In the Cloud of Islands
Ruau, the old Paumotuan woman, and the owner of Tanao, was the
last of her family. There were relatives by marriage, but none of
them would consent to live on so poor an atoll; and the original
population, never large, had diminished, through death and migration,
until at last she was left alone, living in her memories of other
days, awed by the companionship of spirits present to her in strange
and terrible shapes. At last she felt that she could endure it no
longer; but it was many months before the smoke of one of her signal
fires was seen by a passing schooner. She returned with it to Tahiti,
and if she had been lonely before, she was tenfold lonelier there,
so far from the graves of her husband and children. It was at this
time that Crichton met her. He had been living at Tahiti for more
than a year, on the lookout for just such an opportunity as Ruau
offered him. Although only twenty-eight, he was in the tenth year of
his wanderings, and had almost despaired of finding the place he had
so long dreamed of and searched for. During that period he had been
moving slowly eastward, through Borneo, New Guinea, the Solomons, the
New Hebrides, the Tongas, the Cook Group. In some of these islands
the climate was too powerful an enemy for a white man to contend
with; in others there was no land available, or they lacked the
solitude he wanted. This latter embarrassment was the one he had met
at Tahiti. The fact is an illuminating commentary on his character.
Most men would find exceptional opportunities for seclusion there;
not on the seaboard but in the mountains; in the valleys winding
deeply among them, where no one goes from year's end to year's end.
Even those leading out to the sea are but little frequented in their
upward reaches. But Crichton was very exacting in his requirements in
this respect. He was one of those men who make few or no friends--one
of those lonely spirits without the ties or the kindly human
associations which make life pleasant to most of us. They wander
the thinly peopled places of the earth, interested in a large way at
what they see from afar or faintly hear, but looking on with quiet
eyes; taking no part, being blessed or cursed by nature with a love
of silence, of the unchanging peace of great solitudes. One reads
of them now and then in fiction, and if they live in fiction it is
because of men like Crichton, their prototypes in reality, seen for
a moment as they slip apprehensively across some by-path leading from
the outside world.
He had a little place at Tahiti, a walk of two hours and a quarter,
he said, from the government offices in the port. He had to go there
sometimes to attend to the usual formalities, and I have no doubt
that he knew within ten seconds the length of the journey which would
be a very distasteful one to him. I can imagine his uneasiness at
what he saw and heard on those infrequent visits. An after-the-war
renewal of activity, talk of trade, development, progress, would
startle him into a waiting, listening attitude. Returning home, maps
and charts would be got out and plans made against the day when it
would be necessary for him to move on. He told me of his accidental
meeting with Ruau, as he called the old Paumotuan woman. It came
only a few days after the arrival from San Francisco of one of the
monthly steamers. A crowd of tourists--stop-over passengers of a
day--had somehow discovered the dim trail leading to his house. "They
were much pleased with it," he said, adding, with restraint: "They
took a good many pictures. I was rather annoyed at this, although,
of course, I said nothing." No doubt they made the usual remarks:
"Charming! So quaint!" etc.
It was the last straw for Crichton. So he made another visit to the
government offices where he had his passport viséed. He meant to
go to Maketea, a high phosphate island which stands like a gateway
at the northwestern approach to the Low Archipelago. The phosphate
would be worked out in time and the place abandoned, as other islands
of that nature had been, to the seabirds. But on that same evening,
while he was having dinner at a Chinaman's shop in town, he overheard
Ruau trying to persuade some of her relatives to return with her to
Tanao. He knew of the island. He is one of the few men who would know
of it. He had often looked at it on his charts, being attracted by
its isolated position. The very place for him! And the old woman,
he said, when she learned that he wanted to go there, that he wanted
to stay always--all his life--gripped his hands in both of hers and
held them, crying softly, without saying anything more. The relatives
made some objections to the arrangement at first. But the island
being remote, poverty-stricken, haunted, they were soon persuaded to
consent to a ten years' lease, with the option of renewal. Crichton
promised, of course, to take care of Ruau as long as she lived, and
at her death to bury her decently beside her husband.
He proceeded at once with his altered plans. There were government
regulations to be complied with and these had taken some time. On
the day when he was at last free to start he learned that the _Caleb
S. Winship_ was about to sail on a three months' voyage in the Low
Archipelago. He had no time to ask for passage beforehand. He had to
chance the possibility of getting it at the last moment. It is not
to be supposed that either the manager of the Inter-Island Trading
Company or the supercargo of the _Winship_ would have consented to
carry him to such an out-of-the-way destination had they known his
reason for wanting to be set down there. It amuses me now to think
of those two hard-headed traders, men without a trace of sentiment,
going one hundred and fifty miles off their course merely to carry
the least gregarious of wanderers on the last leg of his long journey
to an ideal solitude. It was their curiosity which gained him his
end. They believed he had some secret purpose, some reason of purely
material self-interest in view. They had both seen Tanao from a
distance and knew that it had never been worth visiting either for
pearl shell or copra. It is hard to understand what miracle they
believed might have taken place in the meantime. During the voyage I
often heard them talking about the atoll, about Crichton--wondering,
conjecturing, and always miles off the track. It was plain that he
was a good deal disturbed by their hints and furtive questionings.
He seemed to be afraid that mere talk about Tanao on the part of an
outsider might sully the purity of its loneliness. He may have been
a little selfish in his attitude, but if that is a fault in a man
of his temperament it is one easily forgiven. And what could he have
said to those traders? It was much better to keep silent and let them
believe what they liked.
It must not be thought that Crichton poured out his confidences to me
like a schoolgirl. On the contrary, he had a very likable reserve,
although a good half of it, I should say, was shyness. Then, too,
he had almost forgotten how to talk except in the native dialects
of several groups of widely scattered islands. In English he had a
tendency to prolong his vowels and to omit consonants, which gave
his speech a peculiar exotic sound. He made no advances for some
time. Neither did I. For more than three weeks we lived together on
shipboard, went ashore together at islands where we had put in for
copra, and all that while we did not exchange above two hundred words
in conversation. There was so little talk that I can remember the
whole of it, almost word for word. Once while we were walking on the
outer beach at Raraka, an atoll of thirty-five inhabitants, he said
to me:
"I wish I had come out here years ago. They appeal to the
imagination, don't you think, all these islands?"
His volubility startled me. It was a shock to the senses, like the
crash of a coconut on a tin roof heard in the profound stillness
of an island night. There was my opportunity to throw off reserve
and I lost it through my surprise. I merely said, "Yes, very much."
An hour later we saw the captain, no larger than a penny doll, at
the end of a long vista of empty beach, beckoning us to come back.
We went aboard without having spoken again. It was an odd sort of
relationship for two white men thrown into close contact on a small
trading schooner in the loneliest ocean in the world, as Nordhoff put
it. We were no more companionable in the ordinary sense than a pair
of hermit crabs.
But the need for talking drops away from men under such circumstances
and neither of us found the long silences embarrassing. The spell of
the islands was upon us both. I can understand Crichton's speaking
of their appeal to the imagination while we were in the midst of
them; for our presence there seemed an illusion--a dream more radiant
than any reality could be. In fact, my only hold upon reality during
that voyage was the _Caleb S. Winship_, and sometimes even that
substantial old vessel suffered sea changes; was metamorphosed in a
moment; and it was hard to believe that she was a boat built by men's
hands. Often as she lay at anchor in a lagoon of dreamlike beauty I
paddled out from shore in a small canoe, and, making fast under her
stern, spent an afternoon watching the upward play of the reflections
from the water and the blue shadows underneath, rippling out and
vanishing in the light like flames of fire. For me her homely, rugged
New England name was a pleasant link with the past. I liked to read
the print of it. The word "Boston," her old home port, was still
faintly legible through a coat of white paint. It brought to mind
old memories and the faces of old friends, hard to visualize in those
surroundings without such practical help. Far below lay the floor of
the lagoon where all the rainbows of the world have authentic end.
The water was so clear, and the sunlight streamed through it with so
little loss in brightness that one seemed to be suspended in mid-air
above the forests of branching coral, the deep, cool valleys, and the
wide, sandy plains of that strange continent.
Crichton, I believe, was beyond the desire to keep in touch with
the world he had left so many years before. His experiences there
may have been bitter ones. At any rate, he never spoke of them, and
I doubt if he thought of them often. People had little interest for
him, not even those of the atolls which we visited. When on shore
I usually found him on the outer beaches, away from the villages
which lie along the lagoon. In most of the atolls the distance from
beach to beach is only a few hundred yards, but the ocean side is
unfrequented and solitary. On calm days when the tide begins to ebb
the silence there is unearthly. The wide shore, hot and glaring in
the sun, stretches away as far as the eye can reach, empty of life
except for thousands of small hermit crabs moving into the shade
of the palms. They snap into their shells at your approach and make
fast the door as their houses fall, with a sound like the tinkling
of hailstones, among heaps of broken coral. We waded along the
shallows at low tide. When the wind was onshore and a heavy surf
breaking over the outer edge of the reef, we sat as close to it
as we could, watching the seas gathering far out, rising in sheer
walls fringed with wind-whipped spray, which seemed higher than the
island itself as they approached. It was a fascinating sight--the
reef hidden in many places in a perpetual smoke of sunlight-filtered
mist, through which the oncoming breakers could be seen dimly as they
swept forward, curled, and fell. But one could not avoid a feeling
of uneasiness, of insecurity, thinking of what had happened in those
islands--most of them only a meter or two above sea level--in the
hurricanes of the past; and of what would happen again at the coming
of the next great storm.
We made landfalls at dawn, in midafternoon, late at night--saw the
islands in aspects of beauty exceeding one's strangest imaginings.
We penetrated farther and farther into a thousand-mile area of
atoll-dotted ocean, discharging our cargo of lumber and corrugated
iron, rice and flour and canned goods; taking on copra; carrying
native passengers from one place to another. Sometimes we were out
of sight of land for several days, beating into head winds under
a slowly moving pageantry of clouds which alone gave assurance of
the rotundity of the earth. When at last land appeared it seemed
inaccessibly remote, at the summit of a long slope of water which
we would never be able to climb. Sometimes for as long a period we
skirted the shore line of a single atoll, the water deepening and
shoaling under our keel in splotches of vague or vivid coloring.
From a vantage point in the rigging one could see a segment of
a vast circle of islands strung at haphazard on a thread of reef
which showed a thin, clear line of changing red and white under the
incessant battering of the surf. Several times upon going ashore we
found the villages deserted, the inhabitants having gone to distant
parts of the atoll for the copra-making season. In one village we
came upon an old man too feeble to go with the others, apparently,
sitting in the shade playing a phonograph. He had but three records:
"Away to the Forest," "The Dance of the Nymphs Schottische," and
"Just a Song at Twilight." The disks were as old as the instrument
itself, no doubt, and the needles so badly worn that one could
barely hear the music above the rasping of the mechanism. There was a
groove on the vocal record where the needle caught, and the singer,
a woman with a high, quavery voice, repeated the same phrase, "when
the lights are low," over and over again. I can still hear it, even
at this distance of time and place, and recall vividly to mind the
silent houses, the wide, vacant street bright with fugitive sunshine,
the lagoon at the end of it mottled with the shadows of clouds.
The sense of our remoteness grew upon me as the weeks and months
passed. Once, rounding a point of land, we came upon two schooners
lying inside the reef of a small atoll. One of them had left Papeete
only a short while before. Her skipper gave us a bundle of old
newspapers. Glancing through them that evening, I heard as in a dream
the far-off clamor of the outside world--the shrieking of whistles,
the roar of trains, the strident warnings of motors; but there was
no reality, no allurement in the sound. I saw men carrying trivial
burdens with an air of immense effort, of grotesque self-importance;
scurrying in breathless haste on useless errands; gorging food
without relish; sleeping without refreshment; taking their leisure
without enjoyment; living without the knowledge of content; dying
without ever having lived. The pictures which came to mind as I read
were distorted, untrue, no doubt; for by that time I was almost
as much attracted by the lonely life of the islands as my friend
Crichton. My old feeling of restlessness was gone. In its place had
come a certitude of happiness, a sense of well-being for which I can
find no parallel this side of boyhood.
It was largely the result of living among people who are as
permanently happy, I believe, as it is possible for humankind to
be. And the more remote the island, the more slender the thread of
communication with civilization as we know it, the happier they were.
It was not in my imagination that I found this true, or that I had
determined beforehand to see only so much of their life as might be
agreeable and pleasant to me. On the contrary, if I had any bias at
first, it was on the other side. Disillusionment is a sad experience
and I had no desire to lay myself open to it. Therefore I listened
willingly to the less favorable stories of native character which
the traders, and others who know them, had to tell. But summed up
dispassionately later, in the light of my own observations, it seemed
to me that the faults of character of which they were accused were
more like the natural shortcomings of children. In many respects
the Paumotuans, like other divisions of the Polynesian family, are
children who have never grown up, and one can't blame them for a
lack of the artificial virtues which come only with maturity. They
are without guile. They have little of the shrewdness or craftiness
of some primitive peoples. At least so it appeared to me, making as
careful a judgment of them as I could. I have often noticed how like
children they are in their amazing trustfulness, their impulsive
generosity, and in the intensity and briefness of their emotions.
The more I saw of their life, the more desirable it seemed that
they might continue to escape any serious encroachments of European
or American civilization. They have no doctors, because illness is
almost unknown in their islands. Crime, insanity, feeblemindedness,
evils all too common with us, are of such rare occurrence that
one may say they do not exist. It may be said, too, without
overstatement, that their community life very nearly approaches
perfection. Every atoll is a little world to itself with a population
varying from twenty-five to perhaps three hundred inhabitants. The
chief, who is chosen informally by the men, serves for a period of
four years under the sanction of the French government. He has very
little to do in the exercise of his authority, for the people govern
themselves, are law-abiding without law.
When I first learned that there are no schools throughout the islands
I thought the French guilty of criminal neglect, but later I reversed
this opinion. After all, why should they have schools? No education
of ours could make them more generous, more kindly disposed to one
another, more hospitable and courteous toward strangers, happier
than they are now. Certainly it could not make them less selfish,
covetous, rapacious, for most of them are as innocent of those vices
as their own children. In a few of the richer, more accessible
islands they are slowly changing in these respects, owing to the
example set them by men of our own race. In another fifty years,
perhaps, they may have learned to believe that material wealth is
the only thing worth striving for. Then will come pride in their
possessions, envy of those who have greater, contempt and suspicion
for those who have less, and so an end to their happiness.
I had never before seen children growing up in a state of nature
and I made full use of the rare opportunity. I spent most of my time
with them; played on shore with them; went fishing and swimming with
them; and found in the experience something better than a renewal
of boyhood because of a keener sense of beauty, a more conscious,
mature appreciation of the happiness one has in the simplest kinds of
pleasures. Sometimes we started on our excursions at dawn; sometimes
we made them by moonlight. I became a collector of shells in order
to give some purpose to our expeditions along the reef. I couldn't
have chosen a better interest, for they knew all about shells,
where and when to find the best ones, and they could indulge their
love of giving to a limitless extent. In the afternoons we went
swimming in the lagoon. There I saw them at their best and happiest,
in an element as necessary and familiar to them as it is to their
parents. It is always a pleasure to watch children at play in the
water, but those Paumotuan youngsters with their natural grace at
swimming and diving put one under an enchantment. Many of the boys
had water glasses and small spears of their own and went far from
shore, catching fish. They lay face down on the surface of the water,
swimming easily, with a great economy of motion, turning their heads
now and then for a breath of air; and when they saw their prey they
dived after it as skillfully as their fathers do and with nearly
as much success. Seen against the bright floor of the lagoon, with
swarms of brilliantly colored fish scattering before them, they
seemed doubtfully human, the children of some forsaken merman rather
than creatures who have need of air to breathe and solid earth to
stand on. If education is the suitable preparation for life, the
children of the atolls have it at its best and happiest without
knowing that it is education. They are skillful in the pursuits and
learned in the interests which touch their lives, and one can wish
them no better fortune than that they may remain in ignorance of
those which do not.
Their parents, as I have said, are but children of mature stature,
with the same gift of frank, generous laughter, the same delight in
the new and strange. Very little is required to amuse them. I had
a mandolin which I used to take ashore with me at various atolls,
after I had become convinced that their enjoyment of my music was
not feigned. At first I was suspicious, for I had no illusions about
my virtuosity, and even when I thought of it in the most flattering
way their pleasure seemed out of all proportion to the quality of
the performance. But there was no doubting the genuineness of it.
The whole village would assemble to hear me play. I had a limited
repertoire, but that seemed to matter very little. They liked to hear
the same tunes played over and over again. I learned some of the old
missionary hymns which they knew: "From Greenland's Icy Mountains,"
"Oh, Happy Day," "We're Marching to Zion," and others.
It was strange to find those songs, belonging, fortunately, to a
bygone period in English and American life, living still in that
remote part of the world, not because of anything universal in
their appeal, but merely because they had been carried there years
ago by representatives of the missionary societies. Many eccentric
changes had been made in both the rhythm and melody, greatly to the
improvement of both, but no amount of changing could make them other
than what they are--the uncouth expression of a narrow and ugly kind
of religious sentiment. I don't think the Paumotuans care much for
them, either. They always seemed glad to turn from them to their own
songs, which have nothing either of modern or old-time missionary
feeling. A woman usually began the singing, in a high-pitched,
nasal, or throaty voice, which she modulated in an extraordinary
way. Immediately other women joined in, then several men whose
voices were of tenor quality, followed by other men in basses and
barytones, chanting in two or three tones which, for rhythm and tone
quality, were like the beating of kettledrums. The weird blending
of harmonies was unlike anything I had ever heard before. There is
nothing in our music which even remotely resembles theirs, so that it
is impossible to describe the effect of the full chorus. Some of the
songs make a strong appeal to savage instincts. The less resolute of
the early missionaries, hearing them, must have thrown up their hands
in despair at the thought of the long, difficult task of conversion
awaiting them. But if there were any irresolute missionaries, they
were evidently overruled by their sterner brothers and sisters.
On nearly every island there is now a church, either Protestant or
Catholic. In the Protestant ones the native population practice
the only true faith, largely to the accompaniment of this old
barbaric music. Those unsightly little structures rock to the sound
of exultant choruses which ought never to be sung withindoors.
The Paumotuans themselves know best the natural setting for their
songs--the lagoon beach with a great fire of coconut husks blazing
in the center of the group of singers. I liked to hear them from a
distance where I could get their full effect; to look on from the
schooner lying a few hundred yards offshore. All the inhabitants of
the village would be gathered within the circle of the firelight,
which brought their figures and the white, straight stems of the
coconut palms into clear relief against a background of deep shadow.
The singing continued far into the night, so that I often fell asleep
while listening, and heard the music dying away, mingling at last
with the interminable booming of the surf.
By degrees we worked slowly through the heart of the archipelago,
pursuing a general southeasterly course, the islands becoming more
and more scattered, until we had before us an expanse of ocean
almost unbroken to the coast of South America. But Tanao lay at
the edge of it, and at length, on a lowering April day, we set out
on that last leg of our outward journey. The _Caleb S. Winship_
lay very low in the water. By that time she had a full cargo of
copra, one hundred tons in the hold and twelve, sacked, on deck.
A portion of the deck cargo was lost that same afternoon, during
a gale of wind and rain which burst upon us with fury and followed
us with a seeming malignity of intent. We ran before it, far out of
our course, for three hours. To me the weight of air was something
incredible, an unusually vigorous flourish of the departing hurricane
season. Water spouted out of the scuppers in a continuous stream,
and loose articles were swept clear of the ship, disappearing at
once in a cloud of blinding rain. There was a fearful racket in
the cabin of rolling biscuit tins and smashing crockery. Then an
eight-hundred-pound safe broke loose and started to imitate Victor
Hugo's cannon. Luckily it hadn't much scope and no smooth runway,
so that it was soon brought to a halt by Ruau, the old Paumotuan
woman, who was the only one below at the time. She made an effective
barricade of copra sacks and bedding, dodging the plunging monster
with an agility surprising in a woman of sixty. But what I remember
best was Tané, a monkey belonging to one of the sailors, skidding
along the cabin deck until he was blown against the engine-room
whistle, which rose just clear of the forward end of it. He wrapped
arms and legs around it in his terror, opening the valve in some way,
and the shrill blast rose high above the mighty roar of wind, like
the voice of man lifted with awe-inspiring impudence in defiance of
the mindless anger of nature.
The storm blew itself out toward sundown and the night fell clear--a
night for stars to make one wary of thought; but the moon rose
about nine, softening the pitiless distances, throwing a veil of
mild light across the black voids in the Milky Way, seen so clearly
in those latitudes. The schooner was riding a heavy swell, and,
burdened as she was, rose clumsily to it, sticking her nose into the
slope of every sea. Ruau was at her accustomed place against the
cabin ventilator, unmindful of the showers of spray, maintaining
her position on the slanting deck with the skill of three months'
practice. The thought that I must soon bid her good-by saddened me,
for I knew there was small chance that I should ever meet her again.
I envied Crichton his opportunity for friendship with that noble old
woman, so proud of her race, so true to her own beliefs, to her own
way of living. Her type is none too common among Polynesians in these
days. One gets all too frequently an impression of a consciousness of
inferiority on their part, a sense of shame because of their simple
way of living as compared with ours. Ruau was not guilty of it. She
never could be, I think, under any circumstances. I learned afterward
of an attempt which had been made to convert her to Christianity
during her stay at Tahiti. Evidently she had not been at all
convinced by the priest's arguments, and when he made some slighting
remark about the ghosts and spirits which were so real to her, she
refused to listen any longer. Frightened though she was of spirits,
she was not willing that they should be ridiculed.
We sighted her atoll at dawn, such a dawn as one rarely sees outside
the tropics. The sky was overcast at a great height with a film of
luminous mist through which the sun shone wanly, throwing a sheen
like a dust of gold on the sea. Masses of slate-colored cloud
billowed out from the high canopy, overhanging a black fringe of
land which lay just below the line of the horizon. The atoll was
elliptical in shape, about eight miles long by five broad. There
were seven widely separated islands on the circle of reef and one
small _motu_ in the lagoon. We came into the wind about a half mile
offshore and put off in the whaleboat. The sea was still running
fairly high, and the roar of the surf came across the water with a
sound as soothing as the fall of spring rain; but it increased in
volume as we drew in until the ears were stunned by the crash of
tremendous combers which toppled and fell sheer, over the ledge of
the reef. It was by far the most dangerous-looking landing place we
had seen on the journey. There was no break in the reef; only a few
narrow indentations where the surf spouted up in clouds of spray.
Between the breaking of one sea and the gathering of the next, the
water poured back over a jagged wall of rock bared for an instant
to an appalling depth. Only a native crew could have managed that
landing. We rode comber after comber, the sailors backing on their
oars, awaiting the word of the boat steerer, who stood with his feet
braced on the gunwales, his head turned over his shoulder, watching
the following seas. All at once he began shouting at the top of his
voice. I looked back in time to see a wall of water, on the point of
breaking, rising high above us. It fell just after it passed under
us, and we were carried forward across the edge of the reef, through
the inner shallows to the beach.
The two traders started off at once on a tour of inspection and we
saw nothing more of them until late in the evening. Meanwhile I went
with Ruau and Crichton across the island to the lagoon beach where
her house was. As in most of the atolls, the ground was nearly free
from undergrowth, the soil affording nourishment only to the trees
and a few hardy shrubs. Coconuts and dead fronds were scattered
everywhere. A few half-wild pigs, feeding on the shoots of sprouted
nuts, gazed up with an odd air of incredulity, of amazement as we
approached, then galloped off at top speed and disappeared far in the
distance. Ruau stopped when we were about halfway across and held
up her hand for silence. A bird was singing somewhere, a melodious
varied song like that of the hermit thrush. I had heard it before and
had once seen the bird, a shy, solitary little thing, one of the few
species of land birds found on the atolls.
While we were standing there, listening to the faint music, Crichton
took me by the arm. He said nothing, and in a moment withdrew his
hand. I was deeply moved by that manifestation of friendliness, an
unusual one for him to make. He had some unaccountable defect in
his character which kept him aloof from any relationship approaching
real intimacy. I believe he was constantly aware of it, that he had
made many futile attempts to overcome it. It may have been that which
first set him on his wanderings, now happily at an end. It was plain
to me the moment we set foot on shore that he would have to seek no
farther for asylum. Tanao is one of the undoubted ends of the earth.
No one would ever disturb him there. He himself was not so sure of
this. Once, I remember, when we were looking at the place on the
chart, he spoke of the island of Pitcairn, the old-time refuge of
the Bounty mutineers. Before the opening of the Panama Canal it had
been as far removed from contact with the outside world as an island
could be. Now it lies not far off the route through the Canal to
New Zealand and is visited from time to time by the crews of tramp
steamers and schooners. Tanao, however, is much farther to the north,
and there is very slight possibility that its empty horizons will
ever be stained by a smudge of smoke. As for an actual visit, one
glance at the reef through the binoculars would convince any skipper
of the folly of the attempt.
Even our own crew of natives, skilled at such hazardous work, came
to grief in their second passage over it. They had gone out to the
schooner for supplies Crichton had ordered--a few sacks of flour,
some canned goods, and kerosene oil; in coming back the boat had
been swept, broadside, against a ledge of rock. It stuck there,
just at the edge of the reef, and the sailors jumped out with the
line before the next wave came, capsizing the boat and carrying
it inshore, bottom up. All the supplies were swept into deep water
by the backwash and lost. There had been a similar accident at the
other atoll--flour and rice brought so many thousands of miles having
been spoiled within a few yards of their destination. I remember the
natives plunging into the water at great risk to themselves to save
a few sacks of soggy paste in the hope that a little of the flour
in the center might still be dry; and a Chinese storekeeper, to whom
it was consigned, standing on the shore, wringing his hands in dumb
grief. It was the first time I had ever seen a Chinaman make any
display of emotion, and the sight brought home to me a conception
of the tragic nature of such accidents to the inhabitants of those
distant islands.
Crichton took his own loss calmly, concealing whatever disappointment
he may have felt. Ruau was not at all concerned about it, and, while
we were making an examination of the house, went out on the lagoon
in a canoe and caught more than enough fish for supper. Then we
found that all of our matches had been spoiled by sea water, so we
could make no fire. Judging by the way Crichton brightened up at his
discovery, one would have thought the loss a piece of luck. He set to
work at once to make an apparatus for kindling fire, but before it
was finished Ruau had the fish cleaned and spread out on a coverlet
of green leaves. We ate them raw, dipping them first into a sauce
of coconut milk, and for dessert had a salad made of the heart of a
tree. I don't remember ever having eaten with heartier appetite, but
at the same time I couldn't imagine myself enjoying an unrelieved
diet of coconuts and fish for a period of ten years--not for so long
as a year, in fact. Crichton, however, was used to it, and Ruau had
never known any other except during her three months' stay at Tahiti,
where she had eaten strange hot food which had not agreed with her at
all, she said.
Dusk came on as we sat over our meal. Ruau sat with her hands on her
knees, leaning back against a tree, talking to Crichton. I understood
nothing of what she was saying, but it was a pleasure merely to
listen to the music of her voice. It was a little below the usual
register of women's voices, strong and clear, but softer even than
those of the Tahitians, and so flexible that I could follow every
change in mood. She was telling Crichton of the _tupapaku_ of her
atoll which she dreaded most, although she knew that it was the
spirit of one of her own sons. It appeared in the form of a dog with
legs as long and thick as the stem of a full-grown coconut tree,
and a body proportionally huge. It could have picked up her house
as an ordinary dog would a basket. Once it had stepped lightly over
it without offering to harm her in any way. Her last son had been
drowned while fishing by moonlight on the reef outside the next
island, which lay about two miles distant across the eastern end of
the lagoon. She had seen the dog three times since his death, and
always at the same phase of the moon. Twice she had come upon it
lying at full length on the lagoon beach, its enormous head resting
on its paws. She was so badly frightened, she said, that she fell
to the ground, incapable of further movement; sick at heart, too,
at the thought that the spirit of the bravest and strongest of all
her sons must appear to her in that shape. It was clear that she
was recognized, for each time the dog began beating its tail on the
ground as soon as it saw her. Then it got up, yawned and stretched,
took a long drink of salt water, and started at a lope up the beach.
She could see it very plainly in the bright moonlight. Soon it broke
into a run, going faster and faster, gathering tremendous speed by
the time it reached the other end of the island. From there it made a
flying spring, and she last saw it as it passed, high in air, across
the face of the moon, its head outstretched, its legs doubled close
under its body. She believed that it crossed the two-mile gap of
water which separated the islands in one gigantic leap.
That is the whole of the story as Crichton translated it for me,
although there must have been other details, for Ruau gave her
account of it at great length. Her earnestness of manner was very
convincing, and left no doubt in my mind of the realness to her of
the apparition. As for myself, if I could have seen ghosts anywhere
it would have been at Tanao. Late that night, walking alone on the
lagoon beach, I found that I was keeping an uneasy watch behind
me. The distant thunder of the surf sounded at times like a wild
galloping on the hard sand, and the gentle slapping of little waves
near by like the lapping tongue of the ghostly dog having its fill of
sea water.
We left Tanao with a fair wind the following afternoon, having been
delayed in getting away because of the damaged whaleboat, which had
to be repaired on shore. Tino, the supercargo, insisted on pushing
off at once, the moment the work was finished. Crichton and Ruau
were on the other beach at the time, so that I had no opportunity to
say good-by; but as we were getting under way I saw him emerge from
the deep shadow and stand for a moment, his hand shading his eyes,
looking out toward the schooner. I waved, but evidently he didn't
see me, for there was no response. Then he turned, walked slowly up
the beach, and disappeared among the trees. For three hours I watched
the atoll dwindling and blurring until at sunset it was lost to view
under the rim of the southern horizon. Looking back across that space
of empty ocean, I imagined that I could still see it dropping farther
and farther away, down the reverse slope of a smooth curve of water,
as though it were vanishing for all time beyond the knowledge and the
concern of men.
* * * * *
My first packet of letters from Nordhoff was brought by the skipper
of the schooner _Alouette_. He had been carrying it about for many
weeks, and had it in the first place from the supercargo of another
vessel, met at Rurutu, in the Austral group. The envelope, tattered
and weather-stained, spoke of its long journey in search of me.
Before separating at Papeete we had arranged for a rendezvous, but
at that time we still possessed American ideas of punctuality and
well-ordered travel. Now we know something of the casual movements
of trading schooners and have learned to regard the timely arrival
of a letter as an event touching on the miraculous--the keeping of
a rendezvous, a possibility too remote for consideration. One hears
curious tales, in this part of the world, of the outcome of such
temporary leave-takings as ours was meant to be--husbands seeking
their wives and wives their husbands; families scattered among these
fragments of land and striving for many months to reunite.
I witnessed, not long ago, the sequel of one of these unsuccessful
quests. A native from a distant group of islands set out for one
of the atolls of the Low Archipelago, the home of his sweetheart.
Arrangements for the marriage had been made long before, but letters
had gone astray, and upon his arrival the young man found that the
family of his prospective father-in-law had gone to another atoll
for the diving season. With no means of following, he submitted to
the inevitable, and married another girl. Months later, the woman of
his first choice returned with her second choice of a husband; and
the former lovers met, for the young man had not yet been able to
return to his own island. Neither made any question of the other's
decision--life is too short; and from the native point of view, it
is foolish to spend it in wanderings which, at the last, may never
fulfill their purpose.
Nevertheless, I shall make a search for Nordhoff--a leisurely search,
with some expectation of finding him. Our islands, like those of
Mr. Conrad's enchanted Heyst, are bounded by a circle two thousand
or more miles across, and it is likely that neither of us will
ever succeed in breaking through to the outside world--if, indeed,
there is an outside world. I am beginning to doubt this, for the
enchantment is at work. As for Nordhoff, his letters, which follow,
may speak for themselves.
Eaters of the Lotos
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