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Faery Lands
Of the South Seas
[Illustration]
[Illustration: See p. 241
These lagoons swarm with strange forms of life unknown in northern
waters]
JAMES NORMAN HALL.
CHARLES BERNARD NORDHOFF.
FAERY LANDS OF THE
SOUTH SEAS
[Illustration: THE STAR SERIES]
GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO., INC.
GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY HARPER & BROTHERS.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE
UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE
PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
[Illustration]
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
PREFACE ix
I. A LEISURELY APPROACH 3
II. IN THE CLOUD OF ISLANDS 20
III. MAROONED ON MATAORA 47
IV. THE LAND OF AHU AHU 65
V. A MEMORY OF MAUKÉ 86
VI. RUTIARO 107
VII. A DEBTOR OF MOY LING 132
VIII. AN ADVENTURE IN SOLITUDE 148
IX. THE STARRY THRESHOLD 171
X. COSTLY HOSPITALITY 196
XI. HIS MOTHER'S PEOPLE 207
XII. IN THE COOK GROUP 230
XIII. AT THE HOUSE OF TARI 251
XIV. IN THE VALLEY OF VAITIA 277
XV. TAHITIAN TALES 303
XVI. ANCHORED OFF THE REEF 321
XVII. THE ENGLISHMAN'S STORY 328
XVIII. ABOARD THE "POTII RAVARAVA" 343
PREFACE
The islands of the South Seas are places of an interest curiously
limited. The ethnological problem presented by the native is
interesting only to men of science, commerce is negligible, there is
little real agriculture, and no industry at all. There remains the
charm of living among people whose outlook upon life is basically
different from our own; of living with a simplicity foreign to
anything in one's experience, amid surroundings of a beauty unreal
both in actuality and in retrospect.
It is impossible to write of the islands as one would write of France
or Mexico or Japan--the accepted viewpoint of the traveler is not
applicable here. A simple attempt to impart information would prove
singularly monotonous, and one is driven to essay a different task;
to pry into the life of the mingling races, hoping to catch something
of its significance and atmosphere. In making such an attempt it is
necessary at times to dig deeper than would be consistent with good
taste if names were mentioned, and for this reason--in the case of
certain small islands--the ancient Polynesian names have been used
instead of those given on the chart. All of the islands described are
to be found in the Paumotu, Society, and Hervey groups.
J. N. H.
C. B. N.
TAHITI, _April 10, 1921_.
Landfall
[Illustration]
Faery Lands Of the South Seas
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I
A Leisurely Approach
I don't remember precisely when it was that Nordhoff and I first
talked of this adventure. The idea had grown upon us, one might say,
with the gradual splendor of a tropical sunrise. We were far removed
from the tropics at that time. We were, in fact, in Paris and had
behind us the greatest adventure we shall ever know. On the Place
de la Concorde and along the Champs-Élysées stood rank on rank of
German cannon, silent enough now, but still menacing, their muzzles
tilted skyward at that ominous slant one came to know so well.
For a month we had seen them so, children perched astride them on
sunny afternoons, rolling pebbles down their smooth black throats;
veterans in soiled and faded horizon blue, with the joy of this new
quiet world bright on their faces, opening breech-blocks, examining
mechanism with the skill of long use at such employment; with a kind
of wondering hesitation in their movements too, as though at any
moment they expected those sinister monsters in the fantastic colors
of Harlequin to spring into life again.
Those were glorious days! Never again, I think, will there be such a
happy time as that in Paris. The boulevards were crowded, the tables
filled under every awning in front of the cafés; and yet there seemed
to be a deep silence everywhere, a silence intensified by the faint
rustling of autumn leaves and the tramping of innumerable feet. One
heard the sound of voices, of laughter, of singing, the subdued,
continuous rumble of traffic; but not a harsh cry, not a discordant
note. All the world seemed to be making holiday at the passing of a
solemn, happy festival.
Well, we had kept it with the others--Nordhoff and I--and have the
memory of it now, to be enjoyed over and over again as the years
pass. But there was danger that we might outstay the freshness
of that period. We were anxious to avoid that for the sake of our
memories, if for nothing else. While we were not yet free to order
our movements as we chose, we pretended that we were, and so one
rainy evening in the December following the armistice we decided to
call that chapter of experience closed and to go forward with the
making of new plans.
For we meant to have further adventure of one kind or
another--adventure in the sense of unexpected incident rather than
of hazardous activity. That had been a settled thing between us for
a long time. We had no craving for excitement, but turned to plans
for uneventful wanderings which we had sketched in broad outlines
months before. They had been left, of necessity, vague; but now that
any of them might be made realities, now that we had leisure and a
reasonable hope for the fulfillment of plans--well, we had cause for
a contentment which was something deeper than happiness.
The best of it was that the close of the war found us with nothing
to prevent our doing pretty much as we chose. We might have had
houses or lands to anchor us, or promising careers to drag us back
into the bewilderments of modern civilization; but, fortunately or
unfortunately, there were none of these things. The chance of war had
given us a freedom far beyond anyone's desert. We had some misgivings
about accepting so splendid a gift, which the event sometimes proves
to be the most doubtful of benefits. Viewed in the light of our
longings, however, our capacity for it seemed incalculable, and so,
by degrees, we allowed our minds to turn to an old allurement--the
South Pacific. It became irresistible the more we talked of it,
longing as we then were for the solitude of islands. The objection
to this choice was that the groups of islands which we meant to visit
have been endowed with an atmosphere of pseudoromance displeasing to
the fastidious mind.
But there was not the slightest chance of our being pioneers wherever
we might go. We could not hope to see with the eyes of the old
explorers who first came upon those far-off places. We must expect
great changes. But much as we might regret for the purposes of
this adventure that we had not been born two hundred years earlier,
comfort was not wanting to our situation. Had we been contemporaries
and fellow-explorers with De Quiros, or Cook, or Bougainville we
should have missed the Great War.
We came within view of Tahiti one windless February morning--such
a view as Pedro Fernandez de Quiros himself must have had more than
three hundred years before. The sky to the west was still bright with
stars and but barely touched with the very ghost of light, giving
it the appearance of a great water, with a few clouds, like islands,
immeasurably distant. Half an hour later the islands themselves lay
in full sunlight, jagged peaks falling away in steep ridges to the
sea. Against sheer walls still in shadow in upland valleys one could
see a few terns; but there was no other movement, no sound, nor
any sign of a human habitation--nothing to shatter the illusion of
primitive loveliness.
It was illusion, of course, but the reality was nothing like so
disappointing as I had feared it would be. Outwardly, two hundred
years of progress have wrought no great amount of havoc. There is
a little port, a busy place on boat days. But when the steamer has
emptied the town of her passengers, the silence flows down again
from the hills. Off the main harbor-front thoroughfare streets lie
empty to the eye for half hours at a time. Chinese merchants sit at
the doorways of their shops, waiting for trade. Now and then broad
pools of sunlight flow over the gayly flowered dresses of a group
of native women, scarcely to be seen otherwise as they move slowly
through tunnels of moist green gloom; or a small schooner, like a
detail gifted with sudden mobility in a picture, will back away from
shore, cross the harbor, bright with the reflections of clouds, and
stand out to sea. In the stillness of the noon siesta one hears at
infrequent intervals the resounding thud of ripe fruits as they tear
their way to the ground through barriers of foliage; and at night the
melancholy thunder of the surf on the reef outside the harbor, and
the slithering of bare feet in the moonlit streets.
Coming from a populous exile, doubly attracted for that reason by the
lure of unpeopled places, Nordhoff and I sought here an indication
of what we might find later elsewhere. The few thousands of natives,
whites, Orientals, half-castes, live in a charmed circle of low land
fronting the sea, conscious of their mountains, no doubt, but the
whites without curiosity, the Orientals without desire, the natives
without remembrance. There must have been a maze of trails in the old
days, leading down from the rich valleys. Now they are overgrown,
untraveled, lost. Since the old life is no more than a memory,
one is glad for the desolation, and grateful to the French lack of
enterprise which surely is the only way to account for it.
No, we couldn't have chosen a better jumping-off place for our
unpremeditated wanderings. We had the whole expanse of the Pacific
before us, or, better, around us, and there was, as I have said,
a harbor full of shipping. Boats with pleasing names, like the
_Curieuse_, the _Avarua_, the _Potii Ravarava_, the _Kaeo_, the
_Liane_--and self-confident, seagoing aspect. Some tidy and smart
with new paint and rigging; others with decks warped and sides
blistered, bottoms foul with the accumulation of a six months'
cruise, reeking with the warm odor of copra. Boats newly arrived
from remote islands, with crowds of bare-legged natives on their
decks, their eyes beaming with pleasure in anticipation of the
delights of the great capital; outward-bound to the Marquesas, the
Australs, the Cooks, the Low Archipelago, despite the fact that it
was the middle of the hurricane season. Among these latter there
was one whose name was like a friendly hail from Gloucester, or
Portland, Maine. But it was not this which attracted me to her, for
all its assurance of Yankee hospitality. She was off to the Paumotus,
the Cloud of Islands, and a longing to go there persisted in the
face of a number of vague discouragements. There were no practical
difficulties. Easy enough to get passage by one schooner or another.
Paumotu copra is famous throughout the Southern Pacific. There is
a good deal of competition for it, boats racing one another for
cargo to the richer islands. The discouragements weren't so vague,
either, now that I think of them. They came from men kindly disposed,
interested in the islands in their own way. But their concerns were
purely commercial. I heard a deal of talk about copra--in kilos, in
tons, in shiploads; its market value in Papeete, in San Francisco,
in Marseilles, until the stately trees which gave it lost for a time
their old significance. Talk, too, of coconut oil and its richness
in butter-fat. Butter-fat! There was a word to bring one back to a
workaday world. To meet it at the outset of a long-dreamed-of journey
was disheartening. It followed me with the shrill insistence of a
creamery whistle, and I came very near giving up my plans altogether.
Nordhoff did change his. He said that it was silly, no doubt, but
he didn't like the idea of wandering, however lonely, in a cloud of
butter-fat islands. Therefore we said good-by, having arranged for a
rendezvous at a distant date, and set out on diverging paths.
I ought to leave Crichton, the English planter, out of this story
altogether. He doesn't belong in a commonplace record of travel such
as this one set out to be. He had very little to do with the voyage
of the _Caleb S. Winship_ among the atolls. But when I think of that
vessel he comes inevitably into mind. I see him sitting on the cabin
deck with his freckled brown hands clasped about his knees, looking
across a solitude of waters; and in my mental concept of the Low
Archipelago he is always somewhere in the background, standing on
the sun-stricken reef of a tiny atoll, his back to the sea, almost as
much a part of the lonely picture as the sea itself.
But one can't be wholly matter of fact in writing of these islands.
They are not real in the ordinary sense, but belong, rather, to the
realm of the imagination. And it is only in the imagination that you
can conceive of your ever having been there, once you are back again
in a well-plowed sea track. As for the people, whether native or
alien, in order to focus them in a world of reality it is necessary
to remember what they said or did; what they ate; what sort of
clothing they wore. Otherwise they elude you just as the islands do.
This point of view isn't, perhaps, commonly held among the few
white men who know them--captains of small schooners, managers
of trading companies, resident agents, whose interest, as I have
said, is in what they produce rather than in what they are. As one
old skipper of my acquaintance put it, in speaking of the atolls,
"Take them by and large, they are as much alike as the reef-points
on that sail." Findlay's _South Pacific Directory_, a supposedly
competent authority, bears him out in this: "They are all of similar
character," adding, for emphasis, no doubt, "and they exhibit very
great sameness in their features." He does, however, make certain
slight concessions to what may be his own private conception of their
peculiar fascination, "This vast collection of coral islands; one of
the wonders of the Pacific," and later, in his account of them, "The
native name, 'Paumotu,' signifies a Cloud of Islands, an expressive
term." But he doesn't forget that he is writing for practical-minded
mariners who want facts and not fancies, however truthful these may
be to reality.
"Now, there's Tikehau," one of them said to me before I had been out
there. "That's a round atoll; and Rahiroa is sort o' square like,
an' so on. Some with passes and a good anchorage inside the lagoon.
Others you got to lay outside an' take your cargo off the reef in a
small boat."
But, to go back to Crichton, no one knew who he was or where he came
from. The manager of the Inter-Island Trading Company had lived in
Papeete for years and had never seen him until the day when he turned
up at the water front trundling a wheelbarrow loaded with four crates
of chickens and an odd lot of plantation tools and fishing tackle.
Following him were two native boys carrying a weather-blackened sea
chest, and an old woman with an enormous roll of bedding tied loosely
in a pandanus mat. That was about an hour before the schooner weighed
anchor. He stacked his gear neatly on the beach and then went on
board, asking for passage to Tanao.
"No, sir," the manager said, in telling about it afterward, "I never
laid eyes on him until that moment, and I don't know anyone who
had. Where's he been hiding himself? And why in the name of common
sense does he want to go to Tanao? There's no copra or pearl shell
there--not enough, anyway, to make it worth a man's while going after
it."
Tino, the supercargo, was equally puzzled.
"I know Tanao from the sea," he said. "Passed it once coming down
from the Marquesas when I was supercargo of the _Tiare Tahiti_.
We were blown out of our course by a young hurricane. Didn't land.
There's no one on the God-forsaken place. Now here's this Englishman,
or Dane, or Norwegian--whatever he is--asking to be set down there
with four crates of chickens and an old Kanaka woman for company!"
He shook his head with a give-it-up expression, adding a moment
later: "Well, you meet some queer people down in this part of the
world. I don't believe in asking them their business, but it beats me
sometimes, trying to figure out what their business is."
He was not able to figure it out in this case. The old woman was
talkative; but the information he gathered from her only stimulated
his curiosity the more. She owned Tanao, an atom of an atoll miles
out of the beaten track even of the Paumotu schooners. There had
never been more than a score of people living on it, she said, and
now there was no one. Crichton had taken a long lease on it, and
was going out there--as he told me afterward--"to do my writing and
thinking undisturbed."
I didn't know this until later, however. When I first heard him
spoken of we were only a few hours out from Papeete. We had left
the harbor with a light breeze, but at four in the afternoon the
schooner was lying about fifteen miles offshore, lazy jacks flapping
against idle sails with a mellow, crusty sound. After a good deal
of fretting at the fickleness of land breezes, talk had turned to
Crichton, who was up forward somewhere looking after his chickens. I
didn't pay much attention then to what was being said, for I had just
had one of those moments which come rarely enough in a lifetime, but
which make up for all the arid stretches of experience. They give no
forewarning. There comes a flood of happiness which brings tears to
the eyes, the sense of it is so keen. The sad part of it is that one
refuses to accept it as a moment. You say, "By Jove! I'm not going
to let this pass!" and it has gone as unaccountably as it came, half
lost through foreboding of its end. One prepares for it unknowingly,
I suppose, through months, sometimes years, of longing for something
remote and beautiful--such as these islands, for example. And when
you have your islands, the moment comes, sooner or later, and you see
them in the light which never was, as the saying goes, but which is
the light of truth for all that. Brief as it is, no one can say that
the reward isn't ample. And it leaves an afterglow in the memory,
tempering regret, fading very slowly; which one never wholly loses
since it takes on the color of memory itself, becoming a part of that
dim world of worth-while illusions.
All of which has very little to do with what was passing aboard
the _Caleb S. Winship_, except that I was prevented from taking an
immediate interest in my fellow passengers; but this being my first
near view of a Polynesian trading schooner, the scene on deck had all
the charm of the unusual. Our skipper was a Paumotuan, a former pearl
diver, and the sailors--six of them, including the mate--Tahitian
boys. In addition to these there were Crichton, the planter;
the supercargo, master of three major languages and half a dozen
Polynesian dialects; the manager of the Inter-Island Trading Company;
William, the engineer; Oro, the cabin boy; a Chinese cook and two
Chinese storekeepers--evidence of the leisurely, persistent Oriental
invasion of French Polynesia; thirty native passengers; a horse in an
improvised stall amidships; a monkey perched in the mainmast rigging;
Crichton's four crates of chickens, and five pigs. In addition to the
passengers and live stock, we were carrying out a cargo of lumber,
corrugated iron, flour, rice, sugar, canned goods, clothing, and dry
goods. Each of the native passengers brought with him as much dunnage
as an Englishman carries when he goes traveling, and his food for the
voyage--limes, oranges, bananas, breadfruit, mangoes, canned meat.
With all of this, a two months' supply of gasoline for the engines,
and fresh water and green coconuts for both passengers and crew, we
made a snug fit. Even the space under the patient little native horse
was used to stow his fodder for the long journey.
The women, with one exception, were barefooted, bareheaded, but
otherwise conventionally dressed according to European or American
standards. This, I suppose, is an outrageous betrayal of a trade
secret, if one may say that writers of South Sea narratives belong to
a trade. Those seriously interested in the islands have, of course,
known the truth about them for years; but I believe it is still a
popular misconception that the women who inhabit them--no one seems
to be interested in the men--are even to this day half-savage,
unself-conscious creatures who display their charms to the general
gaze with naïve indifference. Half-savage they may still be, but not
unself-conscious in the old sense. There are a few, to be sure, who,
by means of the bribes or the entreaties of itinerant journalists
and photographers, may be persuaded to disrobe before the camera for
a moment's space; and in this way the primitive legend is preserved
to the outside world. But, as I told Nordhoff, although we are
itinerant, we may as well be occasionally truthful and so gain,
perhaps, a certain amount of begrudged credit.
The one exception was a girl of about nineteen. She came on board
balancing unsteadily on high French heels, her brown legs darkening
the sheen of her white-cotton stockings. I had seen her the day
before as she passed below the veranda of Le Cercle Bougainville,
the everyman's club of the port. She walked with the same air of
precarious balance, and her broad-brimmed straw hat was set at the
jaunty angle American women affect.
"_Voilà! L'indigène d'aujourd'hui_," my French companion said.
Then, breaking into English: "The old Polynesia is dead. Yes,
one may say that it is quite, quite dead." A memory he called
it. "_Maintenant je vous assure, monsieur, ce n'est rien que
ça._" He rang changes on the word, in a soft voice, with an air
of enforced liveliness.
I was rather saddened at the time, picturing in my mind the
scene on the shore of that bright lagoon two hundred years
ago, before any of these people had been forced to accept the
blessings of an alien civilization. But the girl with the French
heels wasn't a good illustration of _l'indigène d'aujourd'hui_,
even in the matter of surface changes. Most of the women dress
much more simply and sensibly, and it was amusing as well as
comforting to see how quickly she got rid of her unaccustomed
clothing once we had left the harbor. She disappeared behind a
row of water casks and came out a moment later in a dress of
bright-red material, barefooted and bareheaded like the rest
of them. She had a single hibiscus flower in her hair, which
hung in a loose braid. I don't believe she had ever worn shoes
before. At any rate, as she sat on a box, husking a coconut with
her teeth, I could see her ankle calluses glinting in the sun
like disks of polished metal.
There was another girl sitting on the deck not far from me, with
an illustrated supplement of an American paper spread out before
her. It was an ancient copy. There were pictures of battlefields in
France; of soldiers marching down Fifth Avenue; a tennis tournament
at Longwood; aeroplanes in flight; motor races at Indianapolis;
actresses, society women, dressmakers' models making a display of
corsets and other women's equipment--pictures out of the welter
of modern life. The little Paumotuan girl appeared to be deeply
interested. With her chin resting on her hands and her elbows braced
against her knees, she went from picture to picture, but looked
longest at those of the women who smiled or posed self-consciously,
or looked disdainfully at her from the pages. I would have given a
good deal to know what, if anything, was passing in her mind. All
at once she gave a little sigh, crumpled the paper into a ball, and
threw it at the monkey, who caught it and began tearing it in pieces.
She laughed and clapped her hands at this, called the attention of
the others, and in a moment men, women, and children had gathered
round, laughing and shouting, throwing bits of coconut shell, mango
seeds, banana skins, faster than the monkey could catch them.
The spontaneity of the merriment did one's heart good. Even the old
men and women laughed, not in the indulgent manner of parents or
grandparents, but as heartily as the children themselves. Unconscious
of the uproar, one of the Chinese merchants was lying on a thin
mattress against the cabin skylight. Although he was sound asleep,
his teeth were bare in a grin of ghastly suavity, and his left
eye was partly open, giving him an air of constant watchfulness.
He was dreaming, I suppose, of copra, of pearl shell--in kilos,
tons, shiploads; of its market value in Papeete, in San Francisco,
in Marseilles, etc. Well, the whites get their share of these
commodities and the Chinamen theirs; but the natives have a commodity
of laughter which is vastly more precious, and as long as they do
have it one need not feel very sorry for them.
Dusk gathered rapidly while I was thinking of these things. Heavy
clouds hung over Tahiti and Moorea, clinging about the shoulders
of the mountains whose peaks, rising above them, were still faintly
visible against the somber glory of the sky. They seemed islands of
sheer fancy, looked at from the sea. It would have been worth all
that one could give to have seen them then as De Quiros saw them, or
Cook, or the early missionaries; to have added to one's own sense
of their majesty, the solemn and more childlike awe of the old
explorers, born of their feeling of utter isolation from their kind
with the presence of the unknown on every hand. It is this feeling
of awe, rarely to be known by travelers in these modern days, which
pervades many of the old tales of wanderings in remote places; which
one senses in looking at old sketches made from the decks of ships,
of the shores of heathen lands.
The wind freshened, then came a deluge of cool water, blotting out
the rugged outlines against the sky. When it had passed it was deep
night. The forward deck was a huddle of shelters made of mats and
bits of canvas, but these were being taken down now that the rain had
stopped. I saw an old woman sitting near the companionway, her head
in clear relief against a shaft of yellow light. She was wet through
and the mild misfortune broke the ice between us, if one may use a
metaphor very inapt for the tropics. With her face half in shadow
she reminded me of the typical, Anglo-Saxon grandmother, although
no grandmother of my acquaintance would have sat unperturbed through
that squall and indifferent to her wet clothing afterward. She didn't
appear to mind it in the least, and now that it was over fished a
paper of tobacco and a strip of pandanus leaf out of the bundle on
which she was sitting. She rolled a pinch of tobacco in the leaf,
twisting it into a tight corkscrew, and lit it at the first attempt.
Then she began talking in a deep, resonant voice, and by a simplicity
and an extraordinary lucidity of gesture conveyed the greater part of
her meaning even to an alien like myself. It was not, alas! a typical
accomplishment. I have not since found others similarly gifted.
She was Crichton's landlady, the owner of Tanao. "Pupure" she called
him, because of his fair hair. I couldn't make out what she was
driving at for a little while. I understood at last that she wanted
to know about his family--where his father was, and his mother. I
suppose she thought I must know him, being a white man. They have
queer ideas of the size of our world. He was young. He must have
people somewhere. She, too, couldn't understand his wanting to go to
Tanao; and I gathered from her perplexity that he hadn't confided his
purposes to her to any extent. I couldn't enlighten her, of course,
and at length, realizing this, she wrapped herself in her mat to
preserve the damp warmth of her body, and dozed off to sleep.
I went below for a blanket and some dry clothing, for the night air
was uncomfortably cool after the rain. The cabin floor was strewn
with sleeping forms. Three children were curled up in a corner like
puppies in a box of sawdust. Little brown babies lay snugly bedded on
bundles of clothing, the mothers themselves sleeping in the careless,
trustful attitudes of children. The light from a swinging lamp threw
leaping shadows on the walls; flowed smoothly over brown arms and
legs; was caught in fault gleams in masses of loose black hair. And
to complete the picture and make it wholly true to fact, cockroaches
of the enormous winged variety ran with incredible speed over the
oilcloth of the cabin table, or made sudden flying sallies out of
dark corners to the food lockers and back again.
On deck no one was awake except Maui at the wheel. There was very
little unoccupied space, but I found a strip against the engine-room
ventilator where I could stretch out at full length. By that time
the moon was up and it was almost as light as day. I was not at all
sleepy, and my thoughts went forward to the Paumotus, the Cloud of
Islands. We ought to be making our first landfall within thirty-six
hours. I didn't go beyond that in anticipation, although in the
mind's eye I had seen them for months, first one island and then
another. I had pictured them at dawn, rising out of the sea against a
far horizon; or at night, under the wan light of stars, lonely beyond
one's happiest dreams of isolation; unspoiled, unchanged, because of
their very remoteness. Well, I was soon to know whether or not they
fulfilled my hopeful expectations.
Some one came aft, walking along the rail in his bare feet. It was
Oro, the cabin boy, who is taken with an enviable kind of madness at
the full of the moon. He looked carefully around to make sure that
everyone was asleep, then stood clasping and unclasping his hands
in ecstasy, carrying on a one-sided conversation in a confidential
undertone. Now and then he would smile and straightway become serious
again, gazing with rapt, listening attention at the world of pure
light; nodding his head at intervals in vigorous confirmation of some
occult confidence. At length his figure receded, blurred, took on the
quality of the moonlight, and I saw him no more.
[Illustration]