Summer Cruising in the South Seas Part 7

Felix scorned to reply, but breathed a faint prayer for a safe return to Chicago, as we slid into the middle of the stream, and resumed our course.

The boughs of densely-leaved trees reached out to one another across the water. We proceeded with more caution as the channel grew narrow; and pressing through a submerged thicket of reeds, we routed a flock of water-fowls that wheeled overhead on heavy wings, filling the valley with their clamour.

Two or three dogs barked sleepily off somewhere in the darkness, and the voice of some one calling floated to us as clear as a bird's note, though we knew it must be far away. We strode through a cane-field, its smoky plumes just tipped with moonlight, and saw the pinnacle of Mauna Kea, as s.p.a.cious and splendid as the fairy pavilion that Nourgihan brought to Pari-Banou, illuminated as for a festival. To the left, a stream fell from the cliff, a ribbon of gauze fluttering noiselessly in the wind.

"O, look!" said Felix, who had yielded again to the influences of Nature. Looking, I saw the moon resting upon the water for a moment, while the dew seemed actually to drip from her burnished disc. Again Felix exclaimed, or was on the point of exclaiming, when he checked himself in awe. I ran to him, and was silent with him, while we two stood wors.h.i.+pping one stately palm that rested its glorious head upon the glowing bosom of the moon, like the Virgin in the radiant auroela.

"Well," said our host, "supposing we get along!" We got along, by land and water, into a village in an orange-grove. There was a subdued murmur of many voices. I think the whole community would have burst out into a song of some sort at the slightest provocation. On we paced, in Indian file, through narrow lanes, under the s.h.i.+ning leaves. Pale blossoms rained down upon us, and the air was oppressively sweet. Groups of natives sat in the lanes, smoking and laughing. Lovers made love in the face of heaven, utterly unconscious of any human presence. Felix grew nervous, and proposed withdrawing; but whither, O Felix, in all these islands, wouldst thou hope to find love unrequited, or lovers shamefaced withal? Much Chicago hath made thee mad!

Through a wicket we pa.s.sed, where a sentinel kept ward. Within the bamboo paling, a swarm of natives gathered about us, first questioning the nature of our visit, which having proved entirely satisfactory, we were welcomed in real earnest, and offered a mat in an inner room of a large house, rather superior to the average, and a disagreeable liquor,--brewed of oranges, very intoxicating when not diluted, and therefore popular.

We were evidently the lions of the hour, for we sat in the centre of the first row of spectators who were gathered to witness the _hula-hula_. We reclined as gracefully as possible upon our mats, supported by plump pillows, stuffed with dried ferns. Slender rushes--strung with _kukui_-nuts, about the size of chestnuts, and very oily--were planted before us like footlights, which, being lighted at the top, burned slowly downward, till the whole were consumed, giving a good flame for several hours.

The great mat upon the floor before us was the stage. On one side of it a half-dozen muscular fellows were squatted, with large calabashes headed with tightly-drawn goat skins. These were the drummers and singers, who could beat nimbly with their fingers, and sing the epics of their country, to the unceasing joy of all listeners. "It's an opera!"

shouted Felix, in a frenzy of delight at his discovery. A dozen performers entered, sitting in two lines, face to face,--six women and six men. Each bore a long joint of bamboo, slit at one end like a broom.

Then began a singularly intricate exercise, called _pi-ulu_. Taking a bamboo in one hand, they struck it in the palm of the other, on the shoulder, on the floor in front, to left and right; thrust it out before them, and were parried by the partners opposite; crossed it over and back, and turned in a thousand ways to a thousand metres, varied with chants and pauses. "Then it's a pantomime," added Felix, getting interested in the unusual skill displayed. For half an hour or more the thras.h.i.+ng of the bamboos was prolonged, while we were hopelessly confused in our endeavours to follow the barbarous harmony, which was never broken nor disturbed by the expert and tireless performers.

During the first rest, liquor was served in gourds. Part of the company withdrew to smoke, and the conversation became general and noisy. Felix was enthusiastic, and drank the health of some of the younger members of the _troupe_ who had offered him the gourd.

A rival company then repeated the _pi-ulu_, with some additions; the gourds were again filled and emptied. "Now for the _hula-hula_," said the host, who had imbibed with Felix, though he reserved his enthusiasm for something less childish than _pi-ulu_. It is the national dance, taught to all children by their parents, but so difficult to excel in that the few who perfect themselves can afford to travel on this one specialty.

There was a murmur of impatience, speedily checked, and followed by a burst of applause, as a band of beautiful girls, covered with wreaths of flowers and vines, entered and seated themselves before us. While the musicians beat an introductory overture upon the tom-toms, the dancers proceeded to bind shawls and scarfs about their waists, turban-fas.h.i.+on.

They sat in a line, facing us, a foot or two apart. The loose sleeves of their dresses were caught up at the shoulder, exposing arms of almost perfect symmetry, while their bare throats were scarcely hidden by the necklaces of jasmines that coiled about them.

Then the leader of the band, who sat, grey-headed and wrinkled, at one end of the room, throwing back his head, uttered a long, wild, and shrill guttural,--a sort of invocation to the G.o.ddess of the _hula-hula_. There had, no doubt, been some sort of sacrifice offered in the early part of the evening,--such as a pig or a fowl,--for the dance has a religious significance, and is attended by its appropriate ceremonies. When this clarion cry had ended, the dance began, all joining in with wonderfully accurate rhythm, the body swaying slowly backward and forward, to left and right; the arms tossing, or rather waving, in the air above the head, now beckoning some spirit of light, so tender and seductive were the emotions of the dancers, so graceful and free the movements of the wrists; now in violence and fear, they seemed to repulse a host of devils that hovered invisibly about them.

The spectators watched and listened breathlessly, fascinated by the terrible wildness of the song and the monotonous thrumming of the accompaniment. Presently the excitement increased. Swifter and more wildly the bare arms beat the air, embracing, as it were, the airy forms that haunted the dancers, who rose to their knees, and, with astonis.h.i.+ng agility, caused the clumsy turbans about their loins to quiver with an undulatory motion, increasing or decreasing with the sentiment of the song and the enthusiasm of the spectators.

Felix wanted to know "how long they could keep that up and live?"

Till daybreak, as we found! There was a little resting spell--a very little resting spell, now and then--for the gourd's sake, or three whiffs at a pipe that would poison a white man in ten minutes; and before we half expected it, or had a thought of urging the unflagging dancers to continue their marvellous gyrations, they were at it in terrible earnest.

From the floor to their knees, from their knees to their feet, now facing us, now turning from us, they spun and ambled, till the ear was deafened with cheers and boisterous, half-drunken, wholly pa.s.sionate laughter.

The room whirled with the reeling dancers, who seemed encircled with living serpents in the act of swallowing big lumps of something from their throats clear to the tip of their tails, and the convulsions continued till the hysterical dancers staggered and fell to the floor overcome by unutterable fatigue.

The sympathetic Felix fell with them, his head sinking under one of the rush candles, that must have burned into his brain had he been suffered to immolate himself at that inappropriate and unholy time and place.

This was the seductive dance still practised in secret, though the law forbids it; and to the Hawaiian it is more beautiful, because more sensuous, than anything else in the world.

I proposed departing at this stage of the festival, but Felix said it was not practicable. He felt unwell, and suggested the efficacy of another attack of _lomi-lomi_.

A slight variation in the order of the dances followed. A young lover, seated in the centre of the room, beat a tattoo upon his calabash and sang a song of love. In a moment he was answered. Out of the darkness rose the sweet, shrill voice of the loved one. Nearer and nearer it approached; the voice rang clear and high, melodiously swelling upon the air. It must have been heard far off in the valley, it was so plaintive and penetrating. Secreted at first behind shawls hung in the corner of the room, some dramatic effect was produced by her entrance at the right moment. She enacted her part with graceful energy. To the regular and melancholy thrumming of the calabash, she sang her song of love.

Yielding to her emotion, she did not hesitate to betray all, neither was he of the calabash slow to respond; and scorning the charms of goat-skin and gourd, he sprang toward her in the madness of his soul, when she, having reached the climax of desperation, was hurried from the scene of her conquest amid whirlwinds of applause.

"It's a dance, that's what it is!" muttered Felix, as the audience began slowly to disperse. Leading him back to the canoe, we had the whole night's orgie reported to us in a very mixed and reiterative manner, as well as several attempts at ill.u.s.trating the peculiarities of the performance, which came near resulting in a watery grave for three, or an upset canoe, at any rate. Our host, to excuse any impropriety, for which he felt more or less responsible, said "it was so natural for them to be jolly under all circ.u.mstances, that when they have concluded to die they make their P.P.C.'s with infinite grace, and then die on time."

Of coa.r.s.e they are jolly; and to prove it, I told Felix how the lepers, who had been banished to one little corner of the kingdom, and forbidden to leave there in the flesh, were as merry as the merriest, and once upon a time those decaying remnants of humanity actually gave a grand ball in their hospital. There was a general clearing out of disabled patients, and a brus.h.i.+ng up of old finery, while the ball itself was _the_ topic of conversation. Two or three young fellows, who had a few fingers left (they unjoint and drop off as the disease progresses), began to pick up a tune or two on bamboo flutes. Old, young, and middle-aged took a sly turn in some dark corner, getting their stiffened joints limber again.

Night came at last. The lamps flamed in the death-chamber of the lazar-house. Many a rejoicing soul had fled from that foul spot, to flash its white wings in the eternal suns.h.i.+ne.

At an early hour the strange company a.s.sembled. The wheezing of voices no longer musical, the shuffling of half-paralyzed limbs over the bare floor, the melancholy droning of those bamboo flutes, and the wild sea moaning in the wild night were the sweetest sounds that greeted them.

And while the flutes piped dolorously to this unlovely spectacle, there was a rus.h.i.+ng to and fro of unlovely figures; a bleeding, half-blind leper, seizing another of the accursed beings,--s.n.a.t.c.hing her, as it were, from the grave, in all her loathsome clay,--dragged her into the bewildering maelstrom of the waltz.

Naturally excitable, heated with exertion, drunk with the very odours of death that pervaded the hall of revels, that mad crowd reeled through the hours of the _fete_. Satiated, at last, in the very bitterness of their unnatural gaiety, they called for the _hula-hula_, as a fitting close.

In that reeking atmosphere, heavy with the smoke of half-extinguished lamps, they fed on the voluptuous _abandon_ of the dancers till pa.s.sion itself fainted with exhaustion.

"That was a dance of death, was it not, Felix?" Felix lay on his mat, sleeping heavily, and evidently unmindful of a single word I had uttered.

Our time was up at daybreak, and, with an endless deal of persuasion, Felix followed me out of the valley to the little chapel on the cliff.

Our horses took a breath there, and so did we, bird's-eyeing the scene of the last night's orgie.

Who says it isn't a delicious spot,--that deep, narrow, and secluded vale, walled by almost perpendicular cliffs, hung with green tapestries of ferns and vines; that slender stream, like a thread of silver, embroidering a carpet of Nature's richest pattern; that torrent, leaping from the cliff into a garden of citrons; the sea sobbing at its month, while wary mariners, coasting in summer afternoons, catch glimpses of the tranquil and forbidden paradise, yet are heedless of all its beauty, and reck not the rustling of the cane-fields, nor the voices of the charmers, because--because these things are so common in that lat.i.tude that one grows naturally indifferent?

As for Felix, who talks in his sleep of the _hula-hula_, and insists that only by the _lomi-lomi_ he shall be saved, he points a moral, though at present he is scarcely in a condition to adorn any tale whatever; and the said moral I shall be glad to furnish, on application, to any sympathetic soul who has witnessed by proxy the unlawful revels of those night-dancers of Waipio.

PEARL-HUNTING IN THE POMOTOUS.

The "Great Western" ducked in the heavy swell, s.h.i.+pping her regular deck-load of salt-water every six minutes. Now the "Great Western" was nothing more nor than a seventeen-ton schooner, two hours out from Tahiti. She was built like an old shoe, and shovelled in a head-sea as though it was her business.

It was something like sea life, wading along her submerged deck from morning till night, with a piece of raw junk in one hand and a briny biscuit in the other; we never _could_ keep a fire in _that_ galley; and as for hard tack, the sooner it got soaked through the sooner it was off our minds, for we knew to this complexion it must shortly come.

Two hours out from Tahiti we settled our course, wafting a theatrical kiss or two toward the gloriously green pyramid we were turning our backs on, as it slowly vanished in the blue desert of the sea.

A thousand palm-crowned and foam-girdled reefs spangle the ocean to the north and east of Tahiti. This train of lovely satellites is known as the Dangerous Archipelago, or, more commonly in that lat.i.tude, the Pomotou Islands. It's the very hotbed of cocoa-nut-oil, pearls, half-famished Kanakas, sh.e.l.ls, and s.h.i.+p-wrecks. The currents are rapid and variable; the winds short, sharp, and equally unreliable. If you would have adventure, the real article and plenty of it, make your will, bid farewell to home and friends, and embark for the Pomotous. I started on this principle, and repented knee-deep in the deck-breakers, as we b.u.t.ted our way through the billows, bound for one of the Pomotous on a pearl hunt.

Three days I sat in sackcloth and salt water. Three nights I swashed in my greasy bunk, like a solitary sardine in a box with the side knocked out. In my heart of hearts I prayed for deliverance: you see there is no backing out of a schooner, unless you crave death in fifty fathoms of phosph.o.r.escent liquid and a grave in a shark's maw. Therefore I prayed for more wind from the right quarter, for a sea like a boundless mill-pond; in short, for speedy deliverance on the easiest terms possible. Notwithstanding, we continued to bang away at the great waves that crooked their backs under us and hissed frightfully as they enveloped the "Great Western" with spray until the fourth night out, when the moon gladdened us and promised much while we held our breath in anxiety.

We were looking for land. We'd been looking for three hours, scarcely speaking all that time. It's a serious matter raising a Pomotou by moonlight.

"Land!" squeaked a weak voice about six feet above us. A lank fellow, with his legs corkscrewed around the shrouds, and his long neck stretched to windward, where it veered like a weather-c.o.c.k in a nor'wester, chuckled as he sang out "Land!" and felt himself a little lower than Christopher Columbus thereafter. "Where away?" bellowed our chunky little captain, as important as if he were commanding a grown-up s.h.i.+p. "Two points on the weather-bow!" piped the lookout, with the voice of one soaring in s.p.a.ce, but unhappily choked in the last word by a sudden lurch of the schooner that brought him speedily to the deck, where he lost his ident.i.ty and became a proper noun, second person singular, for the rest of the cruise.

Now, "two points" is an indefinite term that embraces any obstacle ahead of anything; but the "weather-bow" has been the salvation of many a craft in her distress; so we gave three cheers for the "weather-bow,"

and proceeded to sweep the horizon with unwinking gaze. We could scarcely tell how near the land might lie; fancied we could already hear the roar of surf-beaten reefs, and every wave that reared before us seemed the rounded outline of an island. Of course we shortened sail, not knowing at what moment we might find ourselves close upon some low sea-garden nestling under the rim of breakers that fenced it in, and being morally averse to running it down without warning.

It was scarcely midnight; the moon was radiant; we were silently watching, wrapped in the deep mystery that hung over the weather-bow.

The wind suddenly abated; it was as though it sifted through trees and came to us subdued with a whisper of fluttering leaves and a breath of spice. We knew what it meant, and our hearts leaped within us as over the bow loomed the wave-like outline of shadow that sank not again like the other waves, neither floated off cloud-like, but seemed to be bearing steadily down upon us,--a great whale hungry for a modern Jonah.

What a night it was! We heard the howl of waters now; saw the palm-boughs glisten in the moonlight, and the glitter and the flash of foam that fringed the edges of the half-drowned islet.

It looked for all the world like a grove of cocoa-trees that had waded out of sight of land, and didn't know which way to turn next. This was the Ultima Thule of the "Great Western's" voyage, and she seemed to know it, for she behaved splendidly at last, laying off and on till morning in fine style, evidently as proud as a s.h.i.+p-of-line.

I went below and dozed in the cabin, with the low roar of the reef quite audible; a fellow gets used to such dream-music, and sleeps well to its accompaniment.