Mystic Isles of the South Seas Part 31

I brought with me a lunette, the diver's aid, a four-sided wooden frame fifteen inches each way, with a bottom of gla.s.s and no top. I stuck my head in the box and looked through the gla.s.s, which I thrust below the surface, thus evading the opaqueness or distortion caused by the ripples. One did not need this invention ordinarily, for the water was as clear as air when undisturbed, and the garden of the sea G.o.ds was a brilliant and moving spectacle below my drifting canoe. One must be a child again to see all of it; the magic shapes, the haunting tints, the fairy forms. The gardener who had directed the growth of the aquarium believed in kelpies, undines, and mermaids, and had made for them the superbest playground conceivable even by sprites.

There were trees, bushes, and plants of yellow and white coral, of scarlet corallins, dahlias and roses, cabbages and cauliflowers simulated perfectly, lilies and heaps of precious stones. On flat tables were starfish lazying at full width, strewn sh.e.l.ls, and hermit-crabs entering and leaving their captured homes. Mauve and primrose, pink and blue, green and brown, the coral plants nodded in the glittering light that filtered through the translucent brine. They were alive, all these things, as were the sponges, with stomachs and reactions, and impulses to perpetuate their species and to be beautiful. They had no relation to me except as I had to nature, but they were my beginnings, my simple ancestors who had stayed simple and unminded, and I was to count those hours happy when I communed with them.

Taken from their element they died, but left their mold, to harden in the air they could not breathe, and to amaze the less fortunate people who could not see them in their own estate. The seaweeds grew among them, green or brown, more primordial than the corals, with less of organic life, vegetables and not animals, but eager, too, for expression in their motions, their increase in size, and their continuance through posterity. All these were the display of the kindness of the same spirit who rode the thunder, who permitted a million babes to starve, who stirred in men the madness to slay a myriad of their brothers, and who fixed the countless stars in the firmament to guide them in the darkness.

The hermit-crabs drew my minute attention, and I anch.o.r.ed my canoe and with the lunette watched them by the hour. They were as provident and as handy--with claws--as the bee that stores honey. The hermit inhabits the vacant sh.e.l.ls of other mollusks, entering one soon after birth, sometimes finding them untenanted, and sometimes killing the rightful occupant, and changing his house as he grows. I had been surprised to see small and large sh.e.l.ls moving fast over the reef, and on the beach at the water's-edge; sh.e.l.ls as big as my thumbnail and nearly as big as my head. I seized one, and behold! the inmate was walking on ten legs with the sh.e.l.l on his back, like a man carrying a dog-house. I attempted to pull him out of his lodging, and he was so firmly fastened to the interior by hooks on his belly that he held on until he was torn asunder. His abdomen is soft and pulpy and without protecting plates, as have other crabs, and he survived only by his childhood custom of stealing a univalve abode, though he murdered the honest tenant. In one I saw the large pincher of the crab so drawn back as to form a door to the sh.e.l.l as perfect as the original. When he felt growing pains the hermit-crab unhooked himself from his ceiling and migrated in search of a more commodious dwelling.

Interesting as were these habits of the cen.o.bite crustacean, his keeping a policeman or two on guard on his roof, and moving them to his successive domiciles, was more so. These policemen are anemones, and I saw hermit crab-sh.e.l.ls with three or four on them, and one even in the mouth of the sh.e.l.l. When the anchorite was ready for a new sh.e.l.l, he left his old one and examined the new ones acutely. Finding one to suit his expected growth, he entered it belly first, and transferred the anemone, by clawing and pulling loose its hold, to the outside of his chosen sh.e.l.l. How skilfully this was done may be judged by the fact that I could not get one free without tearing the cup-like base which fastened it. The anemone a.s.sisted in the operation by keeping its tentacles expanded, whereas it withdrew them if any foreign object came near. The stinging cells of the anemone prevent fishes from attacking the hermit, and that is the reason of his care for the parasite. It is the commensalism of the struggle for existence, learned not by the individual crab, but by his race. Some crabs wield an anemone firmly grasped in each claw, the stinging nematocysts of the parasite warding off the devilish octopus, and the anemone having a share of the crab's meals and the pleasure of vicarious transportation. The anemone at the mouth of the sh.e.l.l keeps guard at the weakest spot of the hermit's armor.

These sea-anemones themselves are mysterious evidences of the gradual advance of organisms from the slime to the poem. They are animals, and attach themselves by a muscular base to the rocks or sh.e.l.ls, or are as free-swimming as perch. I saw them two feet in diameter, seeming all vegetable, some like chrysanthemums and some resembling embroidered pin-cus.h.i.+ons. They were of many colors, and are of the coral family.

In this wonderful sea garden, where lobsters, crabs, sea-urchins, turbos, starfish, and hundreds of other sentient beings lived, I saw a thousand true scaled fish, most of them highly colored, and many so curiously marked, fas.h.i.+oned, and equipped with eccentric members that I was startled into biblical phrases. In the market they were strange enough, dead and on the marble slabs, or in green leaves, but in the lagoon they were a kaleidoscope of complexions and shapes. They were the lovely elves to complement the fantastic sh.e.l.lfish, yellow, striped with violet; bright turquoise, with a gold collar; gold, with broad bands of black terminating in winglike fins; scarlet, with cobalt polka-dots; silver, with a rosy flush; glossy green, dazzling crimson, black velvet, solid red.

They darted and flashed in and out of the caves in the coral, caressed the sea-anemones, idled about the sh.e.l.ls, avoided by dexterous twistings and turnings a thousand collisions, and continued ever the primary endeavor, the search for those particular bits of food their appet.i.tes craved.

The effect upon me of all this splendor and grace of water life, as I bent over the surface of the lagoon or walked with lunette among the beds of coral, was, after the oft-repeated periods of bewilderment at the gorgeousness and whimsicality of the universe, a deep rejoicing for its prodigality of design and purpose, and a merry sorrow for those who would inflict dogma and orthodoxy on a practical and heterodox world. I leaned on the side of the canoe or on my spears and laughed at the fools of cities, and at myself, who had been a fool among them for most of my life. Just how this train of reasoning ran I cannot say, but it moved inexorably at the contemplation of the sublime radiancy of the vivarium of the Mataiea lagoon. It always appeared a symbol of the cosmic energy which poured the bounty of rain upon the sea as upon the thirsty earth, and which is beyond good and evil as we reckon them.

When I became myself the hunter for fish, and stood upon the hummocks of coral in water up to my waist or neck, lunette in one hand and spears in another, I saw a different aspect of the garden. I, naked among the coral and the plants, must have looked to them like a frightful demon, white and without scales, a horrible devil-fish, my arms and legs glabrous tentacles, and the lunette and spears adding to my hideousness and foul menace. I know that was the impression I made on the rainbow-fish, for they fled within the caves, and only by peeping in through the gla.s.s could I see them to drive the spear into them. These slender spears were a dozen feet of light, tough wood, two of them with single iron points two feet long, and a third fitted with ten fine-pointed darning-needles. For small fish I used the latter, and in thrusting into a school was pretty sure to impale one or two.

I tied the rope of panda.n.u.s-leaves about my shoulder, and pulled the canoe along with me as a creel, tossing the fish into it as I took them. The first seven were often of different kinds, and I did not despise the yellow and black eels, the lobsters, the mao, or the oysters and clams.

I would rest my spears in the canoe, and meander slowly and meditatively over the coral terraces, repeating verses:

We wandered where the dreamy palm Murmured above the sleepy wave; And through the waters clear and calm Looked down into the coral cave Whose echoes never had been stirred By breath of man or song of bird.

When sky and wind were propitious, and other signs familiar to the Maori indicated that fish were plentiful in the lagoon, the whole village dragged the net. This belonged to the chief, who for his owners.h.i.+p received a percentage of the catch. The net was a hundred and fifty feet long, and was carried out by a dozen canoes or by half a hundred or more men and women, who let it sink to the bottom when up to their necks in water. They then approached the sh.o.r.e with the net in a half-circle, carrying it over the coral heaps, and artfully driving into it all the fish they encountered. In shallow water others waited with little baskets, and, scooping up the fish from the net, emptied them into larger baskets slung from their waists. These fish were not very big, but when larger ones were netted, marksmen with spears waited in the shallows to kill any that leaped from the seine. If the haul was bigger than the needs of the village, the overplus was sent to the market in Papeete, or kept in huge anch.o.r.ed, floating baskets of wicker. These fishermen had been heart and soul in the tahatai oneone, the fish strike, and when we had poor luck, often the best spearsman led the clan in the air taught them by the leader whom they remembered with pride and affection:

Hayrahrooyah! I'm a boom! Hayrahrooyah! Boomagay!

They a.s.sociated the air and words with the fish, and deep down in their primitive hearts thought it an incantation, such as their tahutahu, the sorcerers of the island, spoke of old.

"Tellee haapao maitai! Kelly was a wise man!" they would lament.

Every one used a fine casting-net when fis.h.i.+ng alone along the sh.o.r.es. The net was weighted, and was thrown over schools of small fish so dexterously that hundreds were snared in one fling. The tiniest fish were the size of matches. When cooked with a paste, they were as dainty as whitebait served at Greenwich to a London gourmet, and sung by Shakespere. The nets were plaited of the fibers of the hibiscus, banyan, or panda.n.u.s-bark, and when a mighty catch was expected, one of small mesh was laid inside a net of stronger and coa.r.s.er make, to intercept any large fish that might break through the first line of offense. The weights were stones wrapped in cocoanut-fiber, and the floats were of the buoyant hibiscus-wood. In front of the grounds of the chefferie there hung on the trees a long line of nets drying in the breeze.

Before a feast, if there were not conditions auspicious for a tuu i te upea toro, a dragging of the seine, the village was occupied during the day or the wind was unfavorable, we went out at night after the trades had died down, and in a dozen or twenty canoes we speared them by torchlight. One was at the paddle, and the other at the prow, with uplifted flambeau, searching the waters for the fleeing shadows beneath, and launching the dart at the exact instant of proximity. The congregation of lights, the lapping of the waves, and perhaps the very gathering of humans excited the fish. They leaped and splashed, and unaware of their betrayal of their presence to slayers, informed our eyes and ears of their whereabouts. I could not compete with the Tahitians with the spears, and held a paddle, and that slight occupation gave me time and thought for the scene. The torches threw a lurid glare upon the exaggerated, semi-nude figures of the giant bronzes on the beaks of the pirogues, their arms raised in the poise of the weapon, each outlined against the darkness of the night, glorious avatars yet of their race that had been so mighty and was so soon to pa.s.s from the wave.

"Maru," said the chief, when we sat on the mats at late supper after a return from the lagoon, "it is a pity you were not here when the Tahitians had their 'ar'ia and pahi, our large canoes for navigating on the moana faa aro, the landless sea. The 'ar'ia was a double canoe, each seventy feet long, high in the stern, and lashed together, outrigger to outrigger. A stout, broad platform was held firm between the canoes with many las.h.i.+ngs of sennit, a strong, but yielding, framework on which was a small house of straw where the crew lived. We had no nails, but we used wooden pegs and thousands of cocoanut-fiber ropes, so that everything, aloft and alow, was taut, but giving in the toss of the sea.

"The pahi was eighty feet long, broad in the middle, very carefully and neatly planked over inside, forming a rude bulkhead or inner casing, and had a lofty carved stem rising into one or two posts, terminating in a human form. It was in these vessels that we made the long journeys from island to island, the migrations and the descents upon other Polynesian peoples in war. Both the 'ar'ia and the pahi were propelled by a huge 'i'e, or mat sail of panda.n.u.s-leaves shaped like a leg of a fat hog. In modern times these great canoes were built in Bora-Bora, the island the Hawaiians say they came from, and the name of which means 'Land of the Big House Canoes.' With a good wind we could sail a hundred and twenty miles a day in those vessels. We would attend the fa'a-Rua, which we now call the ha'a-Piti, the wind that blows both ways, for we waited for the northeast or southwest trade-winds according to the direction we made for."

The chief lifted his gla.s.s of wine, and chanted:

"Aue mouna, mouna o Havaii!

Havaii tupu ai te ahi veavea!"

"Hail! mighty mountains, mountains of Havaii!

Havaii where the red, flaming fire shoots up high!"

Brooke had been to Lake Vaihiria, and suggested that I go. The excursion had been long in my mind, for every time an eel was caught or served some one exclaimed, "Aue! You should see the eels in Vaihiria. But, be careful!"

The warning referred to the dangers of the climb, but also to a mysterious menace of tupapaus, or ghosts. I had seen a canoe with the head of an eel carved in wood, and had heard often a hesitant reference to a legend of metempsychosis, of a human and eel transmigration. The chief, after much persuasion, said that the clans of Mataiea had always believed they were descended directly from eels; that an eel of Lake Vaihiria had been the progenitor of all the people of the valley. A vahine of another clan had been overcome by the eel's sorcery, as Mother Eve by the serpent, which doubtless was an eel.

As the eel and the water-snakes are the only serpentine animals in Tahiti, his reasoning was sound. The lake lies high in the mountains, at the very summit of the valley of Mataiea, and overlooks the Great Valley of Papenoo, owned by Count Polonsky, the cultivated Slav-Frenchman.

Tiura, the chief's oldest adopted son, arranged for the journey, and led the four of us who made it. One was an Australian, a doctor of the bush country of Queensland, in his thirties, very tall, and strong, though thin. He was a guest of the chief, and had walked entirely around Tahiti, barefooted, as had Mr. and Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, to the consternation of the conservative English residents of Tahiti, who wanted them to live in Papeete and hold teas. Two pleasant native youths went with us to carry our necessities.

One cannot make the trip in the wet season, usually, but we had had a period of quite dry weather, and were nearing the end of the rainy period. The beginning of the Valley of Vaihiria, the next to that of Mataiea, was reached within an hour by the crooked road that leaves the beach. The valley was very fertile, and its picturesqueness a foretaste of the heights. The brook that ran through it murmured that it, too, climbed to the mountains, and would be our music on the way. The ascent was difficult and wearisome. We walked through long gra.s.s, over great rocks, and pulled ourselves around huge trees. The birds, so rare near the sea-sh.o.r.e, sang to us, and we saw many nests of fine moss. The scenery was different from that of the Valley of Fautaua, which I had climbed with Fragrance of the Jasmine, more rugged, and less captivating, yet beautiful and inspiring. The enormous blocks of basalt often poised upon a point alarmed us, and Tiura said that many times they had crashed down into the abyss. We saw a score of white cascades. It seemed:

A land of streams. Some like a downward smoke, Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go; And some through wavering lights and shadows broke, Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below.

We arrived at a plateau after seven hours of hard toil, almost all the time pursuing a rocky path: it was the crown of the mountain and the borders of the lake. Though we had surmounted only thirteen hundred feet of vertically, we had come by such steeps that we could not wait an instant before throwing off our light garments and plunging into the water. The lake occupied an extinct crater, surrounded by four mountains unequally raised up--Tetufera, Urufaa, Purahu, and Terouotupo. It is half a mile long and a third wide, of curious shape, the banks making it appear in the dusk like a babe in swaddling-clothes with its arms outside the band. A great natural reservoir, fed by many subterranean springs, it gives birth to many others at the feet of the mountains, in Mataiea and Papeari.

After a repast, it being already late, we built a house to sleep in away from the dews of the heights, and Tiura recalled that the first Pomare took his name from a time when he had spent the night here and coughed from the exposure. His followers had spoken of the po mare, meaning literally, night cough, and the euphony pleased the king so that he adopted the name and bequeathed it to four successors. All these Polynesians took their names at birth or later from incidents in their own or others' lives, as my own chief's--"Deal Coffin," from a relative being buried in a sailor's chest; "Press Me" because the chief so named had heard these as the last word uttered by a dying grandchild, and Dim Sight because his grandfather had weak eyes.

Taata Mata, the name of a charming Tahitian woman I knew, signifies "Man's Eye," her own large eyes, perhaps, explaining the name, and Mauu, the name borne by a Tahitian man of good family in Papeete, "Moist." In all Polynesia one found picture names for people, as among the American Indians, and as among all nations, though with Europeans the meanings are forgotten. Moses means "Pulled out of the Water," or "Water Baby." Some of our names of people and places have ridiculous import in Tahiti. I remember Lovaina laughed immoderately, and called all the maids to view a line in the Tiare Hotel register in which a man had put himself down from "Omaha."

After we had eaten, we sat smoking in the darkness, I feeling very close to the blue field of stars. In the tropics the mountains, even so low as these, are impressive of a vast harmony of nature and of kins.h.i.+p with the force that rumpled them with its mighty hand. They have always inspired great thoughts. Moses framed in the mountains the ten taboos of Israel, which we hold as sacred as did the chosen people. Jesus made the mountains the seat of his most important acts, and was there transfigured in glory.

We had been pointed out by Tiura a great crack in the precipice, called Apoo Taria, the "Hole of the Ears." In the b.l.o.o.d.y struggles of the ancient tribes here the conquerors cut off the ears of their victims--some say their captives--and threw them in this hole.

"Because of those ears," said Tiura, "all the eels in this lake have very large ears, and it is so because the father of all the Mataiea folk was an eel. We shall see the eels to-morrow, but I must tell you of the chief of the district of Arue, near Papeete, about which M. Tourjee, the American, wrote the himene. The chief was married to a strong woman of this district, and in those days there were so many Tahitians that the mountains as well as the valleys were filled with them. He had a pet puhi, an eel named Faaraianuu. The eel had his home in a spring in the Arue district. The spring is there to this day."

"Oia ia! It is true!" I interjected. "I have seen it."

"One day," went on Tiura, "the chief remarked to his vahine that he was starting up the mountain to see her grandparents. She wanted to go, too, but he said that he would just hurry along, and be back in a day or two. Against her will he went alone. He did come back in a day or two, and to her questions replied that he had had a delightful visit to her tupuna. After that he got the peu, the habit, of departing for the mountains and remaining for hours daily. The chief's vahine became anoenoe (curious) to see what was his real reason for making these journeys every day. So she followed him secretly. She came to the mountain, where she saw him stop by an umu, a native oven he had evidently built before. He took out a bamboo, the kind in which we cooked small pieces of meat, and she saw him draw out a piece of meat and heard him say 'Maitai! Good!' as he ate it. She watched him closely, and was anxious to know what meat he had cooked, for he had said nothing about it.

"When he had left, she rushed to the oven, opened the bamboo, and saw on pieces of meat the special tattoomarks of the thighs of her grandmother and grandfather. Aue! She was riri. She fell to the earth and wept, and then she was angry. She made up her mind to get even with her false tane, and to hurt him the worst way possible. She hurried to his spring by their home in Arue, and caught his pet eel, Faaraianuu, who was sunning himself on the surface. She slashed him with her knife of pearl sh.e.l.l, and baked him in an umu. She ate his tail at once and put the remainder of the eel in a calabash. Then she left, with the ipu in her hand, for Lake Vaihiria."

Tiura halted his tale a minute to point out the constellation of the Scorpion, and to say, "Those stars are Pipiri Ma, the children, who lived at Mataiea long ago. That is a strange story of their leaving their parents' house for the sky!"

"Aue! Tiura," said I, "the stars are fixed, but there was the vahine with all but the tail of Faaraianuu in her ipu, walking toward this very spot. What became of her?"

The son of Tetuanui smiled, and continued:

"On her way she stopped to see the sorcerer, Tahu-Tahu and his vahine. They were friends. After a paraparau, the usual gossip of women, they asked her what she had in her calabash, and she replied, 'Playthings.' Then they told her her journey would be unsuccessful, but she kept on to this lake and put the remains of the eel in the water, right here where we are. But the eel would not stay in the lake, and though time and again she threw him in, he always came out. Finally she put him back in her ipu and returned to the house of Tahu-Tahu. She told her misfortune, and Tahu-Tahu made pa.s.ses and thrashed about with the sacred ti-leaves, and commanded her to put Faaraianuu in the lake again. This she did, and he stayed, but even now, if you put a cocoanut in this lake at this spot, it will come out at the spring in Arue. The eel still has power over that spring."

Tiura spoke in Tahitian and French, and I handed on his narrative.

"The eel in Tahiti, from what I hear, has seen better days,"

commented the Queensland doctor. "All over the world the primitive people endowed this humble form of animal--the serpentine--with a cunning and supernatural power surpa.s.sing that of the four-footed creatures. I think it was because in the cradle of the human family there were so many hurts from the bites of snakes and sea-eels--they couldn't guard against them--that man salved his wounds by crediting his enemy with devilish qualities. That's the probable origin of the garden of Eden myth."