amusing, always interesting; at once deep, artful, gay, simple, and childish. At bottom they are not very different from ourselves; it is chiefly a matter of environment. Consider any of the traders who came here as boys—old fellows who will buttonhole you and spend hours abusing the people—the truth is that they have become more native than the men they abuse.

"There are places, like Africa, where one can live among a primitive people and absorb nothing from them; their point of view is too alien, their position in the scale of humanity too widely separated from our own. It is different in the islands. If one could discover the truth, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that these people were distant cousins of ours. The scholars—in whose conclusions I haven't much faith—trace them back, along the paths of successive migrations, through Indonesia to northern India or the land of the Cushites. In any case, I believe that the blood we term Caucasian flows in their veins, the legacy of ancestors separated from the parent stock so long ago that mankind had not yet learned the use of iron. And they are old, these island tribes who were discovering new lands in the Pacific in the days when our forefathers wore the horns of bulls upon their heads. Don't judge them in the present, or even in the time of Cook; they were a dying people then, whose decline had begun five or six hundred years before. It seems to me that a race, like an individual, grows old, loses heart, and fades away. On nearly every island they are dying to-day—a tragedy, an inevitable one, which the coming of the European has hastened, but not caused.

"Whether or not it may be accounted for on grounds of a distant kinship, it is impossible to stop long in the islands without absorbing, to a certain extent, the native point of view. Things which seemed rubbish at first slowly acquire significance; one begins to wonder if, after all, there may not be varieties of knowledge lost to us in the complexities of civilization.... I've seen some queer things myself.

"My wife's mother lives on Ahu Ahu, where her ancestors have been hereditary rulers since Maui fished the island out of the sea. I've known the family a good many years, and long before I married Apakura the old lady was kind enough to take a motherly interest in me. I always put up with her when we touched at Ahu Ahu. Once, after I had been away for several months, I sat down to have a yarn with her, and was beginning to tell about where I'd been and what I'd done when she stopped me. 'No, let me tell you,' she said, with an odd smile; and, upon my honor, she did—down to the details! I got the secret out of her the same evening. She is very friendly, it seems, with an ancestor of hers—a woman named Rakamoana, who lived twenty-eight generations—seven hundred years—ago, and is buried in the big marae behind the village. When one of the family is off on a trip, and my mother-in-law suspects that he is in trouble or not behaving himself, she puts herself into a kind of trance, calls up old Rakamoana, and gets all the facts. I hope the habit won't come into general use—might prove jolly awkward, eh? Seriously, though, I can't account for the things she told me without accepting her own explanation. Strange if there were a germ of truth in the legends of how the old sea-going canoes were navigated—the priests, in a state of trance, directing the helmsmen which way to steer for land....

"There is another old woman on Ahu Ahu whose yarns are worth hearing. Many years ago a Yankee whaling vessel called at the island, and a Portuguese harpooner, who had had trouble with the captain, deserted and hid himself in the bush. The people had taken a fancy to him and refused to give him up, so finally the captain was obliged to sail away without his man. From all accounts this harpooner must have been a good chap; when he proved that he was no common white waster, the chief gave him a bit of land and a girl of good family for a wife—now the old lady of whom I spoke. I think it was tools he needed, or some sort of gear for a house he was building; at any rate, when another whaler touched he told his wife that he was going on a voyage to earn some money and that he might be gone a year. There was a kind of agreement, current in the Pacific in those days, whereby a whaling captain promised to land a man at the point where he had signed him on.

"Well, the harpooner sailed away, and, as might have been expected, his wife never saw him again; but here comes the odd part of the story. The deserted wife, like so many of the Ahu Ahu women, had an ancestor who kept her in touch with current events. Being particularly fond of her husband, she indulged in a trance from time to time, to keep herself informed as to his welfare. Several months after his departure the tragedy occurred—described in detail by the obliging and sympathetic dweller in the marae. It was a kind of vision, as told to me, singularly vivid for an effort of pure imagination—the open Pacific, heaving gently and ruffled by a light air; two boats from rival vessels pursuing the same whale; the Portuguese harpooner standing in the bows of one, erect and intent upon the chase, his iron the first, by a second of time, to strike. Then came a glimpse of the two boats foaming side by side in the wake of the whale; the beginning of the dispute; the lancing and death flurry of an old bull sperm; the rising anger of the two harpooners, as the boats rocked gently beside the floating carcass; the treacherous thrust; the long red blade of the lance standing out between the shoulders of the Portuguese.

"The woman awoke from her trance with a cry of anguish; her husband was dead—she set up the widow's tangi. One might have thought it an excellent tale, concocted to save the face of a deserted wife, if the same vessel had not called at Ahu Ahu within a year, to bring news of the husband's death under the exact circumstances of the vision.

"What is one to believe? If seeing is believing, then count me a believer, for my own eyes have seen an incredible thing. It was on Aitutaki, in the Cook group. An old chief, the descendant of a very ancient family, lay ill in the village. I had turned in early, as I'd promised to go fishing on the reef when the tide served, an hour after midnight. You know how the spirits of the dead were believed to flee westward, to Hawaiki, and how their voices might be heard at night, calling to one another in the sky, as they drove past, high overhead. Early in the evening, as I lay in bed, a boy came into the next room, panting with excitement. He had been to a plantation in the hills, it seemed, and as he returned, just after dusk, had heard the voices of a shouting multitude passing in the air above him. I was tired and paid little attention to his story, but for some reason I found it impossible to sleep. It was a hot night, very still and sultry, with something in the air that made one's nerves twitch every time a coconut frond dropped in the distance. I was still lying awake when my fishing companions came to get me; a little ahead of time, for, like me, they had been unable to sleep. We would wait on the reef, they suggested, where it was sure to be cool, until the tide was right.

"We were sitting on the dry coral, smoking. I had just looked at my watch, I remember; it lacked a few minutes to one o'clock. Our canoes were hauled up on one side of the Arutunga Passage—the western pass, by the way. There was no moon. Suddenly one of the boys touched me. 'What is that?' he exclaimed, in a startled voice. I looked up; the others were rising to their feet. Two flaring lights were moving across the lagoon toward us—together and very swiftly. Nearer and nearer they came, until they revealed the outlines of a canoe larger than any built in the islands nowadays—a canoe of the old time, with a flaming torch set at prow and stern. While we stood there, staring in silence, it drew abreast of us, moving with the rush of a swift motor boat, and passed on—out to sea. I was too amazed to think clearly until I heard one of the boys whisper to another, 'Kua mate te ariki—the chief is dead; the great canoe bears him out to the west.' We launched our canoes and crossed the lagoon to the village. Women were wailing; yes, the old man was dead—he had drawn his last breath a little before one o'clock. Remember that I saw this thing myself.... Perhaps it was a dream—if so, we all dreamed alike."

It was late. The singing died away; the lights in the village went out one by one. The passage in the Ahu Ahu reef is a bad place by daylight—the chances were that no canoes would risk it till dawn. Tari struck a match for an instant and lay down on the mat beside his wife. In the little flare of light I saw her sleeping in the unconscious manner of a child.

I know their story—a pretty one, in pleasant contrast to the usual ignoble and transitory loves of white and brown. Apakura is the daughter of the principal family of this island—her mother and father for many years the warm friend of Tari. He had petted the child from the time she was three; she was always on the beach to meet the canoe that brought him ashore, and he, for his part, never forgot the small gifts for which she waited with sparkling eyes. On his rambles about the island the little girl followed Tari with the devotion of a dog; many a time, clambering along the base of the cliffs at dawn, his first knowledge of her presence came with the shrill cry of, "Tiaké mai, Tari!" and he waited while his small follower managed some difficult pile of coral in the rear. Their friendship had only Tari's two or three visits a year to feed on, but neither forgot, and in the course of time, as the child learned to read and write, a correspondence began—very serious on her side, pleased and amused on his. When he went away to the war she was eleven—a slim, dark-eyed child; when he returned she was sixteen, and a woman, though he did not know it.

On this occasion, in the evening, when the rest of the family had gone to bed, he sat talking with Apakura's mother—or, rather, listening while the old woman told one of her stories of life on Ahu Ahu, equally fascinating and long drawn out. It is not difficult to reconstruct the scene in imagination—Tari comfortable in bare feet and a pareu, half reclining against the wall as he smoked his pipe in absent-minded puffs; the woman cross-legged on the floor, leaning forward in earnest speech—her voice rising, falling, and dying to a whisper in the extraordinary manner of the Polynesian teller of tales; her hands from time to time falling simultaneously with a loud slap to her knees, in emphasis of some point in the narrative. The story ended, little by little the mother led the conversation to the subject of her daughter. Tari began to praise the girl.

"What do you think of her," asked the old woman, "now that you have been away these five years?"

"There is no other girl like her," said Tari.

"Since that is so, take her with you; we shall be pleased, all of us—I in particular, who look on you as a son. She is a good girl; she can sew, she can cook, and the young men say that she is beautiful."

"You propose that I take her as a wife?" exclaimed the astonished Tari, to whom, in truth, the idea had not occurred.

"Yes. Why not? You need a wife, now that the little affair of Tukonini has blown over."

"But think, mamma—I am forty and the child is sixteen; it is not fitting."

"Young wives are best if they are faithful; Apakura will never look at another man."

"I will think it over," said Tari; "let us leave it so. Not this year, at any rate—she is too young."

As he bade her good night and turned to go to his sleeping place the old woman spoke again.

"Bear one thing in mind," she said, with a smile; "it will help you to decide. Consider, now and then, the thought of my daughter married to another."

In the end, as is often the case, it was Apakura who settled the matter. Next morning Tari was busy with some stock taking and did not board the schooner till the last moment, or notice—in his preoccupation—the mysterious smiles with which the crew greeted him. They were a dozen miles offshore before he folded the last of his papers, lit a pipe, and went on deck for a breath of air. The old woman's last words stuck unpleasantly in his mind, I fancy, as he stood there smoking, with his back to the companionway. All at once he saw the helmsman—an Ahu Ahu boy he had known since childhood—lift his eyes from the binnacle and grin from ear to ear; at the same moment Tari felt a hand slip into his own, and heard a small, familiar voice say, "I am here." It was Apakura—more serious than usual and a little frightened, but not to be put off longer. They were married in Tahiti a fortnight later.

It was Apakura's voice that awakened me. She was leaning over the bulwark in eager conversation with her mother, who had come off in the first canoe. The air was fresh with the cool of dawn; in the east the sky was flushing behind scattered banks of trade-wind clouds, tinted in wonderfully delicate shades of terra cotta. A dozen big outrigger canoes, of the type peculiar to this island, were coming out through the passage, each paddled by four men, who shouted as their heavy craft dashed through the breakers.

Little by little, not at all after the manner of traditional dawn in the tropics, the light increased, until Ahu Ahu lay fully revealed before us—the smoking reef, the shallow lagoon, and the cliffs, their summits plumed with coconut palms. A crowd of islanders was already gathering on the reef, and I could see others making their way down the steep path from the settlement. As the sun rose the colors of the scene grew stronger—green palms, gray cliffs, white walls of the village, pale blue of the sky, azure of the sea water. There is no color in the world—that I have seen—like the blue of the water off the Ahu Ahu reef; so vivid, so intense, one felt that a tumbler of it, held up to the sun, would be a mass of sapphire, or that a handkerchief dipped in it would emerge strongly dyed.

Apakura was going ashore with her mother. Standing in the narrow canoe, she directed the stowing of her luggage—a mat, a bright patchwork quilt, a box of cedar wood. Tari was awaiting the coming of the traders, for the schooner was stocked with good Tahiti rum, and the rites of welcome would take place on board.

"There they are," he said, pointing to two white figures wading gingerly across the shallow lagoon to the reef; "you're going to meet a pair of rare ones—they've been hard doers in their time!"

The distant figures reached the edge of the boat passage and I could see a boy beckoning them into a waiting canoe, but now they stopped and seemed to argue, with many gestures. Tari chuckled.

"No use trying to hurry them," he told me; "they are discussing the loss of the Esperanza. She went ashore here in the late 'nineties—a full-rigged ship. Peter was one of her crew; Charley had just come here to trade, and saw the whole thing. They've spent twenty years thrashing out the question of whether or not the wreck might have been avoided. Every morning, after breakfast, Charley strolls across to Peter's house to smoke a pipe and discuss some of the fine points; every evening, after tea, Peter returns the visit, and the argument goes on till bedtime. Charley's an American—an old man now, close to seventy. He put in thirty years on Hiva Oa, in the Marquesas, before he came to Ahu Ahu; I'd like to have some of his memories. Notice his arms if he pulls his sleeves up. He has sixteen children on Hiva Oa and fourteen here—all numbered; he says he never can remember their heathen names. When his wife died in the north he gave all his land to the children and left on the first schooner. She touched at Papeete, but he didn't go ashore. Then she made Ahu Ahu, where he landed and established himself a second time. He has never seen a motor car, a telephone, or an electric light."

Presently the canoe came dancing alongside, and the two old men clambered painfully over the rail—Peter thin, hatchet faced, and stooping; Charley the ruin of a magnificent man. He towered above any of us on the deck—this ancient dweller among cannibals—still erect, his head still carried proudly, but the flesh hanging loose and withered on his bones. It was easy to fancy the admiration he must have inspired forty years ago among the wild people, in whose eyes physical strength and perfection were the great qualities of a man. In the cabin, while the cook squeezed limes for the first of many rum punches, Charley took off his tunic of white drill, and as he sat there in his singlet I saw that his arms and chest, like his face, were tanned to an indelible dull brown, and that patterns in tattooing ran from wrist to shoulder—greenish blue and barbaric.

I never learned his history—it must have been a thing to stir the imagination. Once, as we sat drinking, Tari mentioned Stevenson, and the old man's face brightened.

"É," he said, slowly, in native fashion, "I remember him well; he came to Hiva Oa with the Casco. A funny fellow he was ... thin! There was nothing to him but skin and bones. And questions—he'd ask you a hundred in a minute! I didn't take to him at first, but he was all right. He didn't care how he dressed; one day I saw him walking on the beach with nothing on but a pair of drawers."

The cook plied back and forth, removing empty glasses and bringing full ones. As each tray was set on the table, Peter—typical of a lively and garrulous old age—seized his glass and held it up.

"Hurrah!" he exclaimed. "Down she goes," drawled Charley, and Tari murmured, "Cheerio!" At the end of two hours Charley's eyes were beginning to glaze, and Peter was mumbling vaguely of the Esperanza. Tari rose and beckoned to me.

"Make yourselves at home," he said to the old men; "I've got to go ashore. Akatara will give you lunch whenever you want it."

As our canoe made for the reef my companion told me there was to be a feast in his honor, and that his wife wished me to be present. We shot into the passage without a wetting; the people crowded about Tari, laughing, shaking his hand, speaking all at once—an unmistakable warmth of welcome.

The settlement, reached by a short, steep trail, lies at the base of a break in the cliffs. At the door of her mother's house Apakura met us—turned out, as becomes a supercargo's wife, in the choicest of trade finery. She wore heavy golden earrings; bands of gold were on her fingers, and her loose frock was of pale embroidered silk. Her mother—the keen-eyed old woman I had seen in the canoe—made me welcome.

In the afternoon, when the feast was over and we rose stiffly, crammed with fish and taro and baked pig, I asked Tari if he knew a youngster who would show me the best path to the interior of the island. A boy of ten was soon at the door—a dark-skinned child with a great shock of hair, and legs disfigured by the scars of old coral cuts.

A twisting path, cobbled, and wide enough to walk two abreast, led us to the summit. The stones were worn smooth by the passage of bare feet, for, excepting fish, all the food of the village is brought over this road from the plantations to the sea. There could be no doubt that the ring of cliffs on which we stood was an ancient reef; in places one could recognize the forms of coral, imbedded, with shells of many varieties, in the metamorphosed rock. Here and there one found pockets of a material resembling marble, veined and crystalline—formed from the coral by processes impossible to surmise. The bulk of the rock is the fine-grained white limestone called makatea in the eastern Pacific. The level summit of the cliffs, over which, in centuries gone by, the sea had washed and thundered, forms a narrow plain, sparsely wooded and cultivated in spots where a thin soil has gathered in the hollows.

We halted under the palms crowning the inner brink. The trail wound down giddily ahead—so steep in places that ladders had been fastened to the rock. To right and left of us the cliffs were sheer walls of limestone, rising from a level little above that of the sea. The low hills of the interior, volcanic and fern covered, draining in every direction toward the foot of the makatea, have formed a circling belt of swamp land, on which all the taro of the island was grown. One could look down on the beds from where we stood, a mosaic of pale green, laid out by heathen engineers in days beyond the traditions of men.

Another time, perhaps, I will tell you of that afternoon—how we climbed down the trail and walked the dikes among the taro; how my escort increased to a merry company as the people began to come after food for the evening meal; of a boisterous swim in a pool beneath a waterfall; of how I found the remains of an ancient house, built of squared stone so long ago that over one end of it the wooded earth lay two yards deep.

Toward evening, in the bush at the edge of the taro swamps, I came upon a large house, built of bamboo and pandanus in the native fashion. A man was standing framed in the doorway—a tall, white man, dressed in pajamas of silk. His gold-rimmed spectacles, gray beard, and expression of intelligent kindliness were vaguely academic—out of place as the cultivated voice which invited me to stop. The boys and girls escorting me squatted on their heels outside; a brace of pretty children, shy and half naked, scurried past as I entered the house. My host waved his hand toward a mat. There was only one chair in the room, standing before a table on which I saw a small typewriter and a disordered heap of manuscript. Otherwise the place was unfurnished except for books, ranged in crude bookcases, tier upon tier, stacked here and there in precarious piles, standing in rows along the floor.

"I am glad to see you," he said, as he offered me a cigarette from a case of basketwork silver; "it is not often that a European passes my house."

I shall not give his name, or attempt to disguise him with a fictitious one; it is enough to say that he is one of the handful of real scholars who have devoted their lives to Polynesian research. I had read his books, published long before, and wondered—more than once—whether he still lived and where he hid himself. The years of silence had been spent (he told me) in a comparative study of the ocean dialects through which he hoped to solve the riddle of the Pacific—to determine whence came the brown and straight-haired people of the islands. Now, with the material in hand, he had chosen Ahu Ahu as a place of solitude, where he might complete his task of compilation undisturbed.

"On the whole," he said, with agreeable readiness to speak of his work, "I am convinced that they came from the west. The Frenchman's theory that the race originated in New Zealand, like the belief that they migrated westward from the shores of America, is more picturesque, more stirring to the imagination; but the evidence is too vague. If one investigates the possibilities of an eastward migration, on the other hand, one finds everywhere in the western islands the traces of their passage. Far out in the Orient, in isolated groups, off the coast of Sumatra, about Java and Celebes, and in the Arafura Sea, I can show you people of the true Polynesian type. Even in such places, where the last migration must have passed nearly two thousand years ago, scraps of evidence remain—a word, a curious custom, the manner of carrying a basket. These things might seem coincidences if the trail did not grow warmer as one travels east.

"Though no trace of their blood is left, New Guinea must at one time have been a halting place in the migration. Papua it is called, and one finds the word current in Polynesia, meaning a garden, a rich land. The natives of New Guinea are as unlike the people of the eastern Pacific, I should say, as the average American or Englishman, and yet throughout New Guinea there is a most curious cropping out of Polynesian words, pointing to a very ancient intercourse between the races. Consider the word for woman among the Polynesians. In Rarotonga, it is vaine; in Tahiti, vahine; in the Marquesas, vehine; in Hawaii, wahine; in Samoa, fafine. The same root runs through the dialects of Papua. In Motu, woman is habine; in Kerepunu, vavine; in Aroma, babine; and in Motumotu it is ua, which in this part of the Pacific means, variously, female, seed, and rain. I could cite you dozens of similar examples. Now and then one comes across something that sets one's imagination to work ... as you must know, the word for sun in the islands is ra, but in Tahiti they have another word, mahana. In New Guinea, thirty-five hundred miles away, and with all Melanesia between, the tribes of the South Cape call the sun mahana. What a puzzle it is!

"Though it may be the merest coincidence, that ra has a flavor of Egypt. I wonder if there could be a connection? I used to know a girl in Tahiti whose strange and rather beautiful name—hereditary as far back as the records of her family went—was that of a queen of Egypt who ruled many hundreds of years before Christ. But I mustn't ride my hobby too fast.

"It is a pity you can't stop on Ahu Ahu for a time—there are not many islands so unspoiled. I've grown very fond of the place; I doubt if I ever leave it permanently. If you are interested in ghosts, you had better change your mind. I have a fine collection here; the house is built on the site of a tumble-down marae. There is our white rooster, the spirit of an old chief, which appears during the new moon—perfectly harmless and friendly, but the people rather dread him. Then we have a ghostly pig, very bad indeed; and a pair of malignant women, who walk about at night with arms and long hair entwined, and are suspected of ghastly appetites. I shall not say whether or not I have seen any of these; perhaps it is living too much alone, but I am not so skeptical as I was...."

It was not easy to part with such a host, but the sun was low over the makatea, and the prospect of crossing the dikes among the taro and scaling the cliff by dark drove me at last to take reluctant leave.

Lamps were shining in the village when I returned; in some of the houses I heard the voice of the father, reading aloud solemnly from the Bible in the native tongue; in others, the people were assembled to chant their savage and melancholy hymns. Tari was alone on the veranda, smoking in his absent-minded fashion, and motioned me to sit down beside him. I told him how I had spent the afternoon. When I had finished he puffed on in silence for a time.

"It is a strange place, Ahu Ahu," he said at last "My mother-in-law has finished her prayers, sung her himines, and put away the family Bible. Now she has gone to the house of one of her pals for a session with old Rakamoana. Like the land itself, the people are relics of an elder time—pure heathen at heart."

CHAPTER V

A Memory of Mauké

We sighted Mauké at dawn. The cabin lamp was still burning when the boy brought my coffee; I drank it, lit a cigarette, and went on deck in a pareu. The skipper himself was at the wheel; half a dozen men were in the shrouds; the native passengers were sitting forward, cross-legged in little groups, munching ship's biscuit and gazing ahead for the expected land.

The day broke wild and gray, with clouds scudding low over the sea, and squalls of rain. Since we had left Mangaia, the day before, it had blown heavily from the southeast; a big sea was running, but in spite of sixty tons of copra the schooner was reeling off the knots in racing style, running almost free, with the wind well aft of the beam, rising interminably on the back of each passing sea, and taking the following slope with a swoop and a rush. We had no log; it was difficult to guess our position within a dozen miles; the low driving clouds, surrounding us like a curtain, made it impossible to see more than a few hundred yards. Until an observation could be obtained, the landfall was a matter of luck and guesswork. Our course had been laid almost due north-northeast—to pass a little to the west of Mauké—which gave us the chance of raising Mitiaro or Atiu if we missed the first island; but ocean currents are uncertain things, and with a horizon limited to less than half a mile, nothing would be easier than to slip past the trio of low islands and into the stretch of lonely ocean beyond. Every trading skipper is accustomed to face such situations; one can only maintain a sharp lookout and hold on one's course until there is an opportunity to use the sextant, or until it becomes obvious that the land has been passed.

A squall of rain drove down on us; for five minutes, while we shivered and the scuppers ran fresh water, our narrow circle of vision was blotted out. Then suddenly, with the effect of a curtain drawn aside, the clouds broke to the east, flooding the sea with light. A shout went up. Close ahead and to starboard, so near that we could see the white of breakers on the reef, was Mauké—densely wooded to the water's edge, a palm top rising here and there above the thick bush of iron woods. Next moment the curtain descended; gray clouds and rearing seas surrounded us; it was as though we had seen a vision of the land, unreal as the blue lakes seen at midday on the desert. But the skipper was shouting orders in harsh Mangaian; the schooner was swinging up into the wind, the blocks were clicking and purring as half a dozen boys swayed on the mainsheet.

Presently the land took vague form through the mist of squalls; we were skirting the reef obliquely, drawing nearer the breakers as the settlement came in view. A narrow boat passage, into which an ugly surf was breaching, had been blasted through the hard coral of the reef; a path led up the sloping land beyond, between a double row of canoe houses to the bush. A few people were gathering by the canoe houses; it was evident that we had just been sighted, and that it would be some time before a boat could put out, if, indeed, the boatmen were willing to risk the surf. Meanwhile we could only stand off and on until they came out to us, for the skipper had no intention of risking his ship's boat and the lives of his men on such a forbidding shore. "Arari!" he sang out, dwelling long on the last syllable of this Cook Island version of "hard alee." The schooner rounded in to the wind with a ponderous deliberation calculated to make the nerves of a fair-weather sailor twitch; she seemed to hesitate, like a fat and fluttering grandmother; at last, after an age of bobbing and ducking into the head sea, while boom tackles were made fast and headsails backed, she made up her mind, and filled away on the port tack.

Riley, the American coconut planter, who was recruiting labor for the season on his island, turned to me with a wink. "If this old hooker was mine," he remarked in a voice meant to reach the skipper's ears, "I'd start the engine every time I came about; she can't sail fast enough to keep steerageway!"

The skipper sniffed a British sniff; they are old friends. "If this damn fine schooner was yours," he observed, without turning his head, "she'd have been piled up long ago—like as not in broad daylight, on an island a thousand feet high."

Riley chuckled. "Too early for an argument," he said. "Let's go below and have a drink."

I have not often run across a more interesting man than Riley. Thrown together, as he and I have been, in circumstances which make for an unusual exchange of confidence, I have learned more of him in two months than one knows of many an old acquaintance at home. At thirty-five years of age he is a living object lesson for those who bewail the old days of adventure and romance, and wish that their lives had been cast in other times. His blood is undiluted Irish; he has the humor, the imagination, the quick sympathy of the race, without the Irish heritage of instability. Born in South Boston and reared with only the sketchiest of educations, he set out to make his way in the world at an age when most boys are playing marbles and looking forward with dread to the study of algebra. For fifteen years he wandered, gathering a varied background of experience. He worked in mills; he drifted west and shipped as cabin boy on vessels plying the Great Lakes; he drifted farther west to become a rider of the range. Finally he reached San Francisco and took to the sea. He has been a sealer, an Alaska fisherman, an able-bodied seaman on square-riggers sailing strange seas. He has seen Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope; he speaks of the ports of India, China, Africa, the Java Sea, as you would speak of Boston or New York.

In the days when a line of schooners ran from San Francisco to Tahiti, touching at the Marquesas on the way, he felt a call to the South Seas, and shipped for a round trip before the mast. When he returned to San Francisco a change seemed to have come over him; the old, wandering life had lost its charm—had gone flat and stale. Like many another, he had eaten of the wild plantain unaware. The evenings of carousal ashore no longer tempted him; even the long afternoons of reading (for reading has always been this curious fellow's chief delight), stretched on his bed in a sailor's boarding house, had lost their flavor—the print blurred before his eyes, and in its place he saw lands of savage loveliness rising from a warm blue sea; shadowy and mysterious valleys, strewn with the relics of a forgotten race; the dark eyes of a girl in Tai-o-Hae.

Remember that Riley was both a sailor and an Irishman—a rough idealist, keenly susceptible to beauty and the sense of romance. It is stated that the men who live romance are seldom aware of it; this may be true, though I doubt it—certainly in Riley's case the theory does not work out. He is the most modest of men, untainted by a trace of egoism; in his stories, superbly told with the Irish gift for circumstantial detail and dramatic effect, the teller's part is always small. And yet as one listens, thrilled by the color and artistry of the tale, one is all the while aware that this man appraises his memories at their full value—reviews them with a ripened gusto, an ever-fresh appreciation. In short, he is one of those fortunate, or unfortunate, men for whom realities, as most of us know them, do not exist; men whose eyes are incapable of seeing drab or gray, who find mystery and fresh beauty in what we call the commonplace.

It is scarcely necessary to say that Riley was aboard the next schooner bound south for the islands. Nukuhiva knew him for a time, but the gloom and tragedy of that land—together with an episode of domestic infelicity—were overpowering to a man of his temperament. From the Marquesas he went to Tahiti, and his wanderings ended in the Cook group, six hundred miles to the West. Perhaps the finding of his journey's end wrought the change, perhaps it was due to his rather practical Tahitian wife—in any case, the wanderer ceased to rove, the spendthrift began to save and plan. In the groups to the eastward he had picked up a smattering of coconut lore; it was not long before he got a berth as superintendent of a small plantation. With a native wife and the Irishman's knack for languages, he soon mastered the dialect of his group; he is one of a very few men who speak it with all the finer shadings. This accounts in part for his success with labor—the chief difficulty of the planter throughout Polynesia. To one interested as I am in the variations of this oceanic tongue, it is a genuine pleasure to talk with Riley. In school he learned to read and write; beyond that he is entirely self-educated. A good half of his earnings, I should say, in the days when he followed the sea, were spent on books; a native intelligence enabled him to criticize and select; he has read enormously, and what he has read he has remembered. Each time a new subject attracted him he hastened to the book shops of San Francisco, or Liverpool, or Singapore, and gathered a little forecastle library of reference. Like most intelligent men in this part of the world, he has grown interested in the subject of Polynesian research; it is odd to hear him discuss—with a strong accent of South Boston and the manner of a professor of ethnology—some question of Maori chronology, or the variations in a causative prefix. Once he made clear to me a matter often referred to in print, but which I had never properly understood. He was speaking of the language of Tahiti.

"When you hear a Tahitian talk," he said, "it sounds different, but really it's the same as Hawaiian, or Marquesan, or Rarotongan, or New Zealand Maori. Tahiti is the oldest settled place, and the language has kind of rotted away there. Nowadays the Tahitian has lost the strong, harsh sounds of the old lingo, the k and ng; in place of them there is simply a catch between two vowels. If you know Rarotongan and understand the system of change, you can get on all right in Tahiti. Take our word akatangi—to play a musical instrument. Tangi means 'wail' or 'weep'; aka is the old causative prefix; the combination means 'cause to weep.' Now let's figure that word out in Tahitian. First we've got to take out the k and ng; that leaves a bad start—it doesn't sound good, so the Tahitians stick on an f at the beginning. That's all there is to it; fa'ata'i is the word. It makes me laugh to think of when I first came down here. I was working in Tahiti, and when I came home in the evening my girl would look up from her sewing and sing out, 'O Riley!' 'For the love of Mike,' I'd tell her, 'don't you know my name yet? It's Riley, not O'Riley!' Finally I caught on; I'd been fooled on the same proposition as Cook and all the rest of them. You remember they called the island Otahiti. That O is simply a special form of the verb used before personal pronouns and proper nouns. The old navigators, when the canoes came out to meet them, pointed to the land and asked its name. 'O Tahiti' said the natives ('It is Tahiti'). My girl didn't mean to call me O'Riley at all; she was simply saying, 'It's Riley.'"

A serious white man, particularly when he is able to recruit and handle native labor, is always in demand in the islands; it was not long before Riley's talents were recognized; now he is manager and part owner of an entire atoll. I have listened with a great deal of interest to his accounts of the life there. Every year, at about Christmas time, a schooner comes to load his copra and take his boys back to their respective islands. Not a soul is left on the atoll; Riley boards the schooner with his wife and takes passage to Papeete for a couple of months of civilization. When the time is up he makes a tour of the Cook group to recruit twenty or thirty boys for the new season, and is landed on his island with a nine months' supply of medicine, provisions, and reading matter. He is the only white man on the atoll; one would suppose such a life deadly monotonous and lonely, but just now he is pining to get back. It is really the pleasantest of lives, he says; enough routine in keeping the men properly at work, superb fishing when one desires a touch of sport, plenty of time to read and think, the healthiest climate in the world, and a bit of trouble now and then to give the spice a true Irishman needs.

Riley is a man of medium size, with thick brown hair and eyes of Celtic dark blue, perpetually sparkling with humor. I have never seen a stronger or more active man of his weight; on his atoll he spends an hour every day in exercise, running, jumping, working with dumbbells and Indian clubs. From head to foot he is burnt a deep, ruddy brown—a full shade darker than the tint of his native wife. Sometimes, he says, he works himself into such a pink of condition that he aches to pick a fight with the first comer, but I fancy he finds trouble enough to satisfy another man. Once a huge, sullen fellow from the Gambier group attempted to spear him, and Riley called all of his men in from their work, appointed the foreman referee, and beat the two-hundred-and-twenty-pound native fierce and lithe and strong as a tiger—slowly and scientifically, to a pulp. On another occasion, a half-savage boy, from a far-off island of the southern Paumotus, took a grudge against the manager and bided his time with the cunning of a wild animal. The chance came one afternoon when Riley was asleep in the shade behind his house. The Paumotan stole up with a club and put him still sounder asleep with a blow on the head that laid his scalp open and nearly fractured his skull. Half a dozen kicks from the ball of a toughened foot stove in the ribs on one side of his chest; with that, the native left his victim, very likely thinking him dead. Riley's wife, from whom I got the story, was asleep in the house at the time; toward evening she went to look for her husband, and found him stretched out, bloody and unconscious, on the sand. In spite of her agitation—her kind are not much use in a crisis—she managed to get him to the house and revive him. Riley's first act was to drink half a tumbler of whisky; his second, to send for the foreman. The Paumotan boy had disappeared; overcome by forebodings of evil, he had taken a canoe and paddled off to hide himself on an uncleared islet across the lagoon. Riley gave the foreman careful instructions; early in the morning he was to take all the boys and spend the day, if necessary, in running down the fugitive, who under no circumstances was to be injured or roughly handled.

They brought the boy in at noon—deadly afraid at first, sullen and relieved when he learned his punishment was no worse than to stand up to the manager before the assembled plantation hands. It must have been a grievous affair; Tetua could scarcely describe it without tears. Riley was still sick and dizzy; his ribs were taped so tightly that he could breathe with only half his lungs, and a two-inch strip of plaster covered the wound on his head. The Paumotan was fresh and unhurt; he outweighed his antagonist by twenty pounds, and fought with confidence and bitterness. The Kanaka is certainly among the strongest men of the world, a formidable adversary in a rough-and-tumble fight. It went badly with Riley for a time; the boy nearly threw him, and a blow on his broken ribs almost made him faint, but in the end—maddened by pain and the thought of the treacherous attack—he got his man down and might have killed him if the foreman and half a dozen others had not intervened.

Riley's island is a true atoll—a broad lagoon inclosed by an oval sweep of reef along which are scattered islets of varying size. Many people must have lived on it in the past; everywhere there are traces of man's occupation. A dozen inhabitants were there within the memory of living men, but the dead outnumbered the living too heavily—the place became unbearable to them, and in the end a schooner took them away.

The outlying Cook Islands are places full of interest. I determined, when I began this letter, to give you a real account of Mauké—the island itself, its people, the number of tons of copra produced annually, and other enlightening information. But somehow, when one begins to write of this part of the world it seems a hopeless task to stick to a train of facts—there are too many diverging lines of fancy; too many intangible stimuli to thought, stirring to the imagination.

Our landing on Mauké was a ticklish business, Like Mangaia, Mitiaro, and Atiu, this island is of mixed volcanic and raised-coral origin—the pinnacle of a submerged peak, ringed with millions of tons of coral, and without any lagoon worthy of the name. The polyps have built a sort of platform around the land, low inshore and highest—as seems usually the case—just before it drops off into the sea. Breaching across the outer ridge, the surf fills a narrow belt of shallows between it and the shore; the result is a miniature edition of a lagoon—a place of rocky pools where children wade knee-deep, on the lookout for crayfish and baby octopus. On the outer edge the reef is steep, too, dropping off almost at the perpendicular. It is difficult to realize, when one has been brought up on the friendly coasts of America, that if a boat capsizes off these reefs one must swim offshore and wait to be picked up—that it is wiser to chance the sharks than to attempt a landing in the surf, for the sea is breaking along the summit of a sunken cliff—jagged and sharp as broken glass, poisonous as the venom of a snake.

They came out to us in a whaleboat; Riley, the supercargo, and I were the first to go ashore. As we pulled away from the schooner a high-pitched argument began. One of the principal men of the island had come out as a passenger and was sitting beside me. He insisted that as they had got off safely from the boat passage it was best to return the same way. The boat steerer disagreed; it was all very well to put out from the passage, with a score of men to hold the boat until the moment came, and launch her out head-on to the breakers, but now the situation was different; the passage was narrow; it must be entered just so, and a mishap might have unpleasant consequences in such a surf. The steersman had the best of it; he took us a quarter of a mile beyond the passage, and let his men rest on their oars off a place where the reef seemed a little lower than elsewhere.

Each time we swung up to the crest of a swell I got a look at the surf, and the prospect was not reassuring. Once or twice, as the backwash poured off in a frothy cascade, I caught a glimpse of the coral—reddish-black, jagged and forbidding. Little by little we drew near the land until the boat lay just where the waves began to tower for the final rush; the oarsmen backed water gently—the boat steerer turned his head nervously this way and that, glancing at the reef ahead and at the rearing water behind. I thought of a day, many years before, when my father had taken me for a first experience of the "chutes," and our little boat seemed to pause for an instant at the summit of the tower before it tilted forward and flew down the steep slope to the water—infinitely far off and below. The feeling was the same—fear mingling with delight, an almost painful exhilaration.

All of us, saving the watchful figure in the stern, were waiting for a signal which would make the oarsmen leap into activity, the passengers clench their teeth and grip the rail. Suddenly it came—a harsh shout. Six oars struck the water at once; the whaleboat gathered way; a big sea rose behind us, lifted us gently on its back, and swept us toward the reef. Next moment I saw that we had started a breath too late. We were going like the wind, it was true, but not tilted forward on the crest as we should have been; the wave was gradually passing beneath us. Riley glanced at me and shook his head with a humorous turndown of the mouth. It was too late to stop—the men were pulling desperately, their long oars bending at every stroke. When the sea broke we were slipping down into the trough behind; as we passed over the edge of the reef the wave was beginning its backward wash. There were shouts; I found myself up to my waist in a foaming rush of water, struggling with might and main to keep my footing and to hold the boat from slipping off into the sea. We stopped her just on the brink; her keel grated on the coral; another sea was coming at us, towering high above our heads. Riley, the supercargo, and I leaped aboard in response to a sharp command. The boys held her stern-on to the last; as they scrambled over the sides the sea caught us, half swamping the boat and lifting her stern high in the air. She tilted wildly as her bow crashed on the coral, but a rare piece of luck saved her from turning broadside on. Next moment we were over the reef and gliding smoothly into the shallow water beyond. As I drew a long, satisfying breath I heard Riley chuckle. "I think I'll get a job diving for shell," he remarked. "I'll swear I haven't breathed for a good three minutes!"

When we stood on the beach a dozen men came forward, smiling, to greet their friend Rairi. With a decently pronounceable name—from the native standpoint—Riley has got off easily; I never tire of wondering what these people will call a white man. They seem to prefer the surname if it can be pronounced; if not, they try the given name, and Charley becomes Teari, or Johnny, Tioni. If this fails, or if they take a dislike to one, the fun begins. I have a friend who, unless he leaves the islands, will be called Salt Pork all his life; and I know another man—a second-rate colonial of the intolerant kind—who goes blissfully about his business all unaware that hundreds of people know him by no other name than Pig Dung. No doubt you have noticed another thing down here—the deceptive simplicity of address. In these eastern islands the humblest speaks to the most powerful without any title of respect, with nothing corresponding to our "mister" or "sir." At first one is inclined to believe that here is the beautiful and ideal democracy—the realization of the communist's dream—and there are other things which lead to the same conclusion. Servants, for one example, are treated with extraordinary consideration and kindliness; when the feast is over the mistress of the household is apt as not to dance with the man who feeds her pigs, or the head of the family to take the arm of the girl who has been waiting on his guests. The truth is that this impression of equality is false; there are not many places in the world where a more rigid social order exists—not of caste, but of classes. In the thousand or fifteen hundred years that they have inhabited the islands the Polynesians have worked out a system of human relationships nearer the ultimate, perhaps, than our own idealists would have us believe. Wealth counts for little, birth for everything; it is useless for an islander to think of raising himself in a social way—where he is born he dies, and his children after him. On the other hand, except for the abstract pleasure of position, there is little to make the small man envious of the great; he eats the same food, his dress is the same, he works as little or as much, and the relations between the two are of the pleasantest. There is a really charming lack of ostentation in these islands, where everything is known about everyone, and it is useless to pretend to be what one is not. That is at the root of it all—here is one place in the world, at least, where every man is sure of himself.

We were strolling up the path between the canoe houses when Riley stopped me. "Come and have a look," he said; "this is the only island I know of where you can see an old-fashioned double canoe."

There were two of them in the shed we entered, under a roof of battered galvanized iron—long, graceful hulls fashioned from the trunks of trees, joined in pairs by timbers of ironwood laid across the gunwales and lashed down with sinnet. They were beautifully finished—scraped smooth and decorated with carving. In these craft, my companion told me, the men of Mauké still voyage to Atiu and Mitiaro, as they had done for generations before Cook sailed through the group. There is an ancient feud between Mauké and Atiu; it is curious how hard such grudges die. The men of Atiu were the most warlike of all the Cook Islanders; even in these times of traders and schools and missionaries no firearms are allowed on the island. Time after time, in the old days, they raided Mauké, stealing by night upon the sleeping villages, entering each house to feel the heads of the sleepers. When they felt the large head of a warrior they seized his throat and killed him without noise; the children and women—the small heads and the heads with long hair—were taken back alive to Atiu. Terrible scenes have been enacted under the old ironwoods of Mauké, when the raiders, maddened with the heat of killing, danced in the firelight about the opened ovens and gorged on the bodies of the slain; for the Cook-Islanders, excepting perhaps the people of Aitutaki, were cannibals as fierce as the Maoris of New Zealand or the tawny savages of the Marquesas. Why should Aitutaki have bred a gentler and finer people? The group is not widely scattered as islands go; there must have been fighting and intermarriage for ages past. Yet any man who has been here long can tell you at a glance from which island a native hails; even after my few weeks I am beginning to have an eye for the differences. The Mangaian is certainly the most distinct, recognizable at once by his dark skin, his wide, ugly mouth, his uncouth and savage manner. The full-blooded Rarotongan, who will soon be a rarity, is another type—handsome in a square-cut leonine way, with less energy and far more dignity of presence. The people of Aitutaki are different still—fair as the average Tahitian, and pleasing in features and manner; I have seen girls from that island who would be called beautiful in any country. These differences are not easy to account for, it seems to me, when one considers that the islanders are all of one race, tracing their ancestry back to common sources and speaking a common tongue.

The trader, a friend of Riley's, took us to his house for lunch. The day was Sunday and a feast was already preparing, so we were spared the vocal agonies of the pig. Times must be changing—I have seen very few traders of the gin-drinking type one expects to find in the South Seas; nowadays they seem to be rather quiet, reflective men, who like to read and play their phonographs in the evening, and drink excellent whisky with soda from a sparklet bottle. This one was no exception; I found him full of intelligence and a dreamy philosophy which kept him content in this forgotten corner of the world. He was young and English; there were cricket bats and blazers in his living room, and shelves filled with the kind of books one can read over and over again. He was pessimistic over Riley's chances of getting men—the people of Mauké were growing lazier each year, he said, and seemed to get along with less and less of the European things for which, at one time, they had worked. As for copra, they no longer bothered much with it; the nuts were left to sprout under the palms. The taro patches were running down; the coffee and breadfruit dropped off the trees unpicked; the oranges, which brought a good price when a vessel came to take them off, were allowed to drop and rot.

As we sat smoking after lunch, a native boy came in, with a vague air of conspiracy, to hold a whispered conversation with Riley. When he had gone the American winked at our host and turned to me.

"There's a beer tub going full blast out in the bush," he said. "I think I'll drop in on them and see if I can pick up a man or two. You'd better come along."

Liquor is prohibited to the natives throughout the Cook Islands; even the white man must buy it from the government in quantities regulated by the judgment of the official in charge. The manufacture of anything alcoholic is forbidden, but this latter law is administered with a certain degree of tolerance. Fortunately for everyone concerned, the art of making palm toddy has never been introduced; when the Cook-Islander feels the need of mild exhilaration he takes to the bush and brews a beverage known as orange beer. The ingredients are sugar, orange juice, and yeast—the recipe would prove popular, I fancy, in our own orange-growing states. The story goes that when the Cook Island boys went overseas to war they found a great drought prevailing in their eastern field of action—Palestine, I think it was. But there were oranges in plenty, and these untutored islanders soon showed the Tommies a trick that brought them together like brothers. I have tasted orange beer at all stages (even the rare old vintage stuff, bottled two or three months before) and found it not at all difficult to take; there are worse varieties of tipple, though this one is apt to lead to fighting, and leaves its too-enthusiastic devotee with a headache of unusual severity.

We found fifteen or twenty men assembled under an old utu tree; a dance ended as we drew near, and the cup was being passed. Two five-gallon kerosene tins, with the tops cut off and filled with the bright-yellow beer, stood in the center of the group. Women are never present on these occasions, which correspond, in a way, to Saturday evenings in a club at home. A sort of rude ceremonial—a relic, perhaps, of kava-drinking days—is observed around the beer tub. The oldest man present, armed with a heavy stick, is appointed guardian of the peace, to see that decency and order are preserved; the natives realize, no doubt, that any serious disturbance might put an end to their fun. The single cup is filled and passed to each guest in turn; he must empty it without taking breath. After every round one of the drinkers is expected to rise and entertain the company with a dance or a song.

Riley was welcomed with shouts; he was in a gay mood and when we had had our turns at the cup he stripped off his tunic for a dance. He is a famous dancer; unhampered by the native conventions, he went through the figures of heiva, otea, and ura—first the man's part, then the woman's—while the men of Mauké clapped their hands rhythmically and choked with laughter. No wonder Riley gets on with the people; there is not an ounce of self-consciousness in him—he enters into a bit of fun with the good-natured abandon of a child. As for dancing, he is wonderful; every posture was there, every twist and wriggle and flutter of the hands—what old Bligh called, with delightful, righteous gusto, the "wanton gestures" of the heiva.

Riley had told his friends on the beach that he was on the lookout for labor; by this time, probably, the whole island knew he was on his way to the atoll and that he needed men. Before we took leave of the drinkers three of them had agreed to go with my companion. The sea was calmer now, and, since Riley's wife was on the schooner, we decided to go aboard for dinner. Four more recruits were waiting by the canoe houses to sign on—it was odd to see their response to the Irishman's casual offer when half the planters of the group declare that labor is unobtainable.

The whaleboat was waiting in the passage. It was evening. The wind had dropped; the sky overhead was darkening; out to the west the sun had set behind banks of white cloud rimmed with gold. The oarsmen took their places; friendly hands shot us out in a lull between two breakers; we passed the surf and pulled offshore toward where the schooner was riding an easy swell, her lights beginning to twinkle in the dusk.

Rutiaro

Woodcut

CHAPTER VI

Rutiaro

Chance began to move of set purpose in Papeete, on the day I was to sail with the one-hundred-and-ten-ton schooner, Caleb S. Winship, for the Cloud of Islands. I was on my way to the water front, and, having plenty of time, walked leisurely, thinking of the long journey so nearly at hand, of the strange and lonely islands I was to see, and wondering, as an Anglo-Saxon must when presented with a piece of good fortune, what I had done to merit it. Oro, the cabin boy of the Winship, was following with my luggage. He kept at some distance, a mark of respect, as I thought, until I saw him sublet his contract to a smaller boy. Then he retired to spend the unearned increment in watermelon and a variety of cakes sold at the Chinese stalls along the street. Not wanting him to think that I begrudged him his last little fling on shore, I became interested of a sudden in the contents of a shop window, and there I saw a boxful of marbles. In a moment Oro was forgotten. Papeete faded from view, and the warm air, fragrant with the odors of vanilla and roasting coffee, became more bracing. There was a tang in it, like that of early April, in Iowa, for example, at the beginning of the marble-playing season. Fifteen years dropped lightly from my shoulders and I was back at the old rendezvous in the imagination, almost as really as I had ever been in the flesh. The lumber yard of S. M. Brown & Son lay on the right hand and the Rock Island Railroad tracks on the left. Between, on a stretch of smooth cinder right of way, a dozen games were in full swing. There were cries of, "Picks and vents!" "Bunchers!" "Sneakers!" "Knucks down!" the sharp crack of expert shots; the crunch of cinders under bare and yet tender feet. Meadow larks were singing in a nearby pasture, and from afar I heard the deep whistle of the Rocky Mountain Limited as it came down the Mitchellville grade.

I bought the marbles—the whole box of them. They cost fifty francs, about four dollars American, as the exchange was then, but I considered the investment a good one. I knew that, no matter where I might be, to lift the lid of my box was to make an immediate and inexpensive journey back to one of the pleasantest periods of boyhood. Oro was awaiting me at the quay, and carried my small sea chest on board with an air of spurious fatigue. I gave him my purchase and told him to stow it away for me in the cabin, which he did with such care that I did not find it again until we were within view of Rutiaro. The Caleb S. Winship was homeward bound then, from Tanao, where we had left Crichton, the English planter. Rutiaro lying on our course, it was decided to put in there in the hope that we might be able to replace our lost deck cargo of copra, washed overboard in a squall a few days previously.

Neither Findlay's South Pacific Directory nor the British Admiralty Sailing Directions had much to say about the atoll. Both agreed that the lagoon is nine miles long by five broad, and that on June 29, 1887, the French surveying vessel, St. Etienne, found the tide running through a narrow pass at two knots per hour, the flood as swift as the ebb. It was further stated that in 1889 Her Majesty's ship, Prince Edward, anchored in eight fathoms, three hundred yards from shore in front of the village, which is situated on the most westerly island; and that a few pigs and chickens were purchased at a nominal price from the inhabitants. With this information I had to be content in so far as my reading was concerned. There was nothing of a later date in either volume, and the impression I had was that the atoll, having been charted and briefly described, had remained unvisited, almost forgotten, for a period of thirty-one years.

This, of course, was not the case. Tinned beef and kerosene oil had followed the flag there as elsewhere in the world. Religion, in fact, had preceded it, leaving a broad wake of Bibles and black mother-hubbards still in evidence among the older generation. But skippers of small trading schooners are rarely correspondents of the hydrographic associations, and the "reports from the field" of itinerant missionaries are buried in the dusty files of the religious journals, so that Rutiaro is as little known to the world at large as it has always been. Findlay's general remarks about it were confined to a single sentence, "A lonely atoll, numbering a population of between seventy-five and one hundred inhabitants." It certainly looked lonely enough on the chart, far out on the westerly fringe of the archipelago, more than six hundred miles from the nearest steamship route, and that one infrequently traveled. I sought further information from Tino-a-Tino, the supercargo, a three-quarters American despite his Tahitian name. He had been trading in the Low Islands for twenty years, and during that time had created a voluminous literature with reference to their inhabitants. But it was all of an occupational nature and confined to the ledgers of the Inter-Island Trading Company. I found him at his usual task in the cabin, where he gave me some specimen compositions for criticism.

"I wish you'd look them over," he said. "These copra bugs drive a man wild. They get in your eyes, in your liquor, in your mouth—Lord! What a life!"

The cabin was filled with unsacked copra to the level of the upper tier of bunks. One had to crawl in on hands and knees. The copra bugs were something of a nuisance, and the smell and heat oppressive. I had traveled on more comfortable vessels, with tennis courts on the boat decks and Roman swimming baths below—but they didn't touch at Rutiaro.

I went through his accounts, verifying long lists of items, such as:

To Terii Tuahu, Dr.,
1 dozen beacon lanterns............at 480 frs....Frs. 480
To Ohiti Poene, Dr.,
12 sacks Lily-Dust flour...........at 300 frs....Frs. 3600
To Low Hung Chin, Dr.,
1 gross Night-King flash lamps.....at 3600 frs...Frs. 3600

The work of checking up finished, we went out for a breath of air. The atoll lay abeam and still far distant; a faint bluish haze lifted a bare eighth of an inch above the circle of the horizon. Behind us, rain fell in a straight wall of water from a single black cloud which cast a deep shadow over the path we had come. Elsewhere the sky was clear and the sea the incredible blue of the tropics. Tino broke a long silence.

"Look here," he said. "What is it that interests you in these islands? I've never known anyone to visit them for pleasure before. Is it the women, or what?"

Under pressure, I admitted that Nature seemed to have spent her best effort among the Paumotuans in fashioning the men.

"You're right," said Tino. "The women are healthy enough, of course, but they don't set your heart beating a hundred to the minute. They have fine hands and white teeth, and you won't find such black hair in all the world as you find in these atolls. But that's the size of it. You can't praise them any further for looks. Maybe you haven't noticed their ears, because they always cover them up with their hair; but they're large, and their feet and ankles—tough as sole leather and all scarred over with coral cuts. That is well enough for the men, but with the women it's different. Makes you lose your enthusiasm, don't it?"

I had seen a good many striking exceptions in our wanderings, but I agreed that, in the main, what he said was true.

"Well, if it isn't the women, what else is there to be interested in? Not the islands themselves? Lord! When you've seen one you've seen the lot. Living on one of them is like living aboard ship. Not room to stretch your legs. They're solid enough, and they don't sink; but in a hurricane I'd a heap rather take my chances out to sea with the Winship than to be lashed to the stoutest coconut tree in the whole group. Now you take Rutiaro. It was washed over seventeen years ago and all but twenty of the people killed. They are back to seventy-five now, but wait till the next bad blow down that way. They'll drown like rats just as they did before.

"Well, we won't have to stop long," he added, grouchily. "I'll take what copra they have and get out. It's a God-forsaken hole. They only make about twenty-five tons a year. The island could produce three times that amount under decent management. They're a lazy, independent lot, at Rutiaro. You can't get 'em to stir themselves."

I asked him what they had to gain by stirring themselves.

"Gain?" he said. "They have everything to gain. There are only two frame houses on the place. The rest of them are miserable little shelters of coconut thatch. I haven't sold them enough corrugated iron in ten years to cover this cockpit. You remember Takaroa and Niau and Fakahina? Well, there's my idea of islands. Nice European furniture—iron beds, center tables, phonographs, bicycles—"

A further catalogue of the comforts and conveniences of civilization which the inhabitants of Rutiaro might have and didn't convinced me that this was the atoll I had been looking for, and I regretted that our stay there was to be so brief. I did not begrudge the inhabitants of richer atolls their phonographs and bicycles. They got an incredible amount of amusement out of them; listened with delight to the strange music, and spent entire evenings taking turns with the bicycles, riding them back and forth from the lagoon beach to the ocean shore. But the frame houses were blots on the landscape, crude, barnlike structures, most of them, which offend the eye like factory chimneys in a green valley. Rutiaro had none of these things, and, having no interest in it from the commercial point of view, I awaited impatiently our arrival there.

At ten o'clock we were three miles to windward of the village island. It lay at the narrower end of the lagoon, the inner shore line curving around a broad indentation where the village was. The land narrowed in one direction to a ledge of reef. At the farther end there was a small motu not more than three hundred yards in length by one hundred broad, separated from the main island by a strip of shallow water. Seen from aloft, the two islands resembled, roughly, in outline, an old-fashioned, high-pooped vessel with a small boat in tow. I could see the whole of the atoll from the mainmast crosstrees, the lagoon, shimmering into green over the shoals, darkening to an intense blue over unlit valleys of ocean floor; a solitude of sunlit water, placid as a lake buried in the depths of inaccessible mountains. I followed the shore line with my glasses. Distant islands, ledges of barren reef, leaped forward with an effect of magic, as though our atom of a vessel, the only sail which relieved the emptiness of the sea, had been swept in an instant to within a few yards of the surf. Great combers, green and ominous looking in the sunlight, broke at one rapidly advancing point, toppled and fell in segments, filling the inner shallows with a smother of foam. Beyond it lay the broad fringe of white, deserted beach, the narrow forest of shrub and palm, the empty lagoon, a border of misty islands on the farther side. I had seen the same sort of a picture twenty times before, always with the same keen sense of its desolate beauty, its allurement, its romantic loveliness. Tino had said, "When you've seen one you've seen them all," and an old skipper once told me that "the atolls are as much alike as the reef points on that sail." It is true. They are as monotonous as the sea itself and as fresh with varying interest.

The village was hidden among the trees, but I saw the French flag flying near a break in the reef which marked the landing place for small boats. Farther back, a little knot of people were gathered, some of them sitting in the full glare of the sun, others in the deep shade, leaning against the trees in attitudes of dreamy meditation. Three girls were combing their hair, talking and laughing in an animated way. They were dressed in all their European finery, gowns of flowered muslin pulled up around their bare legs to prevent soilure. A matronly woman in a red wrapper had thrown the upper covering aside and sat, naked to the waist, nursing a baby. I put down my glasses, feeling rather ashamed of my scrutiny, as though I had been peeping through a window at some intimate domestic scene. The island leaped into the distance; the broad circle of foam and jagged reef narrowed to a thread of white, and the Caleb S. Winship crept landward again under a light breeze, an atom of a ship on a vast and empty sea. Eight bells struck, a tinkling sound, deadened, scarcely audible in the wide air. I heard Tino's voice as though coming from an immense distance: "Hello, up there! Kai-kai's ready!" I said: "All right! I'm coming," and was surprised at the loudness of my own shout. But I waited for a moment to indulge myself in a last reflection: "It is thirty-one years since the Prince Edward put in here. Excepting a few traders and missionaries, there isn't probably one man in one hundred thousand who has ever heard of this atoll; not one in a million who has ever seen it or ever will see it. What a piece of luck for me!" Then I saw Oro at the galley door with a huge platter of boiled beef and sweet potatoes. The sight of it reminded me that I was very hungry. As I climbed down to the deck I was conscious of the fact that a healthy appetite and a good digestion were a piece of luck, too, and that as long as one could hold it the lure of islands would remain, and one's love of living burn with a clear flame. Jack, the monkey, seemed to divine my thought, to agree with it. As Oro, the food bearer, passed him, he reached down from his perch in the rigging, seized the largest sweet potato on the platter, and clambered out of reach. Assured of his safety, he fell to greedily, looking out wistfully toward the land.

The pass was at the farther end of the lagoon, and in order to save time in getting the work ashore under way, the supercargo and I, with three of the sailors, put off in the whaleboat, to land on the ocean side of the village. Half a dozen men rushed into the surf, seized and held the boat as the backwash poured down the steep incline at the edge of the reef. Among them was the chief, a man of huge frame, six feet two or three in height. Like the others who assisted at the landing, he was clad only in a pareu, but he lost none of his dignity through his nakedness. He was fifty-five years old, as I afterward learned, and as he stood bidding us welcome I thought of the strange appearance certain of the chief men in America or France or England would make under similar circumstances, deprived of the kindly concealment of clothing. What a revelation it would be of skinniness or pudginess! What an exhibition of scrawny necks, fat stomachs, flat chests, flabby arms! To be strictly accurate, I had seen some fat stomachs among elderly Paumotuans, but they were exceptions, and always remarkable for that reason. And those who carried them had sturdy legs. They did not give one the uneasy feeling, common at home, at the sight of the great paunches of sedentary men toppling unsteadily along a strip of crimson carpet, from curb to club doorway.

Wherever one goes in Polynesia one is reminded, by contrast, of the cost physically to men of our own race of our sheltered way of living. There on every hand are men well past middle life, with compact, symmetrical bodies and the natural grace of healthy children. One sees them carrying immense burdens without exertion, swimming in the open sea for an hour or two at a time while spearing fish, loafing ashore with no greater apparent effort for yet longer periods. Sometimes, when they have it, they eat enormous quantities of food at one sitting, and at others, under necessity, as sparingly as so many dyspeptics. It would be impossible to formulate from their example any rules for rational living in more civilized communities. The daily quest for food under primitive conditions keeps them alert and sound of body, so that, whether they work or loaf, feast or fast, they seem always to acquire health by it.

There had been no boats at Rutiaro in five months and the crowd on the beach was unfeignedly glad to see us. The arrival of a schooner at that remote island was an event of great importance; the sight of new faces lighted their own with pleasure, which warmed the heart toward them at once. We had brought ashore a consignment of goods for Moy Ling, the Chinese storekeeper, and when the handshaking was over they gathered around it as eagerly as a group of American children at a Christmas tree. Even the village constable seemed unconscious of any need for a show of dignity or authority. The only badge of his office was a cigarette-card picture of President Poincaré, fastened with a safety pin to his old felt hat. He neglected his duties as a keeper of order, and was one of the most excited of Moy Ling's helpers with the cargo. He kept patting him affectionately on the back, saying, "Maitai! maitai!" which in that situation may be freely translated as, "You know me, Moy Ling!" And the old Chinaman smiled the pleasant, noncommittal smile of his countrymen the world over.

Tino's was the only sour face on the beach. He moved through the crowd, giving orders, grumbling and growling half to himself and half to me. "I told you they were a lazy lot," he said. "They've seen us making in for three hours, and what have they been doing? Loafing on the beach, waiting for us instead of getting their copra together! Moy Ling is the only one in the village who is ready to do business. Five tons all sacked for weighing. He's worth a dozen Kanakas. Well, I'll set 'em to work in quick time now. You watch me! I'm going to be loaded and out of here by six o'clock."

But chance, using me as an innocent accomplice, ordered it otherwise. It was Sir Thomas Browne who said, "Those who hold that all things are governed by fortune had not erred had they not persisted there." He may be right, although I don't remember now where his own nonpersistence lay. But there are some things, some events, which chance or fortune—whatever one wishes to call it—governs from the outset with an amazing show of omnipotence. Tracing them back, one becomes almost convinced of a fixed intent, a far-sighted, unwavering determination in its apparently haphazard functioning. It is clear to me now that, because I had been fond of playing marbles as a boy, I was to be marooned, fifteen years later, on a fragment of land, six thousand miles from the lumber yard of S. M. Brown & Son. Tino had no more to do with that result than I did. He merely lost his temper because chance disorganized his plans for an early departure; tried to quench his anger in rum, and became more furious still because he was drunk. Then off he went in the Caleb S. Winship, leaving me stranded ashore. I can still hear his parting salutation which he roared at me though a megaphone across the starlit lagoon, "You can stay—" But this is anticipating. The story moves in a more leisurely fashion.

As I have said, my box of marbles came to light again only a few hours before we reached Rutiaro. I took them ashore with me, thinking they might amuse the children. They had a good knowledge of the technic of shooting, acquired in a two-handed game common among the atolls, which is played with bits of polished coral. But theirs had always seemed to me a tame pastime, lacking the interest of stakes to be won or lost. I instructed them in the simple rules of "bull-ring" and "Tom's-dead," which they quickly mastered. Then I divided the marbles equally among them and gave them to understand that the winner held his gains, although marbles, like trade goods, might be bartered for. I emphasized that feature of the game because of a recollection remaining from my own marble-playing days, of the contempt in which boys were held who refused to hazard their marbles in a test of skill. They refused to play "for keeps," and the rest of us had nothing to do with them. The youngsters of Rutiaro were not of that stamp. They took their losses in good part. When I saw that I left them to themselves and went for a walk through the village. I knew—at least I thought I did—that our stay was to be brief and I wanted to make the most of it.

I followed the street bordering the lagoon, past the freshly thatched houses with their entryways wide to the sun and wind, and came at length to a small burying ground which lay in an area of green shadow far from the village. There were a dozen or more graves within the inclosure, some of them neatly mounded over with broken coral and white shell, others incased in a kind of sarcophagus of native cement to keep more restless spirits from wandering abroad. Most of them were unmarked. Two or three had wooden headboards, one of which was covered with a long inscription in Chinese. Beneath this the word "Repose" was printed in English, as though it had some peculiar talismanic significance for the Chinaman who had placed it there. It was the grave of a predecessor of Moy Ling's. I fell to thinking of him as I sat there, and of all the Chinamen I had met in the earlier days, lonely, isolated figures, most of them, without family or friends or the saving companionship of books. What was it that kept them going? What goal were they striving toward through lives which held so little of the comfort or happiness essential to the rest of humankind? Repose? A better end than that, surely. The air rang with the sound of the word, the garish sunlight fell pitilessly on the print of it. To most men, I believe, with the best of life still before them, there is something terrible, infamous, in the thought of the unrelieved blackness of an endless, dreamless sleep. I turned from the contemplation of it; let my thoughts wander in a mist of dreams, of half-formed fancies which glimmered through consciousness like streaks of sunlight in a dusty attic. These vanished at length and for a time I was as dead to thought or feeling as Moy Ling's predecessor, sleeping beside me.

I was awakened by some one shaking me by the shoulder. A voice said, "Haere i te pai!" ("Come down to the boat!") and a dark figure ran on before, turning from time to time to urge me to greater speed. It was almost night, although there was still light enough to see by. I remembered that Tino had told me to be at the copra sheds at five. The tide would serve for getting through the pass until eight, but I hurried, nevertheless, feeling that something unusual had happened. Rounding a point of land which cut off the view from the village and the inner lagoon, I saw the schooner, about three hundred yards off shore, slim and black against a streak of orange cloud to the northward. She was moving slowly out, under power; the whaleboat was being hoisted over the side, and at the wheel I saw the familiar silhouette of the supercargo.

I shouted: "Hi! Tino! Wait a minute! You're not going to leave me behind, are you?"

A moment of silence followed. Then came the answer with the odd deliberation of utterance which I knew meant Tahiti rum:

"You can stay there and play marbles till hell freezes over! I'm through with you!"

What had happened, as nearly as I could make out afterward, was this: my box of marbles which I had brought ashore for the amusement of the children, interested the grown-ups as well, particularly the hazard of stakes in the games I had shown them. Paumotuans have a good deal of Scotch acquisitiveness in their make-up. They coveted those marbles—they were really worth coveting—and it was not long until play became general, a family affair, the experts in one being pitted against those in another, regardless of age or sex. Tino's threats and entreaties had been to no purpose. All work came to an end, and the only copra which got aboard the Winship was Moy Ling's five tons, carried out by the sailors themselves. Evidently Puarei, the chief, had been one of the most enthusiastic players. He was not a man to be bulldozed or browbeaten. He had great dignity and force of character, for all his boyish delight in simple amusements. What right had Tino to say that he should not play marbles on his own island? He gave me to understand, by means of gestures, intonation, and a mixture of French and Paumotuan, that this was what the supercargo had done. At last, apparently, Tino had sent Oro on an unsuccessful search for me. He thought, I suppose, that, having been the cause of the marble-playing mania, I might be able and willing to check it. Balked there, he went on board in a fit of violent temper and had not been seen again, although his voice was heard for an hour thereafter. Of a sudden anchor was weighed and I was left, as he assured me, to play marbles with the inhabitants of Rutiaro for an impossibly long time.

Most of these details I gathered afterward. At the moment I guessed just enough of the truth not to be wholly mystified. The watery sputtering of the Winship's twenty-five horse-power engine grew faint. Then, with a ghostly gleam of her mainsail in the starlight, she was gong. I was thinking, "By Jove! I wouldn't have missed this experience for all the copra in the Cloud of Islands!" I was glad that there were still adventures of that sort to be had in a humdrum world. It was so absurd, so fantastically unreal as to fit nothing but reality. And the event of it was exactly what I had wanted all the time without knowing it. There was no reason why I shouldn't stop at Rutiaro. To be sure, I was shortly to have met my friend Nordhoff at Papeete, but our rendezvous was planned to be broken. We were wandering in the South Pacific as opportunity and inclination should direct, which, I take it, is the only way to wander.

For a few moments I was so deeply occupied with my own thoughts that I was not conscious of what was taking place around me. All the village was gathered there, watching the departing schooner. As she vanished a loud murmur ran through the crowd, like a sough of wind through trees—a long-drawn-out Polynesian, "Aué!" indicative of astonishment, indignation, pity. Paumotuan sympathies are large, and I had been the victim of treachery, they thought, and was silently grieving at the prospect of a long exile. They gathered around, patting me on the back in their odd way, expressing their condolences as best they could, but I soon relieved their minds, on that score. Then Huirai, the constable with the cigarette-card insignia, pushed his way through with the first show of authority I had seen him make.

"I been Frisco," he said, with an odd accent on the last syllable. He had made the journey once as a stoker on one of the mail boats. Then he added, "You go to hell, me," his eyes shining with pride that he could be of service as a reminder of home to an exiled American. He was about to take charge of me, in view of his knowledge of English, but the chief waved him away with a gesture of authority. I was to be his guest, he said, at any rate for the present. He began his duties as host by entertaining me at dinner at Moy Ling's store. I was a little surprised that we did not go to his house for the meal until I remembered that the Chinaman had received the only consignment of exotic food left by the Winship. Puarei ordered the feast with the discrimination of a gourmet and the generosity of a sailor on shore leave for the first time in months. We had smoked herring for hors-d'oeuvre, followed by soup, curried chicken and rice, edible birds' nests flavored with crab meat, from China, and white bread. For dessert we had small Chinese pears preserved in vinegar, which we ate out of the tin—"Woman Brand Pears," the label said. There was a colored picture on it of a white woman, in old-fashioned puffed sleeves and a long skirt, seated in a garden, while a Chinaman served her deferentially with pears out of the same kind of a container. Underneath was printed in English: "These pears will be found highly stimulating. We respectfully submit them to our customers." That was the first evidence I had seen of China's bid for export trade in tinned fruit. "Stimulating" may not have been just the word, but I liked the touch of Chinese courtesy which followed it. It didn't seem out of place, even coming from a canning factory.

Puarei gave all his attention to his food, and consumed an enormous quantity. My own appetite was a healthy one, but I had not his capacity of stomach; furthermore, he ate with his fingers, while I was handicapped from the first with a two-prong fork and a small tin spoon. I believe they were the only implements of the sort on the island, for the village had been searched for them before they were found. It was another evidence to me of the unfrequented nature of Rutiaro, and of its slender contact, even with the world of Papeete traders. At most of the islands we had visited, knives and forks were common, although rarely used except in the presence of strangers. The onlookers at the feast—about half the village, I should say—watched with interest my efforts to balance mouthfuls of rice on a two-prong fork. I could see that they regarded it as a ridiculous proceeding. They must have thought Americans a strange folk, checking appetite and worrying digestion with such doubtful aids. Finally I decided to follow the chief's example and set to with my fingers. They laughed at that, and Puarei looked up from his third plate of rice and chicken to nod approval. It was a strange meal, reminding me of stories I had read as a boy, of Louis XV dining in public at Versailles, with a roomful of visitors from foreign courts looking on; whispering behind fans and lace cuffs; exchanging awestruck glances at the splendor of the service, the richness of the food, and the sight of majesty fulfilling a need common to all humankind. There was no whispering among the crowd at the Chinaman's shop, no awestruck glances other than Moy Ling's, at the majesty of Puarei's appetite. I felt sorry for him as he trotted back and forth from his outdoor kitchen, bringing in more food, thinking of his depleted stock, smiling with an expression of wan and worried amiability. Louis XV would have given something, I'll venture, for that old Paumotuan chief's zest for food, for the kingly weight of bone and muscle which demanded such a store of nourishment. He pushed back his chair at length, with a sign of satisfaction, and a half-caste girl of seventeen or eighteen removed the empty dishes.

Paumotuan hospitality is an easy, gracious thing, imposing obligations on neither host nor guest. Dinner over, I told Puarei that I wanted to take a walk, and he believed me. I was free at once, and I knew that he would not be worrying meanwhile about my entertainment. I would not be searched for presently, and pounced upon with the dreaded: "See here! I'm afraid you are not having a good time," of the uneasy host. I was introduced to no one, dragged nowhere to see anything, free from the necessity of being amused. I might do as I liked—rare and glorious privilege—and I went outside, grateful for it, and for the cloak of darkness which enabled me to move about unobserved. It lifted here and there in the glow of supper fires, or a streak of yellow lamplight from an open doorway. I saw family groups gathered around their meals of fish and coconuts, heard the loud intake of breath as they sucked the miti sauce from their fingers. Dogs were splashing about in the shallows of the lagoon, seeking their own supper of fish. They are a strange breed, the dogs of the atolls, like no other that I have ever seen, a mixture of all breeds one would think, a weird blending of good blood and bad. The peculiar environment and the strange diet have altered them so that they hardly seem dogs at all, but, rather, semiamphibious animals, more at home in the sea than on land. They are gentle-mannered with their masters and with strangers, but fierce fighters among themselves. I sat down behind a clump of bushes, concealed from the light of one of the smoldering supper fires, and watched a group of Rutiaroan dogs in their search for food. They had developed a sort of team work in the business, leaped toward the shore all together with a porpoise-like curving of their bodies, and were as quick as a flock of terns to see and to seize their prey.

Returning from my walk, I found the village street deserted and all of the people assembled back of Moy Ling's shop. He was mixing bread at a table while one of the sons of his strange family piled fresh fuel on the fire under a long brick oven. It was a great event, the bread making, after the long months of dearth, and of interest to everyone. Mats were spread within the circle of the firelight. Puarei was there, with his wife—a mountain of a woman—seated at his side. She was dressed in a red-calico wrapper, and her long black hair fell in a pool of shadow on the mat behind her. She was a fit wife for a chief, in size, in energy, in the fire and spirit living in the huge bulk of flesh. Her laughter came in a clear stream which it was a delight to hear. There was no undertone of foreboding or bitter remembrance, and the flow of it, as light-hearted as a child's, heightened the merrymaking mood of the others. There was a babble of talk, bursts of song, impromptu dancing to the accompaniment of an accordion and the clapping of hands. As I looked on I was minded of an account I had read of the Paumotuans in which they were described as "a dour people, silent, brooding, and religious." Religious some of them assuredly are, despite a good deal of evidence to the contrary, and they are often silent in the dreamy way of remote island people whose moods are drawn from the sea, whose minds lie fallow to the peace and the beauty of it. But "dour and brooding" is very far from the truth.

I took a place among them as quietly as possible, for I knew by repeated experience how curious they are about strangers, and first meetings were usually embarrassing. Without long training as a freak with a circus, it would try any man's courage to sit for an hour among a group of Paumotuans while he was being discussed item by item. There is nothing consciously brutal or callous in the manner of it, but, rather an unreflecting frankness like that of children in the presence of something strange to their experience. I knew little of the language, although I caught a word here and there which indicated the trend of the comment. It was not general, fortunately, but confined to those on either side of me. Two old grandmothers started a speculation as to whether or not I had any children, and from this a discussion rose as to which of the girls of Rutiaro would be best suited as a wife for me. I was growing desperate when Chance, the godfather of all wanderers, intervened again in my favor.

Moy Ling's fire was burning brightly and it occurred to several of the youngsters to resume their marble playing. I saw Puarei's face light with pleasure, and he was on his feet at once with his stake in the ring. Others followed, and soon all those who had marbles were in the sport. I understood clearly then how helpless Tino had been. I could easily picture him rushing from group to group, furious at the thought of his interests being neglected through such childish folly. Those marbles were more desirable than his flour and canned goods, which he stood ready to exchange for copra. The explanation of this astounding fact may have been that no one thought he would go off as he did, and to-morrow would do just as well for getting down to business. Since he had gone, there was an end of that. It was futile to worry about the lost food. Certainly it was forgotten during the great tournament which took place that evening. Moy Ling worked at his bread making unnoticed. His fire died down to a heap of coals, but another was built and the play went on. Puarei was a splendid shot, in marble playing as in other respects, the best man of the village; but there was a slip of a girl who was even better. During the evening she accumulated nearly half of the entire marble supply, and at length these two met for a test of skill. It was a long-drawn-out game. I had never seen anything to equal the interest of both players and spectators; not even at Brown's lumber yard when the stakes were a boy's most precious possessions, cornelian stone taws. No one thought of sleep except a few of the old men and women, who dozed off at intervals with their heads between their knees.

The lateness of the hour—the bizarre setting for a game so linked with memories of boyhood, combined to give me an impression of unreality. I had the feeling that the island and all the people on it might vanish at any moment, and the roar of the surf resolve itself into the rumble of street traffic in some gray city. And, though it were the very city where marbles are made, where in the length or breadth of it could there be found anyone who knew the use of them, with either the time or the inclination to play? I might search it, street by street, to the soot-stained suburbs; I might go on to the green country, perhaps; visit all the old-time marble-playing rendezvous from one coast to the other, with no better success. And, though I passed through a thousand villages of the size of Rutiaro, could an evening's amusement be provided in any one of them, for men, women, and children, at an outlay of four dollars, American? The possibility would not be worth considering. People at home live too fast in these days, and they want too much. I could imagine Tino, in a sober mood, giving a grudging assent to this. "But, man!" he would have added, "I wish they had more of their marble-making enthusiasm at Rutiaro. I would put in here three times a year and fill the Winship with copra to within an inch of the main boom every trip."

Moy Ling had enough of it for the whole island, it seemed to me. His ovens were opened as the tournament came to an end, and for half an hour he was kept busy passing out crisp brown loaves and jotting down the list of creditors in his account book. It must have been nearly midnight. The crowd began to disperse. Puarei joined me, smiling ruefully, holding out empty hands. He had lost all of his marbles to a mite of a girl whom he could have put in his vest pocket had he owned one. His wife teased him about it on the way home, laughed heartily at his explanations and excuses. They discussed the events of the day long after the other members of the household had retired to their mats on the veranda. At last I heard their quiet breathing, and a strip of light from the last quarter moon revealed them asleep, two massive heads on the same pillow. I lay awake for a much longer time, thinking of one thing and another—of my friend Crichton at Tanao, the loneliest atoll in the world I should say; of the Winship far out to sea, homeward bound with one hundred and forty tons of copra in her hold; of Tino with his fits of temper, and his passion for trade which blinded him to so much of the beauty and the joy of life. But, after all, I thought, it is men like Tino who keep wheels turning and boats traveling the seas. If he were to die, his loss would be felt; there would be an eddy in the current of life around him. But men like Crichton or myself—we should go down in our time, and the broad stream would flow over our heads without a ripple to show where we had been, without a bubble rising to the surface to carry with it for a moment the memory of our lives. It was not a comforting thought, and I tried to evade it; but I realized that my New England conscience was playing a part in these reflections and was not to be soothed in any such childish manner. "How much copra have you ever produced or carried to market?" it appeared to say. I admitted that the amount was negligible. "How do you mean to justify your presence here?" was the next question, and before I could think of a satisfactory answer, "What good will come of this experience, either to yourself or to anyone else?" That was a puzzler until I happened to think of Findlay's South Pacific Directory. I remembered that his information about Rutiaro was very scant, the general remarks confined, as I have already said, to a single sentence, "A lonely atoll, numbering a population of between seventy-five and one hundred inhabitants." As a sop to my conscience, it occurred to me that I might write to the publishers of that learned work, suggesting that, in the light of recent investigations, they add to that description, "Fond of playing marbles."

Chapter VI tailpiece

CHAPTER VII

A Debtor of Moy Ling

Puarei's house stood halfway down the village street at Rutiaro, facing a broad indentation from the lagoon. The Catholic church adjoined it on one side, the Protestant church on the other. Neither of them was an imposing structure, but they towered above the small frame dwelling of the chief with an air of protection, of jealous watchfulness. On sunny days they shaded his roof in turn; and, when it rained, poured over it streams of water, through lead pipes projecting from their own ampler roofs—a purely utilitarian function, since the drainage from the three buildings furnished the fresh-water supply of the settlement. If the showers were light the overflow from the largess of the rival churches, plashing on the sheets of corrugated iron, filled the house with a monotonous murmur, like the drowsy argument of two soft-voiced missionaries; but during a heavy downpour the senses were stunned by the incessant thunder, as though one were inclosed in an immense drum, beaten with nonsectarian vigor by all the Salvation Armies in the world.

It was during such a deluge, one day in early spring, that I lay on the guest bed in Puarei's one-room house, watching Poura, his wife, who had washed my linen with her own hands and was then ironing it. It was not, strictly speaking, linen. The articles were three—a sleeveless gauze singlet, a cotton handkerchief, and a faded khaki shirt. A pair of khaki trousers, a pair of canvas tennis shoes, and a pandanus hat completed my wardrobe. Since I needed the whole of it when going abroad about the island, it was necessary to go to bed on washing day, and to wait there until the laundering was finished, and such repairs made as constant wear had caused and further wear demanded. How to replenish it and to meet other simple urgent needs gave me cause for some concern, and I was going over the problem as I lay on Puarei's guest bed. It was toward the end of my second week at Rutiaro, and already I was beginning to look decidedly shabby. My shoes were rotted out with sea water, and both shirt and trousers, which were far from new at the time of my arrival, gave evidence of early dissolution. Poura had washed, sewed on buttons, drawn seams together, but the garments were chronically ailing, as hopeless of effective repair as an old man far gone in senile decay. Poura was becoming discouraged about them, and I knew that she must be wondering why I didn't buy some fresh ones. I had a very good reason for not doing so—I had no money. I had been left at Rutiaro without so much as a twenty-five-centime piece, and the Banque de l'Indo-Chine was six hundred miles away.

It would not occur to either Puarei or his wife that I was in need of funds. Theirs was one of the more primitive atolls of the Low Archipelago, where all white men are regarded as mysteriously affluent. If, instead of being marooned at Rutiaro through Tino's fit of temper, I had been discovered a mile outside the reef, making toward the land clad only in a pair of swimming trunks, upon reaching it my rescuers would have expected me, as a matter of course, to take a bulky parcel of thousand-franc notes from beneath that garment. I had, in fact, made a secret inventory of my wealth after the sudden departure of the Caleb Winship, hoping there might be a forgotten bank note in one of my trousers pockets. What I found was a cotton handkerchief, a picture post card of the Woolworth Building, and a small musical instrument called an ocharina, or, more commonly, a sweet-potato whistle. The handkerchief I needed; the post card seemed of no practical use as a means of barter; and, while I might have given up the ocharina, it had but a slight monetary value, and Moy Ling, the Chinese storekeeper of the village, was not interested in it. I didn't offer it to him outright. Instead, I played on it, in front of his shop, "The March of the Black Watch," which I could render with some skill. Thereafter every youngster on the island coveted the instrument, but Moy Ling made no offers and the prospect of a wardrobe was as far away as ever.

His supply of European clothing was limited, but ample to supply my wants. He found for me three undershirts, size forty-four, two gingham outer shirts of less ample proportions, a pair of dungaree overalls, and a pair of rope-sole shoes. I asked him to put these articles aside and went off to reflect upon ways and means of opening a credit account with the canny Chinaman. There was one possible method open to me; I might adopt the pareu as a costume. I could buy three of them for the price of one undershirt, and I believed that Moy Ling would trust me to that extent. Nearly all of the natives wore pareus. They had put aside their trousers and shirts and gingham dresses now that I was no longer a stranger to them, and were much more comfortable in their simple, knee-length garments, those of the men reaching from the waist, those of the women twisted tightly under the arms. Simple and convenient though it was, I felt that it would be absurd for me to assume that style of dress, since I was not accustomed to it. Furthermore, I remembered the ridiculous appearance of Americans and Europeans I had seen at Tahiti—queer people from all sorts of queer places, who come and go through the capital of French Oceania. They rushed into pareus the moment of their arrival at Papeete, and before a week had passed were more primitive in a sophisticated way than the Tahitians themselves. I had no desire to join the ranks of the amateur cannibals, even though there was some excuse for it at Rutiaro; and I knew that the Paumotuans would have more respect for me if I dressed after the manner of my own race.

But how obtain clothing without money—without divulging to anyone that I had no money? The question dinned through my brain with annoying persistence, like the thunder of falling water on Puarei's iron roof. Would it, after all, be best to confide in the chief? I could tell him of my bank account at Papeete, and he knew, of course, that the Caleb Winship had left me without a word of warning, taking my sea chest with her. I was tempted to make a confession of my predicament, but pride or a kind of childish vanity prevented me.

"No, by Jove!" I said. "I'll be hanged if I do! Puarei, his wife—all the rest of them—expect me to live up to their traditional conceptions of white men. I am supposed to be mysteriously affluent, and I owe it to them to preserve that myth in all its romantic glamour."

I had no feeling of guilt in making this decision; rather, a sense of virtue, like that of an indulgent father upon assuring his children that there is a Santa Claus. I decided to be not only mysteriously, but incredibly, affluent. Therefore, when the rain had passed I put on my mended garments and went to Moy Ling's shop.

I found him splitting coconuts in front of his copra shed, and beckoned to him in a careless way. He came forward, smiling pleasantly as usual, but there was a shrewd glitter in his eyes which said, quite as plainly as words, "Honorable sir, I bow before you, but I expect an adequate monetary return for the service." I was not intimidated, however, and when he brought forth the articles I had selected earlier I waved them aside—all of them excepting the rope-sole shoes, the only male footgear of any kind on the island. I explained that I had not before seen the bolt of white drill—the most expensive cloth in his shop—and that I wanted enough of it to make four suits. I saw at once that I had risen in his estimation about 75 per cent, and, thus encouraged, I went on buying lavishly—white-cotton cloth for underwear and shirts; some pencils and his entire supply of notebooks for my voluminous observations on the life and character of the Paumotuans; a Night-King flash lamp; a dozen silk handkerchiefs of Chinese manufacture; a dozen pairs of earrings and four lockets and chains; ten kilos of flour and two of coffee; three bottles of perfume in fancy boxes; four large bolts of ribbon—enough to reach from one end of the village to the other; side and back combs for women, superbly ornamented with bits of colored glass; a bolt of mosquito netting; a monkey wrench; two Beacon lanterns; a pandanus mat; and one bow tie already made up, the kind sold at home in "gents' furnishings" shops.

At the beginning I had no thought of going in so recklessly. But as I went from article to article the conviction grew upon me that the deeper I plunged the greater the impression I should make upon Moy Ling, and it was essential that I should convince him that my mythical wealth was real. He became more and more deferential as my heap of purchases increased in size. I made no inquiry as to the price of anything, believing that to be in keeping with the mysteriously affluent tradition. At my back I heard a hum of excited conversation. The shop was filled with people. I felt the crush behind me, but took no notice of it and went on with my passionless orgy of spending: two bolts of women's dress goods; four pocketknives; a can of green paint and another of white—but details are tiresome. It is enough to say that I bought lavishly, and selected odds and ends of things because Moy's shop contained nothing else. He had a large supply of food, but in other respects his stock was low, and when I had finished, some of his shelves were almost bare. On one there remained only a box of chewing gum. An inscription printed on the side of it read: "Chew on, MacDuff! You can't chew out the original mint-leaf flavor" of somebody's pepsin gum—words to that effect. That product of American epicureanism is to be found, strangely enough, at nearly every Chinaman's store in the Low Archipelago. I bought twenty packages of it, since there were no other confections to be had, and distributed them among the children. The youthful MacDuffs chewed on for some thirty seconds and then swallowed, believing, in their unenlightened way, that gum is a sort of food. I had read of monkeys dying in zoos because of the same practice; but, in so far as I know, there were no ill effects from it at Rutiaro, either then or later.

I succeeded very well in impressing Puarei. He was astonished at the number of my purchases; and Poura said, "Au-e!" shooed out the mint-breathed porters who carried them to the house, and sat down in the doorway, her enormous body completely blocking the entrance. On the veranda the conversation crackled and sparkled with conjecture. I could hear above the others the voice of Paki, wife of the constable, enumerating the things I had bought. It sounded odd in Paumotuan—a high-pitched recitative of strange words, most of them adapted from the English since all of the articles were unknown to the natives before the coming of the traders—faraoa (flour), ripine (ribbon), peni (pencil or pen), taofe (coffee), etc.

I myself was wondering what use I could make of some of my wealth. The flour I would give to Puarei, and his ten-ton cutter was badly in need of paint. Poura would be glad to have the dress goods for herself and her girls, for the Rutiaroans put aside their pareus on Sunday and dressed in European costume. I could also give her the mosquito netting as a drapery for the guest bed. I had, in fact, bought it with that end in mind, for on windless nights, particularly after a rain, the mosquitoes were a fearful nuisance. Puarei's household was used to them, but I tossed and tumbled, and at last would have to paddle out on the lagoon and stay there till morning. The coffee, likewise, was for my own use, Puarei believing that the drinking of either tea or coffee was forbidden by his variety of the Christian religion. Tobacco, too, was a product of evil, and the use of it made broad the way to hell. It is impossible to believe that any missionary would wander so far to preach such theology. What had happened, very likely, was that one of the more austere churchmen who visit Rutiaro at rare intervals had condemned those white man's comforts as injurious to health. He must have been severe in his denunciation, for Puarei had got the idea that abstinence from the enjoyment of them was exacted in a sort of amendment to the Ten Commandments. I did my best to corrupt him, for breakfast at his house was to me a cheerless meal. His faith was not to be shaken, however, although he admitted that coffee drinking might not damn me, since I had been taught to believe that it would not.

I was thinking with pleasure of his tolerance and of the comforting beverage I should have the following morning when I remembered that mine was green Tahiti coffee which must be taken to Moy Ling for roasting. His shop was deserted. I could see it at the end of the sunlit street, steaming with moisture after the rain. The open doorway was a square of black shadow. It lightened with a misty glimmer as I watched, and suddenly Moy flashed into view. He ran quickly down the steps, halted irresolutely, and stood for a moment, shading his eyes with his hand, looking in the direction of Puarei's house. Then he turned, mounted the steps again, and vanished slowly in the gloom. I was uneasy, knowing what he was thinking; but an island less than three miles long, with an average width of four hundred yards, offers a poor refuge for a faint-hearted debtor. And so, having stowed my other purchases under the guest bed, I took the bag of coffee and returned to Moy's store, hoping that I might quiet his fears by increasing my obligation to him.

When one is without them, clothing, coffee, tobacco, and other such necessities assume a place of exaggerated importance, which is the reason why the memories of the earlier part of my stay at Rutiaro are tinged with the thought of them. But I had not come to the Low Islands to spend all of my time and energy in the mere fight for a comfortable existence. I could have done that quite as well at home, with greater results in the development of a more or less Crusoe-like resourcefulness. At Rutiaro the life was strange and new to me, and I found the days too short for observing it and the nights for reflecting upon it. My first interest, of course, was Puarei's household—the chief, his wife, two sons, and three daughters all housed in that one-room frame building. The room was commodious, however, about twenty-five feet by fifteen, and on the lagoon side there was a broad veranda where Poura and her daughters did much of their work and passed their hours of leisure. Behind the house was a large cistern, built of blocks of cemented coral, and a small outkitchen made of the odds and ends of packing cases and roofed with thatch.