White Shadows in the South Seas Part 32

"'Are they all gone?' he inquired weakly.

"'No,' I said, 'there are fifteen or twenty here.' We came to a clearing and there found the remnant of the Typees. I questioned them, but none had ever heard of him. There had been many Ma.n.u.s,--the word means bird,--but as they were the last of the tribe, she must have been dead before they were born, and they no longer kept in their memories the names of the dead, since there were so many, and all would be dead soon.

"The American still understood enough Marquesan to understand their answers, and taking me by the arm he left the horses and led me up the valley till he came to a spot where there were fragments of an old _paepae_, buried in vines and torn apart by their roots.

"'We lived here,' he said, and then he sat on the forsaken stones and cried. He said that they had had two children, and he had been sure that at least he would find them alive. His misery made me feel bad, and the d.a.m.ned _nonos_, too, and I cried--I don't know how d.a.m.n sentimental it was, but that was the way it affected me. The old chap seemed so alone in the world.

"'It is three miles from here to the beach,' he said, 'and I have seen men coming with their presents for the chief, walking a yard apart, and yet the line stretched all the way to the beach.'

"He could hardly ride back to Tai-o-hae, and he departed with the _Tropic Bird_ without saying another word to any one."

Typee, they told me, was half way to Atiheu and a good four miles by horse. The road had been good when the people were many, and was still the main road of the island, leading through the Valley of Hapaa. My steed was borrowed of T'yonny Howard, who, though he owned a valley, poured cement for day's wages.

"What I do?" he asked, as if I held the answer. "n.o.body to help me work there. I cannot make copra alone. Even here they bring men from other place do work. Marquesan die too fast."

If T'yonny revered his father's countrymen, his horse did not. These island horses are unhappy-looking skates, though good climbers and sliders.

"You don't need person go with you," said the son of the former living picture. "That horsey know. You stay by him."

The saddle must have been strange to the horsey, for uneasiness communicated itself from him to me as we set out, an uneasiness augmented to me by the incessant vicious p.r.i.c.ks of the ever-present _nonos_.

The way led ever higher above the emerald bay of Tai-o-hae set in the jade of the forest, and valley after valley opened below as the trail edged upward on the face of sheer cliffs or crossed the little plateaus of their summits. Hapaa lay bathed in a purple mist that hid from me the mute tokens of depopulation; Hapaa that had given Porter its thousands of naked warriors, and that now was devoid of human beings.

Dipping slightly downward again, the trail lay on the rim of a deep declivity, a sunless gulf in which the tree-tops fell away in rank below rank into dim depths of mistiness. There was no sign of human pa.s.sing on the vine-grown trail, a vague track through a melancholy wilderness that seemed to breathe death and decay. A spirit of gloom seemed to rise from the shadowed declivity, from the silence of the mournful wood and the damp darkness of the leaf-hidden earth.

I had given myself over to musing upon the past, but suddenly in the narrowest part of the trail the beast I rode turned and took my canvas-covered toes in his yellow teeth. A vague momentary flash of horror came over me. Did I bestride a metempsychosized man-eater, a revenant from the b.l.o.o.d.y days of Nuka-hiva? In those wicked eyes I saw reflected the tales of transmigatory vengeance, from the wolf of Little Red Riding Hood to the a.s.s that one becomes who kills a Brahman. I gave vent at the same second to a shriek of anguish and struck the animal upon the nose, the tenderest part of his anatomy within reach. He released my foot, whirled, cavorted, and, as I seized a tree fern on the bank, went heels over head over the cliff.

T'yonny had said to "stay by horsey," but he could not have foreseen the road he would take. I was sorry for him as I heard the reverberations of his crashing fall. No living thing could escape death in such a drop, for though the cliff down which he had disappeared was not absolutely perpendicular, it was nearly so.

Peering over it, I could not see his corpse, for fern and tree-top hid all below. At least, I thought, he had surcease of all ills now.

And so I descended the steep trail on foot--mostly on one foot--until I reached the vale of Typee.

I found myself in a loneliness indescribable and terrible. No sound but that of a waterfall at a distance parted the somber silence. The trail was through a thicket of ferns, trees, and wild flowers. The perfume of _Hinano_, of the _vaovao_, with its delicate blue flowers, and the _vaipuhao_, whose leaves are scented like violets, filled the heavy air, and I pa.s.sed acres of _kokou_, which looks like tobacco, but has a yellow fruit of delicious odor. It was such a garden as the prince who woke the _Sleeping Beauty_ penetrated to reach the palace where she lay entranced, and something of the same sense of dread magic lay upon it. Humanity was not so much absent as gone, and a feeling of doom and death was in the motionless air, which lay like a weight upon leaf and flower.

The thin, sharp buzzing of the _nonos_ was incessant. They had come when man departed; there were none when Porter devastated the valley, nor when Melville spent his happy months here thirty years later. One must move briskly to escape them now, and I was pushing through the bushes that strove to obliterate the trail when I came upon a native.

He was so old that he must have been a youth in the valley when it was visited by the American-liner captain as a boy. He was quite nude save for a ragged cincture, and his body had shrunk and puckered, and his skin had folded and discolored until he looked as if life had ebbed away from him and left him high and dry between the past and the hereafter. A ragged chin beard, ashen in hue, hung below his gaping, empty mouth. But there was a spirit in his bosom still, for upon his head he wore a circle of bright flowers to supplement the spa.r.s.e locks.

His eyes were barely openable, and his face, indeed, his whole body, was a coppery green, the soot of the candlenut, black itself, but blue upon the flesh, having turned by age to a mottled and hideous color. Only the striking patterns, where they branched from the biceps to the chest, were plain.

That he had been one of the great of Nuka-hiva was certain; the fact was stamped indelibly upon his person, and though worn and faded to the ghastly green of old copper, it remained to proclaim his lineage and his rank.

"_Kaoha te iki!_" said this ancient, as he stood in the path.

"_Kaoha e!_" I saluted him.

"_Puaka piki enata_" he said further, and pointed down the trail.

What could he mean? _Puaka_ is pig, _piki_ is to mount or climb, and _enata_ is man. A great white light beat about my brow. "The pig men climb?" Could he mean Rozinante, the steed to whom T'yonny had entrusted me, and who had so basely deserted his trust over a cliff?

I hurried on incredulous, and, in a clearing where there were three or four horses, beheld the suicide grazing upon the luscious gra.s.s.

He had lost much cuticle, and the saddle was in shreds, but the _puaka piki enata_ was evidently in fairly good health.

The old man had slowly followed me down the trail, and he stood within the doorway of a rude hut, blinking in the sun as he watched my movements. In the houses were altogether fewer than a dozen people.

They sat by cocoanut-husk fires, the acrid smoke of which daunted the _nonos_.

The reason any human beings endure such tortures to remain in this gloomy, deserted spot can only be the affection the Marquesan has for his home. Not until epidemics have carried off all but one or two inhabitants in a valley can those remaining be persuaded to leave it.

This dozen of the Taipi clan are the remainder of the twenty Ramqe saw with the heartbroken American. They have clung to their lonely _paepaes_ despite their poverty of numbers and the ferocity of the _nonos_. They had clearings with cocoanuts and breadfruit, but they cared no longer to cultivate them, preferring rather to sit sadly in the curling fumes and dream of the past. One old man read aloud the "Gospel of St. John" in Marquesan, and the others listlessly listened, seeming to drink in little comfort from the verses, which he recited in the chanting monotone of their _uta_.

Nine miles in length is Typee, from a glorious cataract that leaps over the dark b.u.t.tress wall where the mountain bounds the valley, to the blazing beach. And in all this extent of marvelously rich land, the one-time fondly cherished abode of the most valiant clan of the Marquesas, of thousands of men and women whose bodies were as beautiful as the models for the statues the Greeks made, whose hearts were generous, and whose minds were eager to learn all good things, there are now this wretched dozen too old or listless to gather their own food. In the ruins of a broken and abandoned _paepae_, in the shadow of an acre-covering banian, I smoked and asked myself what a Christ would think of the havoc wrought by men calling themselves Christians.

CHAPTER XXVII

Journey on the _Roberta_; the winged c.o.c.kroaches; arrival at a Swiss paradise in the valley of Oomoa.

I sailed from Tai-o-hae for an unknown port, carried by the schooner _Roberta_, which had brought the white mare from Atuona and whose skipper had bore so well the white banner of Joan in the procession that did her honor. The _Roberta_ was the only vessel in those waters and, sailing as she did at the whim of her captain and the necessities of trade, none knew when she might return to Nuka-hiva, so I could but accept the opportunity she offered of reaching the southern group of islands again, and trust to fortune or favor to return me to my own island of Hiva-oa.

The _Roberta_ lay low in the water, not so heavily sparred as the _Morning Star_, or with her under-cut stern, but old and battered, built for the business of a thief-catcher, and with a history as scarred as her hull and as slippery as her decks. Was she not once the _Herman_, and before that something else, and yet earlier something else, built for the Russians to capture the artful poachers of the Smoky Sea? And later a poacher herself, and still later stealing men, a black-birder, seizing the unoffending natives of these South Seas and selling them into slavery of mine or plantation, of guano-heap and sickening alien clime. Her decks have run blood, and heard the wailing of the gentle savage torn from his beloved home and lashed or clubbed into submission by the superior white. Name and color and rig had changed time and again, owners and masters had gone to Davy Jones's locker; the old bra.s.s cannon on her deck had raked the villages of the Marquesans and witnessed a thousand deeds of murder and rapine.

I pulled myself aboard by a topping-lift, climbed upon the low cabin-house, and jumped down to the tiny p.o.o.p where Jerome Capriata held the helm.

This Corsican, with his more than sixty years, most of them in these waters, was a Marquesan in his intuitive skill in handling his schooner in all weather, for knowing these islands by a glimpse of rock or tree, for landing and taking cargo in all seas. Old and worn, like the _Roberta_, he was known to all who ranged the southern ocean.

What romances he had lived and seen were hidden in his grizzled bosom, for he said little, and nothing of himself.

The supercargo, Henry Lee, a Norwegian of twenty-five years, six of which he had pa.s.sed among the islands, set out the rum and wine and a clay bottle of water. He introduced me to Pere Olivier, a priest of the mission, whose charge was in the island of Fatu-hiva. From him I learned that the _Roberta_ was bound for Oomoa, a port of that Island.

That I had not been given the vaguest idea what our first landfall would be was indicative of the secrecy maintained by these traders in the compet.i.tion for copra. The supply being limited, often it is the first vessel on the spot after a harvest that is able to buy it, and captains of schooners guard their movements as an army its own during a campaign. The traders trust one another as a cat with a mouse trusts another cat.

The priest was sitting on a ledge below the taffrail, and I spoke to him in Spanish, as I had heard it was his tongue. His _buenos dias_ in reply was hearty, and his voice soft and rich. A handsome man was Padre Olivier, though in sad disorder. His black soutane, cut like the woolen gown of our grandmothers, was soaking wet, and his low rough shoes were muddy. A soiled bandana was about his head. His finely chiseled features, benign and intelligent, were framed by a snow-white beard, and his eyes, large and limpid, looked benevolence itself. He was all affability, and eager to talk about everything in the world.

The rain, which all day had been falling at intervals, began again, and as the _Roberta_ entered the open sea, she began to kick up her heels. Our conversation languished. When the supercargo called us below for dinner, pride and not appet.i.te made me go. The priest answered with a groan. Padre Olivier was prostrate on the deck, his n.o.ble head on a pillow, his one piece of luggage, embroidered with the monogram of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the needlework of the nuns of Atuona.

"I am seasick if I wade in the surf," said the priest, in mournful jest.

The _Roberta's_ cabin was a dark and noisome hole, filled with demijohns and merchandise, with two or three untidy bunks in corners, the air soaked with the smells of thirty years of bilge-water, sealskins, copra, and the cargoes of island traffic. Capriata, Harry Lee, and I sat on boxes at a rough table, which we clutched as the _Roberta_ pitched and rolled.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Near the Mission at Hanavave]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Starting from Hanavave for Oomoa]

When the ragged cook brought the first dish, unmistakably a cat swimming in a liquid I could have sworn by my nose to be drippings from an ammonia tank, I protested a lack of hunger for any food. My ruse pa.s.sed for the moment, but was exposed by a flock or swarm of c.o.c.kroaches, which, scenting a favorite food, suddenly sprang upon the table and upon us, leaping and flying into the plates and drawing Corsican curses from Capriata and Norwegian maledictions from Lee. I did not wait to see them throwing the invaders from the battlements of the table into the moat of salt water and spilt wine below, but quickly, though feebly, climbed to the deck and laid myself beside Pere Olivier, nor could cries that the enemy had been defeated and that "only a few" were flying about, summon me below again.

Pere Olivier and I stayed p.r.o.ne all night in alternate pelting rain and flooding moonlight, as a fair wind bowled us along at six knots an hour. Padre Olivier, between naps, recited his rosary to take his mind from his woes. I could tell when he finished a decade by his involuntary start as he began a new one. I had no such comfort as beads and prayers, and the flight of those schooner griffins had struck me in the solar plexus of imagination.

"Accept them as stations of the cross," said the priest. "This life is but a step to heaven."