Mystic Isles of the South Seas Part 18

I had coffee opposite the market place in the shop of Wing Luey, and chatted a few moments with Prince Hinoe, the son of the Princesse de Joinville, who would have been king had the French not ended the Kingdom of Tahiti. No matter what time Hinoe lay down at night, he was up at dawn for the market, for his early roll and coffee and his converse with the sellers and the buyers. There once a day for an hour the native in Papeete touched the country folk and renewed the ancient custom of gossip in the cool of the morning.

The princess--in English her familiar Tahitian name, Noanoa Tiare, meant Fragrance of the Jasmine--was in the Parc de Bougainville, by the bust of the first French circ.u.mnavigator.

"Ia ora na!" she greeted me. "Are you ready for adventure?"

She handed me a small, soft package, with a caution to keep it safe and dry. I put it in my inside pocket.

The light of the sun hardly touched the lagoon, and Moorea was still shrouded in the shadows of the expiring night. As we walked down the beach, the day was opening with the "morning bank," the ma.s.ses of white clouds that gather upon the horizon before the tradewind begins its diurnal sweep, to s.h.i.+ft and mold them all the hours till sunset.

Fragrance of the Jasmine was in a long and clinging tunic of pale blue, with low, white shoes disclosing stockings also of blue, and wore a hat of panda.n.u.s weave. She carried nothing, nor had I anything in my hands, and we were to be gone all day. I regretted that I had not lingered longer with Prince Hinoe over the rolls and coffee.

We fared past the merchants' stores, the Cercle Bougainville, and the steams.h.i.+p wharf, and over the Pont de l'Est, or Eastern bridge, to Patutoa. The princess pointed out to me many wretched straw houses, crowded in a hopeless way. They were like a refugee camp after a disaster, impermanent, uncomfortable, barely holding on to the swampy earth. One knew the occupants to be far from their own Lares and Penates.

"Those are the habitations of people of other islands," she said. "The people of the Paumotus, the Australs, and of Easter Island settled there. They were brought here by odious labor contractors, and died of homesickness. Those men murdered hundreds of them to gain un pen d'argent, a handful of gold. Eh b'en, those who did it have suffered. They have faded away, and most of their evil money, too. Aue!"

Llewellyn's dark face as he protested against Lying Bill's sarcastic statement of guilt came before me.

To lighten the thought of the princess I told her the thread of "The Bottle Imp," and that the magic bottle had disappeared out of the story right there, by the old calaboose. She was glad that the white sailor who did not care for life had saved the Hawaiians.

Framed in the door of a rough cabin I saw McHenry. He was in pajamas, barefooted, and unshaven. I recalled that he had an "old woman"

there. Llewellyn had reproved him for speaking contemptuously of her as beneath him socially. I waved to McHenry, who nodded charily, and pulled down the curtain which was in lieu of a door. The shack looked bare and cheap, as if little money or effort had been spent upon it. Perhaps, I thought, McHenry could afford only the drinks and cards at the Cercle Bougainville and economized at home. He did not reappear, but a comely native woman drew back the curtain, and stood a moment to view us. She was large, and did not look browbeaten, as one would have supposed from McHenry's boast that he would not permit her even to walk with him except at a "respectful distance." Of course I knew him as a boaster.

The church of the curious Josephite religion was near by, and in the mission house attached to it I saw the American preachers of the sect.

"What do they preach?" I asked Noanoa Tiare.

"Those missionaries, the Tonito? Oh, they speak evil of the Mormons. I do not know how they speak of G.o.d." She laughed. "I am not interested in religions," she explained. "They are so difficult to understand. Our own old G.o.ds seem easier to know about."

We had arrived at the part of the beach into which the broad avenue of Fautaua debouched.

The road was beside the stream of Fautaua, and arching it were magnificent dark-green trees, like the locust-trees of Malta. This avenue was in the middle of the island, and looking through the climbing bow of branches I saw Maiauo, the lofty needles of rock which rise black-green from the mountain plateau and form a tiara, Le Diademe, of the French. A quarter of an hour's stroll brought us to a natural basin into which the stream fell. It was of it Louis Marie Julien Viaud, shortly after he had been christened Loti, wrote:

The pool had numerous visitors every day; beautiful young women of Papeete spent the warm tropical days here, chatting, singing and sleeping, or even diving and swimming like agile gold fish. They went here clad in their muslin tunics, and wore them moist upon their bodies while they slept, looking like the naiads of the past.

We were already warm from walking, and I, in my pareu and light coat of pongee silk, looked longingly at the water sparkling in the sun, but the princess took me by the hand and led me on.

"It were better to go directly up the valley and out of the heat,"

she advised. "We shall have many pools to bathe in."

It was at the next that I took from my pocket "Rarahu, ou le mariage de Loti," a thin, poorly printed book in pink paper covers that I had possessed since boyhood, and which I had read again on the s.h.i.+p coming to Tahiti. The princess, like all reading Tahiti, knew it better than I, for it was the first novel in French with its scenes in that island, and for more than forty years had been talked about there.

"Here at this pool," she said, with her finger on the page, "Loti surprised Rarahu one afternoon when for a red ribbon she let an old and hideous Chinese kiss her naked shoulder. Mon dieu! That French naval officer made a bruit about a poor little Tahitian girl! We will talk about her when we are at dejeuner."

Dejeuner! My heart leaped. Whence would the luncheon come? Had this child of Tahiti arranged beforehand that she should be met by a jinn with sandwiches and cakes? I dared not ask.

We pushed on, and pa.s.sed many residences of natives. They were almost all of European construction, board cottages, because the houses of native sort are forbidden within the munic.i.p.al limits. Beyond them we saw no houses. The Tahitian families were cooking their breakfasts, brought from the market, on little fires outside their houses. They all smiled, and called to us to partake with them.

"Ia ora na! Haere mai amu!"

"Greeting! Come eat with us!"

They looked happy in the suns.h.i.+ne, the smoke curling about them in milky wreaths, the men naked except for pareus, and the children quite as born. Fragrance of the Jasmine answered all with pleasant badinage, and each must know whither we were bound. They thought it not at all odd, apparently, that a princess of their race should be going to the waterfalls with a foreigner, and they beamed on me to a.s.sure me of their interest and understanding.

The broad avenue lessened into a broken road, roofed by many kinds of trees. Though the sun ascended from the ocean on the other side of Tahiti above the fantastic peak of Maiauo, it had not shed a beam upon the ferns and mosses. The guava was a dense growth. Like the lantana of Hawaii and Ceylon, imported to Tahiti to fill a want, it had abused hospitality, and become a nuisance without apparent remedy. How often man works but in circles! Everywhere in the world plants and insects, birds and animals, had been pointed out to me that had been acquired for a beneficent purpose, and had become a curse.

The mina-bird was brought to Tahiti from the Moluccas to eat wasps which came from South America, and were called Jack Spaniards. The mina, perhaps, ate the insects, but he also ate everything else, including fruit. He stole bread and b.u.t.ter off tables, and his hoa.r.s.e croak or defiant rattle was an oft-repeated warning to defend one's food. The minas were many in Tahiti, and, like the English sparrow in American cities and towns, had driven almost all other birds to flight or local extinction. The sparrow's urban doom might be read in the increasing number of automobiles, but the mina in Tahiti, as in Hawaii, had a sinecure.

Noanoa Tiare said that the guava had its merits. Horses and cattle ate its leaves and fruit, and the wood was a common fuel throughout Tahiti. The fruit was delicious, and in America or England would be all used for jelly, but only Lovaina preserved it. The pa.s.sion-flowers of the granadilla vines, white and star-like, with purpling centers, were intermingled with the guavas, a brilliant and aromatic show, the fruit like miniature golden pumpkins. Their acid, sweetish pulp contained many seeds, each incased in white jelly. One ate the seeds only, though the pulp, when cooked, was palatable.

The road dwindled into a narrower path, and then a mere trail. The road had crossed the brook many times on frail bridges, some tottering and others only remnants. Habitations ceased, and we were in a dark, splendid gorge, narrow, and affording one no vision straight ahead except at intervals.

The princess named many of the growths we pa.s.sed, and explained their qualities. The native is very close to the ground. The lantana, with its yellow and magenta flowerets, umbrella ferns, and aihere, the herbe de vache, and the bohenia, used by the Tahitians for an eye lotion, were all about. Palms, with cocoanuts of a half dozen stages of growth, and giant banana-plants lined the banks, and bushes with blue flowers like violets, and one with red b.u.t.tons, intermingled with limes and oranges to form a thicket through which we could hardly force our way.

We were yet on the level of the rivulet, but now, the princess said, must take to the cliff. We had come to a pool which in symmetry and depth, in coolness and invitingness, outranked all before. I was very hot, the beads of perspiration like those in a steamroom.

"We will rest here a few minutes, and you may bathe," said my lovely guide. "I have not been to Fautaua vaimato for several years, but I never forget the way. I will make a basket, and here we will gather some fruit for our dejeuner for fear there might not be plenty at the waterfalls."

I took off my tennis-shoes, hung my silk coat on a limb, and plunged into the pool. Never but in the tropics does the human being fully enjoy the dash into cool water. There it is a tingling pleasure. I dived time and again, and then sat in the small glitter of sunlight to dry and to watch Noanoa Tiare make the basket. She said she had a wide choice there, as the leaves of the banana, cocoanut, bamboo, panda.n.u.s, or aihere would serve. She had selected the aihere, the common weed, and out of its leaves she deftly fas.h.i.+oned a basket a foot long and wide and deep.

Although she had been in Paris and London and in New York, knew how to play Beethoven and Grieg and Saint-Saens, had had gowns made by Paquin, and her portrait in the salon, she was at home in this glade as a Tahitian girl a hundred years ago. The airs of the avenue de l'Opera in Paris, and, too, of the rue de Rivoli in Papeete, were rarefied in this simple spot to the impulses and experiences of her childhood in the groves and on the beaches of her beloved island.

When I had on my coat, we gathered limes, bananas, oranges, and a wild pineapple that grew near by in a tangle of coffee and vanilla, and the graceful acalypha. The yellow tecoma, a choice exotic in America, shed its seeds upon the sow thistle, a salad, and the ape or wild taro. The great leaves of the ape are like our elephant's ear plant, and the roots, as big as war-clubs, are tubers that take the place of potatoes here. In Hawaii, crushed and fermented, and called poi, they were ever the main food. The juice of the leaf stings one's skin.

The princess removed her shoes and stockings, and I carried them over my shoulder. We deflected from the rivulet to the cliff above it, and there forced our way along the mountain-side, feeling almost by instinct the trail hidden by the ma.s.s of creepers and plants.

It was a real jungle. Man had once dwelt there when his numbers in this island were many times greater. Then every foot of ground from the precipices to the sea was cleared for the breadfruit, the taro, the cocoanut, and other life-giving growths, which sowed themselves and asked no cultivation. Now, except for the faint trail, I was on primeval ground, from all appearances.

The canon grew narrower and darker. The undefined path lay inches deep in water, and the levels were shallow swamp. Nature was in vast luxuriance, in a revel of aloofness from human beings, casting its wealth of blazing colors and surprising shapes upon every side. We slid down the edge of the hill to the burn, where the ma.s.sive boulders and shattered rocks were camouflaged by the painting of moss and lichen, the ginger, turmeric, caladium, and dracaena, and by the overhanging palms covered with the rich bird's-nest ferns.

We sat again in this wild garden of the tropic to invite our souls to drink the beauty and quietude, the absence of mankind and the nearness of nature. We became very still, and soon heard the sounds of bird and insect above the lower notes of the brawling stream.

The princess put her finger on her lips and whispered in my ear:

"Do you hear the warbling of the omamao and the olatare? They are our song-birds. They are in these high valleys only, for the mina has frightened them from below--the mina that came with the ugly Chinese."

"Noanoa Tiare," said I, "you Tahitians are the birds of paradise of the human family. You have been driven from the rich valleys of your old life to hills of bare existence by the minas of commerce and politics. I feel like apologizing for my civilization."

She pressed my hand.

"Taisez-vous!" she replied, smiling. "Aita peapea. I am always happy. Remember I still live in Tahiti, and this is my time. My foremothers' day is past. Allons! We will be soon at the vaimato, and there we will have the dejeuner."

As we moved on I saw that the yellow flowers of the purau, dried red by the sun,--poultices for natives' bruises,--and candlenuts in heaps,--torches ready to hand,--littered the moss.

The mountain loomed in the distance, and the immense Pic du Francais towered in shadow. Faintly I heard the boom of the waterfall, and knew we were nearing the goal.

The canon grew yet narrower and darker, and the crash of water louder. We had again attained a considerable height over the stream, and the trail seemed lost. The princess took my hand, and cautiously feeling the creepers and plants under our feet, we slipped and crept down the hidden path. Suddenly, the light became brilliant, and I found myself in a huge broken bowl of lava rock, the walls almost vertical. From the summit of the precipice facing me fell a superb cascade into a deep and troubled tarn. The stream was spun silver in the sun, which now was warm and splendid. So far it fell that much of it never reached the pool as water, but, blown by the gentle breeze, a moiety in spume and spray wet the earth for an acre about. Like the veil of a bride, the spindrift spread in argent clouds, and a hundred yards away dropped like gentle rain upon us. Verdure covered everything below except where the river ran from the tarn and hurried to the lesser things of the town. The giant walls, as black as the interior of an old furnace, were festooned with magnificent tree ferns, the exquisite maidenhair, lianas, and golden-green mosses, all sparkling in the sun with the million drops of the vaimato.

We withdrew a few paces from the vapor, and found a place on the edge of the brook to have our fruit and, perhaps, a siesta. A carpet of moss and green leaves made a couch of Petronian ease, and we threw ourselves upon it with the weariness of six miles afoot uphill in the tropics. It was not hot like the summer heat of New York, for Tahiti has the most admirable climate I have found the world over, but at midday I had felt the warmth penetratingly. Noanoa Tiare made nothing of it, but suggested that we both leap into the tarn.