White Shadows in the South Seas Part 12

Smith finds in the Tahitian legend proof of this contention. In the Polynesian language _araea_, the "red earth" of the tale, is the same as _vari_, and in Indonesia there were the words _fare_ or _pare_, in Malay _padi_ or _peri_, and in Malagasy _vari_, all meaning rice. A Rarotongan legend relates that in Hawaiki two new fruits were found, and the _vari_ discarded. These fruits were the breadfruit and the horse-chestnut, neither of which is a native of Polynesia.

I related these stories of the _mei_ to Great Fern, who replied: "_Aue!_ It may be. The old G.o.ds were great, and all the world is a wonder. As for me, I am a Christian. The breadfruit ripens, and I fill the _popoi_ pit."

Great Fern was my friend, and, as he said, a Christian, yet I fear that he did not tell me all he knew of the ancient customs. There was an innocence too innocent in his manner when he spoke of them, like that of a child who would like one to believe that the cat ate the jam. And on the night when the _popoi_ pits were filled, pressed down and running over, when they had been covered with banana leaves and weighed with heavy stones, and the season's task was finished, something occurred that filled my mind with many vague surmises.

I had been awakened at midnight by the crashing fall of a cocoanut on the iron roof above my head. Often during the rainy nights I was startled by this sound of the incessantly falling nuts, that banged and rattled like round shot over my head. But on this night, as I composed myself to slumber again, my drowsy ears were uneasy with another thing, less a sound than an almost noiseless, thrumming vibration, faint, but disturbing.

I sat up in my Golden Bed, and listened. Exploding Eggs was gone from his mat. The little house was silent and empty. Straining my ears I heard it unmistakably through the rustling noises of the forest and the dripping of rain from the eaves. It was the far, dim, almost inaudible beating of a drum.

Old tales stirred my hair as I stood on my _paepae_ listening to it.

At times I thought it a fancy, again I heard it and knew that I heard it. At last, wrapping a _pareu_ about me, I went down my trail to the valley road. The sound was drowned here by the splashing chuckle of the stream, but as I stood undecided in the pool of darkness beneath a dripping banana I saw a dark figure slip silently past me, going up toward the High Place. It was followed by another, moving through the night like a denser shadow. I went back to my cabin, scouted my urgent desire to shut and barricade the door, and went to bed. After a long time I slept.

When I awoke next morning Exploding Eggs was preparing my breakfast as usual, the sunlight streamed over breadfruit and palm, and the night seemed a dream. But there were rumors in the village of a strange dance held by the inhabitants of Nuka-hiva, on another island, in celebration of the harvest of the _mei_. Weird observances were hinted, rites partic.i.p.ated in only by men who danced stark naked, praising the old G.o.ds.

This was a custom of the old days, said Great Fern, with those too-innocent eyes opened artlessly upon me. It has ever been the ceremony of Thanks-giving to the ancient G.o.ds, for a bountiful harvest, a propitiation, and a begging of their continued favor. As for him, he was a Christian. Such rites were held no more in Atuona.

I asked no more questions. Thanks-giving to an omnipotent ruler for the fruits of the harvest season is almost universal. We have put in a proclamation and in church services and the slaughter of turkeys what these children do in dancing, as did Saul of old.

The season's task completed, Great Fern and Apporo sat back well content, having provided excellently for the future. Certain of their neighbors, however, filled with ambition and spurred on by the fact that there was plenty of _mei_ for all with no suspicion of greediness incurred by excessive possessions, continued to work until they had filled three pits. These men were regarded with admiration and some envy, having gained great honor. "He has three _popoi_ pits," they said, as we would speak of a man who owned a superb jewel or a Velasquez.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A volunteer cocoanut grove, with trees of all ages]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Climbing for cocoanuts]

The grated breadfruit in the holes was called _ma_, and bore the same relation to _popoi_ as dough bears to bread. When the _ma_ was sufficiently soured Apporo opened the pit each morning and took out enough for the day's provision, replacing the stones on the banana leaves afterward. The intrusion of insects and lizards was not considered to injure the flavor.

I often sat on her _paepae_ and watched her prepare the day's dinner.

Putting the rancid ma.s.s of _ma_ into a long wooden trough hollowed out from a tree-trunk, she added water and mixed it into a paste of the consistency of custard. This paste she wrapped in _purua_ leaves and set to bake in a native oven of rocks that stood near the pit.

Apporo smoked cigarettes while it baked, perhaps to measure the time.

Marquesans mark off the minutes by cigarettes, saying, "I will do so-and-so in three cigarettes," or, "It is two cigarettes from my house to his."

When the cigarettes were consumed, or when her housewifely instinct told Apporo that the dish was properly cooked, back it went into the trough again, and was mashed with the _keatukipopoi_, the Phallic pounder of stone known to all primitive peoples. A _pahake_, or wooden bowl about eighteen inches in diameter, received it next, and the last step of the process followed.

Taking a fistful of the ma.s.s, Apporo placed it in another _pahake_, and kneaded it for a long time with her fingers, using oil from crushed cocoanuts as a lubricant. And at last, proudly smiling, she set before me a dish of _popoi kaoi_, the very best _popoi_ that can possibly be made.

It is a dish to set before a sorcerer. I would as lief eat bill-poster's paste a year old. It tastes like a sour, acid custard.

Yet white men learn to eat it, even to yearn for it. Captain Capriata, of the schooner _Roberta_, which occasionally made port in Atuona Bay, could digest little else. Give him a bowl of _popoi_ and a stewed or roasted cat, and his Corsican heart warmed to the giver.

As bread or meat are to us, so was _popoi_ to my tawny friends. They ate it every day, sometimes three or four times a day, and consumed enormous quant.i.ties at a squatting. As the peasant of certain districts of Europe depends on black bread and cheese, the poor Irish on potatoes or stirabout, the Scotch on oatmeal, so the Marquesan satisfies himself with _popoi_, and likes it really better than anything else.

Many times, when unable to evade the hospitality of my neighbors, I squatted with them about the br.i.m.m.i.n.g _pahake_ set on their _paepae_, and dipped a finger with them, though they marveled at my lack of appet.i.te. In the silence considered proper to the serious business of eating, each dipped index and second finger into the bowl, and neatly conveyed a portion of the sticky ma.s.s to his mouth, returning the fingers to the bowl cleansed of the last particle. Little children, beginning to eat _popoi_ ere they were fairly weaned, put their whole hands into the dish, and often the lean and mangy curs that dragged out a wretched dog's existence about the _paepaes_ were not deprived of their turn.

If one accept the germ theory, one may find in the _popoi_ bowl a cause for the rapid spread of epidemics since the whites brought disease to the islands.

CHAPTER XII

A walk in the jungle; the old woman in the breadfruit tree; a night in a native hut on the mountain.

Atuona Valley was dozing, as was its wont in the afternoons, when the governor, accompanied by the guardian of the palace, each carrying a shot-gun, invited me to go up the mountain to shoot _kukus_ for dinner. The _kuku_ is a small green turtle-dove, very common in the islands, and called also _u'u_ and _kukupa_. Under any of these names the green-feathered morsel is excellent eating when broiled or fried.

I did not take a gun, as, unless hunger demands it, I do not like to kill. We started out together, climbing the trail in single file, but the enthusiasm of the chase soon led my companions into the deeper brush where the little doves lured them, and only the sharp crack of an occasional shot wakening the echoes of the cliffs disturbed my solitude.

The dark stillness of the deep valley, where the shadows of the mountains fell upon groves of cocoanuts and miles of tangled bush, recalled to me a canon in New York City, in the center of the world of finance, gloomy even at noon, the sky-touching buildings darkening the street and the spirits of the dwellers like mountains. There, when at an unsual moment I had come from the artificially-lighted cage of a thousand slaves to money-getting, and found the street for a second deserted, no figure of animal or human in its sombre sweep, I had the same sensation of solitude and awe as in this jungle.

Suddenly a mult.i.tude of people had debouched from many points, and shattered the impression.

But here, in Atuona Valley, the hoot of the owl, the _kouku_, which in Malay is the ghost-bird, the _burong-hantu_, seemed to deepen the silence. Does not that word _hantu_, meaning in Malay an evil spirit, have some obscure connection with our American negro "hant," a goblin or ghost? Certainly the bird's long and dismal "Hoo-oo-oo"

wailing through the shuddering forest evoked dim and chilling memories of tales told by candlelight when I was a child in Maryland.

Here on the lower levels I was still among the cocoanut-groves. The trail pa.s.sed through acres of them, their tall gray columns rising like cathedral arches eighty feet above a green mat of creeping vines.

Again it dipped into the woods, where one or two palms struggled upward from a clutching jungle. Everywhere I saw the nuts tied by their natural stems in clumps of forty or fifty and fastened to limbs which had been cut and lashed between trees. These had been gathered by climbers and left thus to be collected for drying into copra.

Constantly the ripe nuts not yet gathered fell about me. These heavy missiles, many six or seven pounds in weight, fell from heights of fifty to one hundred feet and struck the earth with a dull sound.

The roads and trails were littered with them. They fall every hour of the day in the tropics, yet I have never seen any one hurt by them.

Narrow escapes I had myself, and I have heard of one or two who were severely injured or even killed by them, but the accidents are entirely out of proportion to the shots fired by the trees. One becomes an expert at dodging, and an instinct draws one's eyes to the branch about to shed a _mei_, or the palm intending to launch a cocoanut.

As I made my way up the trail, pausing now and then to look about me, I came upon an old woman leaning feebly on a tall staff. Although it was the hour of afternoon sleep, she was abroad for some reason, and I stopped to say "_Kaoha_," to her. A figure of wretchedness she was, bent almost double, her withered, decrepit limbs clad in a ragged _pareu_ and her lean arms clutching the stick that bore her weight.

She was so aged that she appeared unable to hear my greeting, and replied only mutteringly, while her bleary eyes gleamed up at me between fallen lids.

Such miserable age appealed to pity, but as she appeared to wish no aid, I left her leaning on her staff, and moved farther along the trail, stopping again to gaze at the shadowed valley below while I mused on the centuries it had seen and the brief moment of a man's life. Standing thus, I was like to lose my own, for suddenly I heard a whirr like that of a shrapnel sh.e.l.l on its murderous errand, and at my feet fell a projectile.

I saw that it was a breadfruit and that I was under the greatest tree of that variety I had ever seen, a hundred feet high and spreading like a giant oak. In the topmost branches was the tottering beldame I had saluted, and in both her hands the staff, a dozen feet long. She was threshing the fruit from the tree with astounding energy and agility, her scanty rags blown by the wind, and her emaciated, naked figure in its arboreal surroundings like that of an aged ape.

How she held on was a mystery, for she seemed to lean out from a limb at a right angle, yet she had but a toe-hold upon it. No part of her body but her feet touched the branch, nor had she any other support but that, yet she banged the staff about actively and sent more six-pounders down, so that I fled without further reflection.

The score of houses strung along the upper reaches of Atuona Valley were silent at this hour, and everywhere native houses were decaying, their falling walls and sunken roofs remembering the thousands who once had their homes here. Occasionally in our own country we see houses untenanted and falling to ruin, bearing unmistakable evidences of death or desertion, and I have followed armies that devastated a countryside and slew its people or hunted them to the hills, but the first is a solitary case, and the second, though full of horror, has at least the element of activity, of moving and struggling life. The rotting homes of the Marquesan people speak more eloquently of death than do sunken graves.

In these vales, which each held a thousand or several thousand when the blight of the white man came, the abandoned _paepaes_ are solemn and shrouded witnesses of the death of a race. The jungle runs over them, and only remnants remain of the houses that sat upon them.

Their owners have died, leaving no posterity to inhabit their homes; neighbors have removed their few chattels, and the wilderness has claimed its own. In every valley these dark monuments to the benefits of civilization hide themselves in the thickets.

None treads the stones that held the houses of the dead. They are _tapu_; about them flit the _veinahae_, the _matiahae_, and the _etuahae_, dread vampires and ghosts that have charge of the corpse and wait to seize the living. Well have these ghoulish phantoms feasted; whole islands are theirs, and soon they will sit upon the _paepae_ of the last Marquesan.

I reached the top of the gulch and paused to gaze at its extent. The great hills rose sheer and rugged a mile away; the cocoanuts ceased at a lower level, and where I stood the precipices were a ma.s.s of wild trees, bushes, and creepers. From black to lightest green the colors ran, from smoky crests and gloomy ravines to the stream singing its way a hundred feet below the trail.

A hundred varieties of flowers poured forth their perfume upon the lonely scene. The frangipani, the red jasmine of delicious odor, and tropical gardenias, weighted the warm air with their heavy scents.

Beside the trail grew the _hutu_-tree with crimson-ta.s.seled flowers among broad leaves, and fruit p.r.i.c.kly and pear-shaped. It is a fruit not to be eaten by man, but immemorally used by lazy fishermen to insure miraculous draughts. Streams are dammed up and the pears thrown in. Soon the fish become stupified and float upon the surface to the gaping nets of the poisoners. They are not hurt in flavor or edibility.

The _keoho_, a th.o.r.n.y shrub, caught at my clothes as I left the trail.

Its weapons of defence serve often as pins for the native, who in the forest improvises for himself a hat or umbrella of leaves.

Beside me, too, was the _putara_, a broad-leaved bush and the lemon hibiscus, with its big, yellow flower, black-centered, was twisted through these shrubs and wound about the trunk of the giant _aea_, in whose branches the _kuku_ murmured to its mate. Often the flowering vine stopped my progress. I struggled to free myself from its clutch as I fought through the ma.s.s of vegetation, and pausing perforce to let my panting lungs gulp the air, I saw around me ever new and stranger growths--orchids, giant creepers, the _noni enata_, a small bush with crimson pears upon it, the _toa_, or ironwood, which gave deadly clubs in war-time, but now spread its boughs peacefully amidst the prodigal foliage of its neighbors.

The umbrella fern, _mana-mana-hine_, was all about. The _ama_, the candlenut-tree, shed its oily nuts on the earth. The _puu-epu_, the paper mulberry, with yellow blossoms and cottony, round leaves, jostled panda.n.u.s and hibiscus; the _ena-vao_, a wild ginger with edible, but spicy, cones, and the lacebark-tree, the _faufee_, which furnishes cordage from its bark, contested for footing in the rich earth and fought for the sun that even on the brightest day never reached their roots.

I staggered through the bush, falling over rotten trees and struggling in the ma.s.s of shrubs and tangled vines.