Traders and divers assembling for the diving—A story told by Llewellyn
at night—The mystery of Easter Island—Strangest spot in the
world—Curious statues and houses—Borrowed wives—Arrival of English
girl—Tragedy of the Meke Meke festival.
THE scene at Takaroa was now remindful in a diminutive way of the bustle
and turmoil before the opening of a camp-meeting in the United States.
The traders and pearl-buyers of Tahiti began to assemble, and divers and
their families of other islands to arrive. Soon the huddle had the mild
disorder and excitement of an old-fashioned southern revival. Chinese,
the cunning Cantonese, two generations in Tahiti, set up stands for
selling sweetmeats and titbits, and the merchants spread out samples of
their goods in competition with Mapuhi’s and Hiram Mervin’s stores. The
whites developed artful schemes for circumventing one another in
securing the best divers. These, until contracts were signed, were
importuned and made much of as desirable members are solicited by
college clubs. The narrow strand of the atoll crowded up with new-comers
who every few days alighted from schooner, cutter, and canoe. All day
the moat and sea were alive with boats unloading the belongings and
merchandise of the visitors. The housing problem was settled by each
family’s or group’s erecting for itself flimsy abodes of the scant
building material growing on the isle, pieced out with boards or bits of
flattened tin cans or canvas, while others contented themselves with
lean-tos or leafy kennels. All was good nature, anticipation of profits,
and hope of miraculous drafts from the lagoon.
In the evenings on the verandas or about the bivouacs, there was an
incessant chatter. The bargaining, the reuniting of former friends or
acquaintances, the efforts of deacons and missionaries, the sly actions
of the traders, the commencements of courtships, and love-making of the
free-and-easy foreigners filled the balmy night air with laughter,
whisperings, and conversation. A hundred stories were told—jokes,
adventures, slanders, and curious happenings. Religion, business, mirth,
and obscenity vied for interest.
Llewellyn, the Welsh Tahitian vanilla-planter, with Lying Bill, McHenry,
Kopcke, Aaron Mandel, and others, formed a nightly circle. Sitting on
boxes or reclining on mats under the cocoanut-trees, with a lantern or
two above them and pipes aglow, these pilgrims of the deep recited
moving tales of phenomena and accident, of wanderings and hardships, and
small villainies.
[Illustration:
Photo from Dr. Theodore P. Cleveland
Spearing fish in the lagoon
]
“Sailors are damn fools,” said Captain Nimau, whom I had met in Lacour’s
shed on Anaa. “There was a ship’s boat passed here some time ago. It was
from the wrecked American schooner _El Dorado_, and the three men in it
with eight others of the crew had spent months on a lonely island and
were beating up for Tahiti. They did not reach Papeete for days after I
sighted them from Lacour’s, yet they wouldn’t spare the time to touch at
Anaa where they might have gotten plenty of food and water, and rested a
day or two. I wondered who they were until O’Brien here told me. I saw
them only through my glass.”
[Illustration:
The Captain and two sailors of the _El Dorado_
]
“The skipper of the _El Dorado_ who was in the boat wouldn’t let it
stop,” said McHenry. “He was hurryin’ to Tahiti to find a steamer for
America to report to his owners an’ to get a new billet. I saw him in
Papeete, hustlin’ his bleedin’ boat and dunnage on the steamer for
‘Frisco after three weeks’ wait. The sailors weren’t in no rush for they
know’d they be cheated outa their rights, anyway. The squarehead capt’in
had the goods on the owners of the _El Dorado_ because they couldn’t
collect insurance for her without his say. He scooted away from Easter
Island in that small boat after four months there, leavin’ all but those
two bloody fools who came with him.”
“He mentioned to me that he was buying a house on the instalment plan,
and would lose everything if he didn’t get back to make his payment,” I
said. “So he ventured 3,600 miles in a small boat to save his home.”
“Any one would have enough of that lonely island in four months,” said
Llewellyn, reminiscently. His deep, melancholy voice came from the
shadows where he sat on a mat. “I lived years there. It is a place to go
mad in. It isn’t so much that it is the last bit of land between here
and South America, and is bare and dry, without trees or streams, and
filled with beetles that gnaw you in your sleep, but there’s something
terrible about it. It has an air of mystery, of murder. I have never
gotten over my life there. I wish I had never seen it, but I still dream
about it.”
Llewellyn was a university man. He had drunk as deeply of the lore of
books and charts as he had of the products of the stills of Scotland and
the winepresses of France. In his library in Tahiti, his birthplace,
were many rare brochures, manuscripts, and private maps of untracked
parts of the Pacific, and keys to Polynesian mazes impenetrable by the
uninstructed. Seventy years before, his father had come here, and
Llewellyn as child and man had roamed wide in his vessels in search of
secret places that might yield gold or power. He had worn bare the
emotions of his heart, and frayed his nerves in the hunt for pleasure
and excitement. Now in his fifties he felt himself cheated by fate of
what he might have been intellectually.
“I suppose I’m the only man here who has ever been on Rapa Nui,” he went
on. “It’s like Pitcairn, far off steam and sailing routes, and with no
cargoes to sell or buy. Only a ship a year from Chile now, they say, or
a boat from a shipwreck like the _El Dorado’s_. But the scientific men
will always go there. They think Easter, or Rapa Nui, as the natives
call it now, has the solution of the riddle of the Pacific, of the lost
continent. You know it had the only written language in the South Seas,
a language the Easter Islanders, the first whites found there, knew
apparently little of.”
McHenry interrupted Llewellyn, to set in movement about the group a
bottle of rum and a cocoanut-shell, first himself quaffing a gill of the
scorching molasses liquor. Llewellyn downed his portion hastily, as if
putting aside such an appetite while engaged on an abstruse subject. He
knew that rum made all equal; and he was an aristocrat, and now beyond
the others in thought.
“_Allez!_” said Captain Nimau. “I am curious. _Dites!_ What did you find
out?”
Llewellyn’s eyes smoldering in somber-thatched cells lit a moment as he
returned to his enigmatic theme.
“I was a young man not long from a German university and travel in
Europe when I was sent to Easter Island,” he said, with dignity. “A
commercial firm in Tahiti, a Frenchman and a Scotchman, had control of
the island, which was not under the flag of any country, and was
employed by them to look after their interests. The firm had a schooner
that sailed there now and then, and with me went a young American. He
was a graduate of some Yankee college, and had drifted into the South
Seas a few months before. For some reason we did not know about, he was
eager to go to Easter Island. He could speak none of the lingos
hereabouts, and the firm at first refused him, but on his insistence,
and willingness to agree to stay two years and to work for a trifle,
they sent him with me.
“He was about twenty-four, handsome and gay, but a student. I liked him
from the start. Ralph Waldo Willis was his name, and I was glad that I
had such a companion for there was nobody else but natives to talk to,
except Timi Linder, a half-Tahitian who was older than us and who was
our boss. Our cockroach schooner was a month in getting there. It’s more
than a thousand miles as the tropic bird goes, but for us it was sailing
the wrong way many days, making half-circles or beating dead against the
wind. We were about ready to turn round and sail back when we caught a
breeze and made sight of land. I hated it at first view. It was nothing
like our South Sea islands, with black, frowning cliffs worn into a
thousand caves and recesses. The ocean broke angrily against the stern
basalt, or entered these huge pits and sprang out of them in welling
masses of foam and spray. An iron-bound coast that defied the heart, or
any sentiment but wonder and fear. Boulders as big as ships were half
attached to the precipices or lay near-by to attest the continuous
devouring of the land by the sea. Coming from Tahiti, with its beautiful
reefs and beaches, and the clouds like wreaths of _reva-reva_, with
cocoanut-palms and breadfruit-trees and bananas covering all the land,
this Easter Island seemed terribly bare and forbidding. There wasn’t a
flower on it.”
Llewellyn halted and lit his pipe. In the glow of the match his eyes had
the inversion of the relator who is remote from his audience.
McHenry, who had been quiet a few minutes, must call attention to
himself.
“Is there any fightin’ or women in this yarn?” he burst out, with a
guffaw.
Llewellyn came back to the present in a dark fume.
“I’ll chuck it,” he said irritably. “You want only stories that stink!”
Nimau, the Frenchman, took McHenry’s arm.
“_Nom d’une pipe!_” he rapped out. “Take that bottle, McHenry, and throw
it and yourself into the lagoon. Monsieur Llewellyn, please go on! The
night is just begun. That _Ile de Pâcques_ is a very curious place.”
McHenry, offended, jumped up. “Go to hell, all of you!” he blurted.
“I’ll go and stir up the Mormons. If they smell my breath, it’ll make
’em jealous.”
Llewellyn took up his narration.
“It’s a cursed place,” he assented. “There’s been nothing but death
since the white man found out there was anything to steal there. They
were the healthiest people in the world, but we whites knew how to
destroy them. Our schooner came into the roadstead of Hanga Roa at
daybreak. I could see the huge, dead volcano, Rana Roraku, from the
masthead. Other extinct volcanos were all over the rolling land. _Te
Pito te Henua_, the old islanders called it; the Navel and the Womb.
That monster crater, Rano Raraku, must have given it the latter name,
for out of it came all those wonderful images of stone. The Navel was
one of many rounded, shallower craters all about. When we landed at
sunrise and the slanting rays shone on them they were for all the world
like the navels of giants. I fancied each of them belonging to a
colossus who had turned to stone. At first, the island was just a gray
bulk, the surface in several sweeping curves dotted with mole-hills. As
we climbed upon the cliffs and the details of the land grew in the
sunlight, the impression was of a totally different part of the globe,
of a cut-off place where scenes and people were of an ancient sort, of a
mystery that stunned as thoughts crowded in on one. That impression
never left me. I can feel it now after these years. The American,
Willis, was fair overcome. He turned pale and put his hand to his
stomach as if sick.
“‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, though I really knew.
“‘I feel like when I was a little boy and saw the wax-works in New
York,’ he said. ‘All the spirits of the dead and great seem to be
around. But I’ve waited years to come here.’
“As we walked from point to point that first day, the spectacle was
incredible, absolutely bewildering. The whole island was a charnel-house
and a relic shrine. It seemed to have been furnished by a race whose
mind was fixed on death instead of life, and who worked for remembrance
instead of happiness. Oblivion was their most desperate fear, or, at
least, they must have thought that the preservation of their bones and
the building of images of the dead were the chief duties of the living.
At intervals all around the coast were immense platforms or High Places
of slabs of stone, gigantic stages for tremendous statues. These bases
were called _ahu_, and were some three or four hundred feet long, and on
them at regular intervals had been mammoth sculptures. Scores of these
lay half buried in the scrub, and some were covered over entirely by the
growth of the grass. Some were fifty or even seventy feet high and
others three or four feet, as if the makers sized them by the power or
fame of the dead men they represented. They were like gray ghosts of the
departed.
“I can’t quite tell you the sensation we had at our first stroll about.
Our house was at the base of the volcano, and Timi Linder, who came off
to the schooner in a boat to meet us, took us to it. He was a cousin of
mine—some of you remember him—and a fine fellow. He didn’t make anything
of all those images or the tombs. Sheep were his gods, and we had twenty
thousand of them to take care of, besides hundreds of horses and cattle.
Our house, Willis’s and mine, was at Mataveri, at the base of the crater
Rana Kao, and Timi’s was five miles away at Vaihu. It used to be a
Catholic mission. We were soon settled down to a regular routine.
“We were on horseback all day. Some of the going was so bad it meant
hours of barely walking the horses. The lower part of the island was all
broken sheets of lava, grown over or about with tough grass, and it was
worth your neck to travel fast in it. On the slopes of the hills it was
smoother, the ash from the volcanos having been leveled more in the
thousands of years since the last eruption. Another horrible thing about
living there was that we had to get all our water like in these Paumotus
by catching rain on our iron roof into tanks. God! How I used to long
for a drink out of a Tahiti brook! When we were out in the scrub and
noon came it was salvation to find a piece of shade. It was not so
terribly hot, because Easter is out of the tropics, and, as I say, the
climate is perfectly healthful, but the sun came down like lightning on
that lava and the hard grass, and the glare and the heat combined, with
the fatigue of the riding, would lay us out. The nights were cool, with
heavy dews which supplied the sheep with enough moisture.
“Timi left us much to ourselves and said that he wanted us to go about
without any duties and to learn the lay of the land. So we did that. The
island was about thirty-four miles around, but it took us many weeks to
make the circuit, because we followed the indentations of most of the
inlets or bays, determined to see everything of the marvels before we
got down to work. Those were the days we suffered from thirst. Except
for the lakes in the craters which I’ll tell you about, the so-called
_puna_ or springs were far apart, and then only shoal excavations among
the boulders into which surface water ran and had been protected by
rocky roofs from the sun and animals. Just a few bucketsful in each at a
time, and rank it was. The queer thing was the natives drank but little
water. They would be surprised every day at our thirst.
“We ascended the crater Rana Kao near our home. It was a quarter of a
mile high, and nearly a mile across, a perfect, unbroken circle at its
edge except where the lava had cut through and run down to the sea. The
inside was magnificent, like a vast colosseum, and, at the bottom, a
lake unlike any I had ever seen. Six hundred feet below the rim it was,
and more than three hundred feet deep by our soundings, and the sides of
the volcano were like a regular cone. We saw many cattle feeding or
drinking in the midst of lush vegetation, and on getting close to the
lake itself we found that they were standing or walking on a floating
garden. So dense and profound was this matting or raft of green and
brown, in which were bushes and even small trees, that the cattle moved
on it without fear. Yet in places we saw the water rippled by the wind,
and at times the cows or bulls drew back from their paths as if they
sensed danger. The water was foul with vegetable and animal matter, but
probably once this lake had been cared for, and its waters had quenched
the thirst of many thousands of people.”
“Ah!” said I, “Llewellyn, I was going to ask you. So far you have been
on an uninhabited island. What about the people you found there. I am
more interested in them even than in the wonderful images and tombs.”
“’E won’t say too bloody much about them,” said Lying Bill, caustically.
“‘Is family killed off most of ’em.”
Again it seemed that we would hear Llewellyn to no conclusion. He got on
his feet, and shook out his pipe.
“A gentleman has no place in the Paumotus,” he said, bitterly. “Mr.
O’Brien, you must not judge South Sea traders by McHenry or Pincher.”
“Judge and be bloomin’ well damned!” interrupted Lying Bill. “I’ll go
an’ see where McHenry is. Maybe the bottle’ll ’ave a drink in it, an’
you can stay an’ spin your yarn your own way. I know the bleedin’
truth.”
Captain Pincher retreated, muttering, in the darkness toward the sound
of the surf on the reef. The gentle breeze agitated the cocoanuts above
our heads, and Kopcke, a child in mentality though a man, begged
Llewellyn to keep on.
“Pay no attention, please, to those bums!” said Kopcke in his politest
French. “Now, me, I want to learn everything.”
Nimau and I apologized for humanity, and insisted that the scholar
proceed. Mollified, and with his pipe refilled, the quarter-caste
graduate of Leipsic resumed his account.
“I was going to tell about the people, and I’ll begin at the beginning,”
he said, thoughtfully. “A Dutch ship discovered Easter Island two
hundred years ago, and shot some of the natives. Every succeeding
discoverer did the same. Peruvian blackbirders killed hundreds and
carried off five thousand of them to die in the guano deposits of the
Chincha Islands and the mines of Peru. Almost every leading man, the
king and every chief, was killed or captured. The prisoners nearly all
died in slavery, and only Pakomeo came back. He lived near us, and told
me all about it. Timi Martin believed there were twenty thousand people
on the island near the time of the Peruvian raid.
“From then on, with all the livest men gone, the people paid no
attention to any authority. There had been a hereditary monarchy for
ages, and while the clans might go to battle for any reason, no one ever
touched the king or his family. But with Maurata, the king, kidnapped,
and most of the head men, there was no boss. Then _Frère_ Eugène, a
Belgian priest of Chile, brought back three youths who had been taken by
the Peruvians. One was Tepito, the heir of King Maurata, and the priest
thought maybe he could use him to convert the islanders. He had a hard
time, but he did it. You must say for those old missionaries that they
stuck to their jobs though hell popped. He had fifty narrow escapes from
being assassinated by natives who thought him much like the Peruvians,
and just when he was baptizing the last of the Rapa Nuiis, and complete
peace had settled down, trouble began again. A Frenchman who was looking
about for a fortune arrived there and took up his residence. He saw
there was plenty of land not used for growing yams, the only crop, and
so he went into partnership with a Scotchman in Tahiti to grow sheep,
cattle, and horses. He gave a few yards of calico for a mile of land,
and started his ranch with the Scotchman’s animals.
“The Frenchman took up with a common woman who had been the wife of a
chief but who was not of the chief caste, and he had her made queen.
Queen Korato was her name, and she was a caution—like a society woman
and a Jezebel, mixed. She bossed everything but her husband. She started
a row between him and _Frère_ Eugène, who claimed authority through the
church. There being no regular government, the priest said that, through
God and the pope, he was the ruler. He was a strong man, and I must say
from all accounts kind to the natives. They started to work and built
again, but the feud between the church and the queen became fiercer and
fiercer, and finally after personal combats between leaders, and a few
deaths, _Frère_ Eugène gathered all his adherents and, securing a vessel
through his bishop, transported them to the Gambier Islands.
“Now the struggle commenced of getting the land away from the natives.
Without any government, and the land of each district owned in community
by each clan, the queen and the Frenchman had to get title by cunning
and force. They did not succeed in that without blood. Booze and guns
and meat did it. The remaining head men gave away the land for sheep to
eat, for gin and rum to drink, and for guns to shoot those who objected
to having their land taken. Of course, it was really a community, with
no private property inside the clans, but the chiefs signed papers they
couldn’t read, and the firm claimed everything soon. It was legal as
things go, as legal as England taking New Zealand or Australia, or
France taking my Tahiti. The people divided into factions, headed by
self-appointed chiefs, and went to fighting. Some were driven into
craters, and some hid in caves. The crowd that had the upper hand chased
the other groups. They all began to steal the sheep for food, and the
Frenchman hired a band to stop the marauding and end the war. Then the
real massacres began. Natives were so pressed they took up cannibalism
again, and without fire they ate their meat raw. Ure Vaeiko told me how
he warmed a slice of a man’s body in his armpit to make it better
eating.
“In the end a kind of peace was made by the terrible misery of all. But
the Frenchman who had gotten the land did not live long to enjoy his
bargain. They caught him unawares when he was on a ladder helping to
repair the very house we lived in, and which he built. They struck him
down with a club, and buried him near-by. Other whites all but lost
their lives later when they tried to prevent the islanders from stealing
sheep when hungry. They were besieged in our house, but finally were
saved by the arrival of a vessel. Now, with their potato plantations
destroyed, their houses burned, the natives were done for. They
consented to sign contracts to work in the hot sugar-fields of Tahiti.
Five hundred were removed there. I often saw them, poor devils. They
were homesick to death, and they never were brought back as promised.
They died in Tahiti, crying for their own land.
“It was not long after that I went to Easter with the American, Willis.
Queen Korato had followed the Frenchman into the grave, and the
Scotchman had become the sole owner of the island. No one disputed him,
and when Willis and I took up our residence in the former royal
residence at Mataveri, Timi Linder was the virtual king. The entire
population either lived on small plantations which they had to wall in
to keep the cattle and sheep from eating their yams, or they worked for
us looking after the cattle and horses, and shearing the sheep. The
fighting was over, for the spirit of the wild islanders was extinct as
was almost all the twenty thousand Linder said were there a few years
before. The two or three hundred left lived in the ruins of the ancient
stone houses, cairns, and platforms, the tombs of the dead Rapa Nuiis
for ages. The living piled up more stones or roofed in the walls with
slabs and earth, and got along somehow. They had lost all reverence for
the past, and often brought us the skulls of their ancestors to trade
for a biscuit or two or a drink of rum.
“Willis and I were young, and though both of us were intensely
interested in the mystery of the island, and the unknown throngs who had
built the gigantic sepulchers and carved the monoliths, we had many dull
hours. When it rained or at night we thought of the outside world. The
howling of the sheep-dogs, the moaning of the wind, and the frightful
pests of insects made the evenings damnable. The fleas were by the
millions, and the glistening brown cockroaches, two or three inches
long, flew at our lights and into our food, while mosquitoes and hordes
of flies preyed on us. We often sat with nets on our heads and denim
gloves on, and on our cots we stuffed our ears with paper to keep out
snapping beetles. Willis was wrapped up in trying to read the wooden
tablets Linder had collected, on which were rows and rows of picture
symbols. First, he had to learn the Rapa Nui language. There’s one way
to do that in these islands. We all know that, and it was easy there.
They had always had a custom by which a husband leased his wife to
another man for a consideration. Linder attended to that, and sent over
to us two girls to teach us the lingo. They were beautiful and merry,
being young, and looked after our household. Taaroa was assigned to
Willis and Tokouo to me. We got along famously until one day, after a
year or so, a schooner arrived to take away wool, and on it was a white
girl and her father. That changed everything for us.”
In Llewellyn’s air and low, mournful voice there was confession. In his
words there had been anger at Captain Pincher’s accusation, but with
Lying Bill and McHenry, mockers at all decency, missing from the circle,
we others became impressed, I might say, almost oppressed, by impending
humiliation. In an assemblage, a public meeting, or a pentecostal
gathering, one withstands the self reproach and contrition of others,
or, perhaps, experiences keen pleasure in announced guilt and remorse,
but among a few, it hurts. One’s soul shrinks at its own secrets, and
there is not the support and excitement of the throng. We moved
uneasily, with a struggling urge to call it a night, but Llewellyn,
absorbed in his progress toward unveilment, went on without noticing our
disquiet.
“My God! What a change for Willis and me! The schooner was in the offing
one morning when we got up. We calculated that the wind would not let
her anchor at Hanga Piko, and started out on horses for Rana Raraku to
photograph the largest image we had found on the island. You have been
in Egypt, O’Brien?”
I nodded assent, and the lamp threw a spot of light on Llewellyn’s
gloomy face.
“You remember the biggest obelisk in the world is still unfinished in
the quarry at Syene. This one, too, was still in the rough. It lay in an
excavation on the slope of the huge crater, not fully cut out of the
rocky bank, but incredibly big. We measured it as quite seventy feet
long. It was as all those images, a half-length figure, the long,
delicate hands almost meeting about the body, the belly indrawn—pinched,
and the face with no likeness to the Rapa Nui face, or to any of the
Polynesians, but harsh and archaic, perhaps showing an Inca or other
austere race, and also the wretchedness of their existence. Life must
have been dour for them by their looks and by their working only for the
dead. How they ever expected to move this mass we could not understand.
They had no wood, even, to make rollers, as the Egyptians had, because
their thickest tree was the _toromiro_, not three inches in diameter,
but they had to depend on slipping the monstrous stones down slopes and
dragging them up hills or on the level by ropes of native hemp and main
strength. Hundreds or thousands of sculptors and pullers must have been
required for the 555 monoliths we found carved or almost finished. But
they never were of the race the whites saw there.
“Before we began the descent of Rana Rauraku we stopped a moment to
survey the scene. The sun was setting over La Perouse Bay, and the side
of the crater on which we were was deepening in shadow. As we went down
the hill the many images reared themselves as black figures of terror
and awe against the scarlet light. Willis was in a trance. He was a
queer fellow, and there was something inexplicable in his attachment to
those paradoxes of rock dolls. He thought he had discovered some clue to
the race of men or religious cult which he believed once went almost all
over the world and built monuments or stonehenges long before metal was
known as a tool. We rode across the swelling plain past the quarry in
the Teraai Hills where the hats for the images were carved of the red
sandstone, and we stayed a minute to see again a monster twelve feet
across and weighing many tons. It was a proper head-covering for the
sculpture in the quarry. What had caused the work to stop all of a
sudden? There were hundreds of tools, stone adzes and hammers, dropped
at a moment, statues near finished or hardly begun, some half-way to the
evident place of fixation, and others almost at them. What dreadful bell
had sounded to halt it all?
[Illustration:
Photo by International Newsreel
Beach dancers at Tahiti
]
“Talking about all that, we came to where we could see the Hanga Piko
landing, and our company schooner anchored a little offshore. The
captain and some of the crew were engaged in bringing supplies ashore,
and it was not until we rode into the ground of Queen Korato’s palace,
our home, that we saw there were white strangers arrived. Imagine the
situation! When we called to Taaroa and Tokouo to get a man to care for
the horses, out came a beautiful English girl in a white frock, and
apologized for having entered the house in our absence. Her father
joined her, and we soon knew him, Professor Scotten Dorey, for the
greatest authority on Polynesian languages, myths, and migrations. There
he was, by the favor of the Tahiti owners, come to stay indefinitely and
to study the Rapa Nui language. His daughter was his scribe, she said,
and saved his eyes as much as possible by copying his notes. We were up
against it, as O’Brien would say. Our conveniences were scant,—the queen
had not been much for linen or dishes,—and you know how we fellows live
even in such nearer places like Takaroa.
[Illustration:
After the bath in the pool
]
“Then there was the matter of Taaroa and Tokouo; borrowed wives,
recognized as the custom was. Willis took one look at Miss Dorey, and
went white as when he first saw the sweep of Easter Island. He was as
sensitive as a child about certain things. There we had been all alone,
I used to doing what I damn please, anyhow, and he without any old
_bavarde_ to chatter, or even to see. I won’t say, too, that we hadn’t
had some drinking bouts, nights when we had scared away even the
cockroaches and the ear-boring beetles with our songs, and the love
dances of Taaroa and Tokouo. For me, I’m a gentleman, and I was a
student under Nietzsche at Basel, but I hate being interfered with. I’ve
lived too long in the South Seas. But for the American, a young chap
just out of college, it was like being seen in some rottenness by a
member of his family. You fellows may laugh, but that’s the way he felt.
He used to talk about a younger sister to me on our voyage up.
“We assured the daughter and father we would care for them. There was
room enough, four or five chambers in the place, and we could improvise
beds for them, rough as they might be, but the daily living, the meals
and the evenings, confronted us hatefully. I would mind nothing but the
being so close to probably very particular people, the lack of freedom
of undress, and the pretense about Tokouo, but Willis was in a funk. He
wanted to go to live with Timi Linder, but I knew that he could not
endure that. Linder was island-born and almost a native, insects were
nothing to him, and he made no pretense of regular meals like a white.
Besides he was boss, and wanted to live his own life. I told Willis
plainly he had to make the best of it for a few months. He finally said
he would break off his intimacy with Taaroa, and I said that that was
his lookout.
“So we took the Doreys into our _ménage_. We gave them two rooms
together, and Willis and I doubled up. Taaroa and Tokouo had their mats
in the fourth, and the fifth was the living- and dining-room. The
cook-house was detached. We improvised a big table for the professor on
which he could spread his dictionaries and comparative lists of South
Seas languages, and there day after day he delved into the _Te Pito te
Henua_ mystery. Chief Ure Vaeiko and Pakomeo were interpreters of the
tablets and reciters of legends, but, as the professor had not yet
mastered the Rapa Nui tongue, a go-between in English was needed. For a
few days Timi Linder volunteered for this job, but soon it was the
American who was called upon. He had made good use of his year or so and
knew the dialect well. It is only a dialect of the Malayo-Polynesian
language, and the professor himself in three months knew more of it than
any of us because he spoke six or seven other branches of it from New
Zealand Maori to Tahitian.
“The schooner, after a month of unloading supplies and taking on wool
and cattle, sailed for Tahiti, and Timi Linder went with her, as he had
been three years away from his relations. This left me in charge, and as
the principal settlement was at Vaihu, the former mission, I was ordered
by Linder to move there, and Willis to stay at Hanga Piko. You can see
easily how fate was shaping things for the American. I took Tokouo with
me, and, the year’s lease of Taaroa expiring, she was demanded back by
her husband. An elderly Tahitian couple replaced them as helpers in the
palace. As I was five miles away, with a poor road, and had to keep the
accounts of births and deaths of people and animals, look after the
warehouse, and be a kind of chief and doctor, I saw less and less of the
Doreys, and not much more of Willis. He had to run his gang, attend to
the cattle, the water-holes, and sheep that got in distress in the
craters or caves. Of course, now and then he came over to see me, or I
to see him and the English people,—I’m Welsh myself, three quarters,—and
I met him often in the scrub.
“Everything seemed going along all right after a few months. The Doreys
came in the seventh month of the Rapa Nui year, _Koro_, which
corresponds to our January, Timi Linder left in _Tuaharo_, February, and
Taaroa returned to her husband the last of that month. The month is
divided in half, beginning with the new moon and the full moon. On the
first of the full moon in _Vaitu-nui_, May, we had a party to visit the
_ahu_ of Hananakou. The professor, his daughter, and Willis joined me at
Vaihu as it was on the trail, and in company with several islanders we
started. It so happened that Taaroa was at my house to visit Tokouo, and
when Willis rode into the inclosure she was the first person he saw.
“‘_Kohomai!_’ he said, which is the usual greeting. It is like ‘Good
day’ or ‘How do you do,’ but it actually means ‘Come to me!’ You answer,
‘_Koe!_’ which is ‘Thou!’ A dozen times a day you might meet and say
this, pleasantly or automatically, but I heard Taaroa reply with
astonishing bitterness, ‘_Koe kovau aita paihenga!_’ ‘Thou! I am not a
dog!’ She turned her back on him as Miss Dorey followed in, and I saw on
his face a look of puzzlement and fear. I was struck for the first time
by the contrasting beauty of the two girls, Taaroa the finest type of
Polynesian, as fine as the best Marquesan, and the white girl the real
_tea-tea_, the blond English, the pink-white flesh, the violet eyes and
rich brown hair. I tell you I’d like to have been lover to them both.
Taaroa looked intently at Miss Dorey, who spoke to her negligently
though kindly, and the incident was over. Anyhow, for the time being.
“The _ahu_ of Hananakou was a grim sight in the moonlight. About eighty
yards long, and but four wide, it loomed on the sea-cliff like the fort
at Gibraltar, black, broken, and remindful of the past. The front was of
huge blocks of fire-rocks, all squared as neatly as the pyramids, and
carved in curious faces and figures barely traceable in the brilliant
night. Among these was the swastika or fylfot. Human remains filled the
inner chambers, and bones were lying loose among the boulders. The
professor took my arm—he was in his sixties then—and led me to where a
fallen statue lay prone on the steep slope toward the sea.
“‘Agassiz guessed it,’ he said quietly. ‘The Pacific continent once
extended due west from South America to here, pretty nearly from the
Galapagos to the Paumotus. The people who built these statues were the
same as the Incas of Peru. In my room now is a drawing made by my
daughter of the figures on the rocks at Orongo. I have its duplicate on
a piece of pottery I dug up in an Inca grave. There is the swastika as
in ancient Troy, India, and in Peru. The Maori legend known from Samoa
to New Zealand was correct. Probably it came from Rapa Nui people who
survived the cataclysm that lowered the continent under the ocean.
“Instinctively I turned my head towards the great land of South America
now two thousand miles away, and in the moonbeams I saw Willis clasping
the English girl’s hand. Her face was close to his and her eyes had
happy tears in them. A jealous feeling came over me. As a matter of
fact, I never made love to a white woman since I left Europe. I’m
satisfied with the part-native who don’t ask too much time or money.
But, by God, I envied him that night, and when we returned to Queen
Korato’s palace I hated him for his luck.
The mood of Llewellyn was growing more self-accusatory, and his voice
less audible. Perhaps Aaron Mandel, an old pearl-buyer, had heard him
tell the story before, because he interrupted him, and said:
“What the devil’s the good of openin’ old graves, T’yonni?”
He said it, indulgently, calling him by his familiar Tahitian name, but
Llewellyn was set to tell it all. I felt again and more certainly that
it was confession, and excused my impatient interest by the need of his
making it.
“Let him finish!”
Llewellyn’s gaze was that of a man relieved from imminent prison.
“It’s not my grave, Mandel,” he said; “I could not foresee the future.
When I got back to Vaihu, Tokouo brought me some rum and water, and
Taaroa sat on the mat with us. She had questions in her black eyes, and
I had to answer something after what I had heard her say to Willis.
“‘We went to Hananakou,’ I began.
“‘He does not need me now,’ she broke in angrily. ‘He has gotten all my
words, and gives them to the _Via tea-tea_ (white woman). He is a
_toke-toke_, a thief!’
“Remember that Miss Dorey was undoubtedly the first white female Taaroa
had ever seen, and that jealousy among women or men in Rapa Nui was
unknown. They hated, like us, but jealousy they had no word for. And
because I was amazed at her emotion, I said:
“‘I saw them _hohoi_ (embrace).’
“Taaroa showed then the heat of this new flame on Easter Island. She
gave a mocking laugh, repeated it, then choked, and burst into wailing.
You could have told me that moment I knew nothing of the Maori, and I
would not have denied it. I was struck dumb, and swallowed my drink. And
as I poured another, and sat there in the old mission-house where
_Frère_ Eugène had gathered his flock years before, Taaroa began the
love song of her race, written in the picture symbols on the wooden
tablet I have in my house in Tahiti now. It is the _Ate-a-renga-hokan
iti poheraa_. You know how it goes. I can hear Taaroa now:
“Ka tagi, Renga-a-manu—hakaopa;
Ohiu runarme a ita metua.
Ka ketu te nairo hihi—O te hoa!
Eaha ton tiena—e te hoa—e!
“Ta hi tiena ita have.
Horoa ita have.
Horoa moni e fahiti;
Ita ori miro;
Ana piri atu;
Ana piri atu;
Ana tagu atu.”
Even a quarter of Maori blood with childhood spent in Polynesia lends a
plaintive quality to the voice of men and women, and gives them an
ability to sing their own songs in a powerfully affecting manner—the
outpouring of the sad, confused hearts of a destroyed people. Under the
cocoanut-trees of Takaroa, the lamps all but expiring by then, the man
who had sat under Nietzsche at Basel rendered the song of Takaroa, the
primitive love cry of the Rapa Nuiis, so that I was transported to the
Land of Womb and Navel, and saw as he did the lovely savage Taaroa in
her wretchedness.
“_Auwe!_” Kopcke exclaimed. “She could love!”
“_Eiaha e ru!_ You shall see!” murmured Llewellyn, forebodingly. “After
that I didn’t meet Taaroa for two months. She stopped visiting Tokouo,
and my girl said she was _heva_, which is wrong in the head. Tokouo
couldn’t even understand jealousy. But I did, and I envied the American
having two women, the finest on the island, in love with him. About a
month later I was at the palace to have supper with them. My word, Miss
Dorey had straightened out things. There were the best mats, those the
natives make of bulrushes, everywhere. The table was spread as fine as
wax, and we had a leg of mutton, tomatoes, and other fresh vegetables.
She said they owed the green things to Willis, who had hunted the
islands for them, and found some wild and some cultivated by natives who
had the seed from war-vessels that had come years before. The professor
had out my tablets after dinner, and his daughter read the translation
into English of the song Taaroa had sung. She had brought with her on
the schooner a tiny organ about as big as a trunk, and she had set the
_ute_ to music, as wild as the wind. The words went like this:
“Who is sorrowing? It is Renga-a-manu-hakopa!
A red branch descended from her father.
Open thine eyelids, my true love.
Where is your brother, my love?
At the Feast in the Bay of Salutation
We will meet under the feathers of your clan.
She has long been yearning after you.
Send your brother as a mediator of love between us,
Your brother who is now at the house of my father.
Oh, where is the messenger of love between us?
When the feast of driftwood is commemorated
There we will meet in loving embrace.
“She was dressed all in white, with a blue sash, and a blue ribbon in
her hair, and when she sang I could see her white bosom as it rose and
fell. She was making love to the American right before me. Her father,
with the tablet beside him, thought of nothing but the translation, and
she had forgotten me. I could see that this was one of many such
evenings. Willis stood and turned the leaves on which she had written
her words and air, and when she sang the word ‘love’ their bodies seemed
to draw each other. There was a girl I knew in Munich—but hell! After
the tablets were put away, we talked about the yearly festival of the
god Meke Meke, which was about the last of the ancient days still
celebrated. The schooner was due back, and would take away the visitors,
and they hoped that it would not go before thirty days yet, when it
would be _Maro_, the last month in the Rapa Nui year, our July. That was
the real winter month, and then the sea-birds came by the tens of
thousands to lay their eggs. Mostly they preferred the ledges and
hollows of the cliffs, but the first comers frequented two islets or
points of rock in the sea just below the crater Rano Kao. Both Chief Ure
Vaeiko and the old Pakomeo said that always there had been a ceremony to
the god Meke Meke at that time. We had witnessed the one the previous
year, and could tell the English pair about it.
“All the strong men of the island, young and old, met at Orongo after
the birds were seen to have returned, and raced by land and water to the
rocks, Motu Iti and Motu Nui, to seize an egg. The one who came back to
the king and crowd at Orongo was highly honored. The great spirit of the
sea, Meke Meke, was supposed to have picked him out for regard, and all
the year he was well fed and looked after by those who wanted the favor
of the god. The women especially were drawn to him as a hero, and a
likely father of strong children. In times gone, said Ure Vaeiko, many
were killed or hurt in the scramble of thousands, and in the fights for
precedence that came in the struggle to break the eggs of competitors.
Now one or two might be drowned or injured, but, with the few left to
take part, often no harm was done anybody.
“When I left that night Willis walked a little distance with me as I led
my horse. He was under stress and, after fencing about a bit, said that
he would like to go away on the schooner. His two years were not
complete, but he was anxious to get back to America. He had gathered
material for a thesis on the tablets and sculptures of Rapa Nui, with
which he believed he could win his doctor’s degree. That was really what
he had come for, he said. I was sore because I knew the truth. I didn’t
doubt about the thesis. That explained his being there at all, but his
wanting to go on that next vessel was too plain. I said to him that he
was not a prisoner or a slave, but that I hoped he would stay, unless
Timi Linder was aboard, when it would be all right, as only two white
men were needed, one at each station. We left it that way, though he did
not say yes or no.
“Well, Linder was on the schooner, and she came into Hanga Piko Cove two
weeks before the Meke Meke feast, so that her sailing was set for the
day after, and Willis was told by Linder it was all right for him to go.
Linder had letters for everybody, and new photographic films for Willis.
I unloaded the vessel, and Willis rode over the island with Linder to
show him the changes, the increase of cattle and sheep, and pick out
certain cattle and horses the schooner was to carry to Tahiti. He made
dozens of pictures for his thesis. Meanwhile the natives had absolutely
quit all work and moved in a body from their little plantations to the
old settlement at Orongo to prepare for the race. Orongo was the
queerest place in the world. If Rapa Nui was strange, then Orongo was
the innermost secret of it. It was a village of stone houses in two
rough rows, built on the edge of the volcano Rana Kao, and facing the
sea. There were fifty houses, all pretty much alike. They were built
against the terraces and rocks of the crater slope, without design, but
according to the ground. The doorways to the houses were not two feet
wide or high, and the rooms, though from a dozen to forty feet long,
never more than five feet wide, and the roofs not more than that high.
They were built of slabs of stone, and the floors were the bare earth.
The doorposts were sculptured and the inside walls painted, and the
rocks all about marked with hieroglyphics and figures. There were
lizards, fishes, and turtles, and a half-human, mythical beast with
claws for legs and arms, but mostly the Meke Meke, the god which
Professor Dorey had discovered the likeness of in the Inca tombs in
Peru. The old people said that Orongo had never been occupied except at
the time of the feast of Meke Meke.
“So there they were, all that were left of the once many thousands,
living again in those damp, squat tombs, and cooking in the ovens by the
doorways that were there before Judas hanged himself. All knew that
Orongo was more ancient than the platforms or the images, and those were
built by the same folk who put up the stonehenges in Britain and in the
Tonga Islands. Pakomeo, who had escaped from the slavery in Peru, was in
charge of the Meke Meke event, because Chief Ure Vaeiko was in his
eighties. We donated a number of sheep, and, with yams, bananas, and
sugar-cane,—we grew a little of these last two,—the show was mostly of
food. A few went to Orongo several days before the bird-eggs trial, but
all slept there the night before. The moon was at its biggest, and the
women danced on the terrace in front of the houses. Professor Dorey and
his daughter with Willis were there when Timi Linder and I arrived after
supper. They had waited for us, to begin, and the drums were sounding as
we rounded the curve of the crater.
“The English girl was entranced by the beauty of the night, the weird
outlines of the Orongo camp, the over-reaching rise of the volcano, the
sea in the foreground, and the _kokore toru_, the moon that shone so
brightly on that lone speck of land thousands of miles from our homes. I
heard her singing intimately to him an old English air. The schooner was
to leave the next day, and her lover would go with her.
“When we were seated on mats, Pakomeo struck his hands together, and
called out, ‘_Riva-riva maitai!_’ Two women danced, both so covered with
mat garments and wearing feather hats drooping over their heads that I
did not know them. The tom-tom players chanted about the Meke Meke, and
the women moved about the circle, spreading and closing their mats in
imitation perhaps of the Meke Meke’s actions in the sea or air. I was
bored after a few minutes, and watched Willis and Miss Dorey. They were
in the shadow sitting close to each other, their hands clasped, and from
his sweet words to her I learned her first name. The father always said
simply ‘daughter,’ but Willis called her Viola. It was a good name for
her, it seemed to me, for she was grave and pathetic like the viola’s
notes. The two women were succeeded by others, who put in pantomine the
past of their people, the building of the _ahu_ and the images, the
fishing and the wars, the heroic feats of the dead, and the vengeance of
the gods. Christianity had not touched them much. They still believed in
the _atua_, their name for both god and devil.
“Now the heaps of small fuel brought days before by severe labor were
lit, and when the fires were blazing low a single dancer appeared. She
had on a white tapa cloak, flowing and graceful, and in her hair the
plumage of the _makohe_, the tropic bird, the long scarlet feathers so
prized by natives. As she came into the light I saw that she was Taaroa.
Her long black hair was in two plaits, and the _makohe_ feathers were
like a coronet. She had a dancing-wand in each hand, the _ao_, light and
with flattened ends carved with the heads of famous female dancers of
long ago. The three drums began a slow, monotonous thump, and Taaroa a
gentle, swaying movement, with timid gestures, and coquettish
glances—the wooing of a maiden yet unskilled in love. The drums beat
faster, and the simulated passion of the dancer became more ardent. Her
eyes, dark-brown, brilliant, and liquid, commenced to search for the
wooed one, and roved around the circle. They remained fixed an instant
on the American in startling appeal. I glanced and saw Miss Dorey look
at him surprisedly and inquiringly, and then resentfully at Taaroa. But
she was carrying on her pantomine, and she ended it with a burst of
passion, the _hula_ that we all know, though even more attractive than
Miri’s or Mamoe’s in Tahiti.
“I suppose Miss Dorey had never in her life seen such an expression of
_amour_, and didn’t know that women told such things. Her face was like
the fire, and she moved slightly away from Willis. But now Taaroa was
dancing again, and altogether differently. She stood in one spot, and as
the drums beat softly, raised her arms as if imploring the moon, and
sang the mourning _ute_ of Easter Island:
“‘Ka ihi uiga—te ki ati,—
Auwe te poki, e—’
“The sail of my daughter,
Never before broken by the force of foreign clans!
Ever victorious in all her fights,
She would not drink the poison waters in the cup of obsidian glass.
“We all felt depressingly the sudden reversal of sentiment, and, when
Taaroa had finished, Miss Dorey said she would like to leave. She
shivered. The air was a little cold, but the Rapa Nuiis built up their
fires and prepared to dance through the night. We whites, with Timi
Linder, went home with a promise to meet at noon to-morrow for the egg
ceremony. As Timi and I rode to Vaihu, seven or eight miles it was, he
remarked that Taaroa had gotten much handsomer while he was away. He
asked if she was still friendly with Willis, and I explained things.
Timi didn’t make much of those troubles, but ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘they’ll
all sail away to-morrow, and her husband can lease her to me.’”
Llewellyn hesitated. His story had been long. The lamps were out.
“There isn’t much more,” he said, apologetically though pleadingly.
“When the race started at Orongo, we four, the English people, Willis,
and I, went to the sea where we could watch the swimming. Timi Linder
stayed with Ure Vaeiko and Pakomeo to award the prize. The runners came
swarming down the cliff, some taking paths around and others trying to
climb straight down. They wore loin-cloths only, and were mad as
fighters with the excitement. Some fell but got up, and away they went,
and some leaped into the sea from the bluff at forty or fifty feet high.
The rocks were about a hundred fathom off shore, and that is a short
swim for Kanakas. But it was the carrying the egg whole and getting up
the bluff again that tested skill and luck. Well, it was over in a
little while, and when we returned to Orongo, Matatoa, the husband of
Taaroa, had been made the choice of the god Meke Meke for the year.
“As the passengers had their goods already stowed, but intended to go
aboard the schooner before nightfall to wait for a favoring wind, Willis
proposed that we all go back to the beach and have a last bath together.
Most of the Rapa Nuiis went with us, and the victor and Taaroa among
them. We all wore _pareus_ and I tell you those two young people made a
magnificent pair. That year and a half on Rapa Nui had done wonders for
Willis. He was like a wrestler, and Miss Dorey in her _pareu_ was a
picture.
“Some one spoke of the spring under the sea, and proposed that we all
drink from it. It was like that one at Nâgone. The fresh water runs into
the ocean about ten feet under the ocean at the bottom of the cliff.
Willis shouted out that he had never had a drink under the sea, and
would try it first. Nobody, they said, had been down there for years,
but in war time it had been a prized spot. Willis was a good diver, and
down he went while we watched from the rocks twenty feet above on which
we climbed. Now, to stay down there long enough to drink, some one else
had to stand on your shoulders, and some one else on theirs. Willis
plunged in, and, of those sporting in the water, Taaroa was first to
follow him down. Her husband, the winner, was the second, and we,
laughing and joking about the American’s heavy burden, waited for him to
come up spluttering.
“You know how long it seems. We had no watches, but after about a
minute, Matatoa suddenly tottered and then dived. The water was not very
clear there because of the issuance of the spring, and mud stirred up,
and we could not see beneath the surface. But we knew something
unexpected had happened, and Miss Dorey seized my arm.
“‘For God’s sake, go down and help him,’ she shrieked.
[Illustration:
Old cocoanut trees
]
[Illustration:
From the painting by Oscar F. Schmidt
The dark valley of Taaoa
]
“I hesitated. I didn’t think anything was wrong, but even then I had a
feeling of not risking anything to save him if it was. He had too much
already. Rotten! I know it. But that’s my nature. I couldn’t have done
any good. Matatoa came up and went down again and then a half dozen
dived to the place where Willis and Taaroa were out of sight. One came
up and yelled that he could not find them, and then we knew the worst.
They were gone by this time more than three minutes. Then I leaped in,
too, but there were so many of us we got tangled up with one another
under the water, and as Matatoa came near me I told every one else to
move aside, and that we two would make the search.
“Well, we found that at the spring a frightful sponge of seaweed and
kelp had grown, and that Willis and Taaroa had become fastened in it. We
had to take down knives to cut them out, and we brought them up
together. She had him clasped in her arms so tightly we had to tear them
apart. They were like dead. His heart was not beating, but we carried
them up the rocky path and with as much speed as possible to the fires
which the natives still had for cooking. There Pakomeo and Ure Vaeiko
directed the holding of them in the smoke which, as you know, does
sometimes bring them back, but they were dead as Queen Korato. We put
the body of the American on a horse and took it to the palace. Taaroa
remained at Orongo, and her tribe began at once preparations to bury her
in one of the burrows. Miss Dorey was quiet. Except that one shriek I
did not hear her cry. I went to Vaihu that night and left Timi Linder
with them. I got drunk, and Timi said in the morning that the English
girl stayed alone all night with Willis in the living room.”
I had sat so long listening to Llewellyn that when, with the tension
off, I tried to stand up, I reeled. He sat with his head bowed. Captain
Nimau grasped my arm to help himself up, and said, “_Mais, mon Dieu!_
that was terrible. You buried the American there, and the Doreys left
soon.”
“The next day, after the burial. I remained two years more, and, by the
great Atua of Rano Roraku, I wasn’t sober a week at a time.”
Kopcke lit a cigarette, and, as we prepared to separate, said
sententiously: “_Mon vieux_, I know women and I know the Kanaka, and I
do not think Taaroa drowned the American for love. She didn’t know about
the sea-grass being there.”
Llewellyn did not answer. He only said, vexedly, “Well, for heaven’s
sake, let’s get a few drinks before we go to sleep!”
I left them to go to Nohea’s shack. On my mat I pitied Llewellyn. He had
a real or fancied contrition for his small part in the tragedy of Rapa
Nui. But my last thought was of the violet eyes of Miss Dorey. Those
months to England must have been over-long.
------------------------------------------------------------------------