The Land of Ahu Ahu
I might attempt to set down a matter-of-fact description of this
place if only the subject permitted one to be matter-of-fact. Strange
and remote, set in a lonely space of the sea and isolated from
the world for the seven or eight centuries following the decline
of Polynesian navigation, there is no other land like this hollow
island of Ahu Ahu. Week after week, month after month, the watcher
on its cliffs may gaze out toward the horizon and see never a sail
nor a distant trail of smoke to liven the dark-blue desert of the
Pacific. The cliffs themselves are strange--the reef of an ancient
atoll, upraised in some convulsion of the earth to form a ring of
coral limestone--sheer precipices facing the sea, half a mile of
level barren summit, and an inner wall of cliffs, overlooking the
rich lowlands of the interior. During the unnumbered years of their
occupation, the land has set a stamp upon its people--so long on Ahu
Ahu that they have forgotten whence they came. Hardy, hospitable, and
turbulent, they are true children of the islands, and yet a family
apart--ruder and less languid than the people of Samoa or Tahiti, and
speaking a harsher tongue. And, more than any other island folk, they
live in the past, for ghosts walk on Ahu Ahu, and the living commune
nightly with the old dead who lie in the _marae_.
It was an hour before sunset when we sighted the land--the merest
blue irregularity on the horizon, visible from one's perch in the
shrouds each time the schooner rose to the crest of a sea. The mellow
shout of landfall brought a score of native passengers to their
feet; at such a moment one realizes the passionate devotion of the
islander to his land. Men sprang into the rigging to gaze ahead with
eager exclamations; mothers held up their babies--born on distant
plantations--for a first glimpse of Ahu Ahu; seasick old women,
emerging from disordered heaps of matting, tottered to the bulwarks
with eyes alight. The island had not been visited for six months,
and we carried a cargo of extraordinary variety--hardware, bolts
of calico, soap, lumber, jewelry, iron roofing, cement, groceries,
phonograph records, an unfortunate horse, and several pigs, those
inevitable deck-passengers in the island trade. There were scores of
cases of bully beef and ship's biscuit--the staple luxuries of modern
Polynesia, and, most important of all, six heavy bags of mail.
As we drew near the land, toward midnight, I gave up the attempt to
sleep in my berth and went on deck to spread a mat beside Tari, our
supercargo, who lay aft of the mainmast, talking in low tones with
his wife. It was calm, here in the lee of the island; the schooner
slipped through the water with scarcely a sound, rising and falling
on the long gentle swell. Faint puffs of air came off the land,
bringing a scent of flowers and wood smoke and moist earth. We had
been sighted, for lights were beginning to appear in the village; now
and then, on a flaw of the breeze, one heard a sigh, long drawn and
half inaudible--the voice of the reef. A party of natives, seated
on the forward hatch, began to sing. The words were modern and
religious, I believe, but the music--indescribably sad, wild, and
stirring--carried one back through the centuries to the days when man
expressed the dim yearnings of his spirit in communal song. It was a
species of chant, with responses; four girls did most of the singing,
their voices mingling in barbaric harmonies, each verse ending in a
prolonged melodious wail. Precisely as the last note died away, in
time with the cadence of the chant, the deep voices of the men took
up the response, "_Karé, aué!_" ("No, alas!") Tari turned to me.
"They sing well," he said, "these Ahu Ahu people; I like to listen
to them. That is a hymn, but a stranger would never suspect it--the
music is pure heathen. Look at the torchlights in the village; smell
the land breeze--it would tell you you were in the islands if you
were set down here blindfold from a place ten thousand miles away.
With that singing in one's ears, it is not difficult to fancy oneself
in a long canoe, at the end of an old-time voyage, chanting a song of
thanksgiving to the gods who have brought us safely home."
He is by no means the traditional supercargo of a trading schooner,
this Tari; I have wasted a good deal of time speculating as to
his origin and the reasons for his choosing this mode of life. An
Englishman with a hint of Oxford in his voice--quite obviously what
we call a gentleman--a reader of reviews, the possessor (at his
charming place on Nukutere) of an enviable collection of books on the
natural history and ethnology of the South Seas, he seldom speaks of
himself or of his people at home. For twenty years he has been known
in this part of the world--trading on Penrhyn, Rakahanga, Tupuai,
the atolls of the Paumotu. He speaks a dozen of the island dialects,
can join in the singing of _Utes_, or bring a roar of applause by
his skill in the dances of widely separated groups. When the war
broke out he enlisted as a private in a New Zealand battalion, and
the close of hostilities found him with decorations for gallantry,
the rank of captain, and the scars of honorable wounds. As a subject
for conversation, the war interests him as little as his own life,
but this evening he had emptied a full bottle of rum, and was in the
mildly mellow state which is his nearest approach to intoxication.
"I never thought I'd see the old country again," he said, "but the
war changed all that. I got a nasty wound in Gallipoli, you see, and
they sent me home to convalesce. The family wasn't meant to know I
was hurt, but they saw a bit of a thing in the paper [an account of
the exploit which won Tari his D. C. M.], and there they were at the
dock when the transport off-loaded. I hadn't laid eyes on them for
fifteen years.... The old governor--by Jove! he was decent. It was
all arranged that I should stop in England when the war was over;
I thought myself it was a go. When the job was finished, and I'd
got a special dispensation to be demobbed at home, I stood it for a
fortnight and then gave up....
"Home is all very well for a week or two, but for a steady thing I
seem to fit in better down here. What is it that makes a chap stop
in the islands? You must have felt it yourself, and yet it is hard
to put into words. This sort of thing, perhaps [he swept his hand
through the soft darkness] ... the beauty, the sense of remoteness,
the vague and agreeable melancholy of these places. Then I like the
way the years slip past--the pleasant monotony of life. My friends
at home put up with a kind of dullness which would drive me mad; but
here, where there is even less to distinguish one day from another,
one seems never to grow fretful or impatient of time. One's horizon
narrows, of course; I scarcely look at the newspaper any more. If
you stop here you will find yourself unconsciously drifting into
the native state of mind, readjusting your sense of values until the
great events of the world seem far off and unreal, and your interests
are limited to your own business, the vital statistics of your
island, and the odd kinks of human nature about you. Perhaps this is
the way we are meant to live; at any rate, it brings serenity.
"I've been here too long to sentimentalize about the natives--they
have their weak points, and plenty of them. Allowing for these,
you'll find the Kanakas a good sort to have about--often amusing,
always interesting; at once deep, artful, gay, simple, and childish.
At bottom they are not very different from ourselves; it is chiefly
a matter of environment. Consider any of the traders who came here as
boys--old fellows who will buttonhole you and spend hours abusing the
people--the truth is that they have become more native than the men
they abuse.
"There are places, like Africa, where one can live among a primitive
people and absorb nothing from them; their point of view is too
alien, their position in the scale of humanity too widely separated
from our own. It is different in the islands. If one could discover
the truth, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that these people
were distant cousins of ours. The scholars--in whose conclusions I
haven't much faith--trace them back, along the paths of successive
migrations, through Indonesia to northern India or the land of the
Cushites. In any case, I believe that the blood we term Caucasian
flows in their veins, the legacy of ancestors separated from the
parent stock so long ago that mankind had not yet learned the use of
iron. And they are old, these island tribes who were discovering new
lands in the Pacific in the days when our forefathers wore the horns
of bulls upon their heads. Don't judge them in the present, or even
in the time of Cook; they were a dying people then, whose decline had
begun five or six hundred years before. It seems to me that a race,
like an individual, grows old, loses heart, and fades away. On nearly
every island they are dying to-day--a tragedy, an inevitable one,
which the coming of the European has hastened, but not caused.
"Whether or not it may be accounted for on grounds of a distant
kinship, it is impossible to stop long in the islands without
absorbing, to a certain extent, the native point of view. Things
which seemed rubbish at first slowly acquire significance; one begins
to wonder if, after all, there may not be varieties of knowledge lost
to us in the complexities of civilization.... I've seen some queer
things myself.
"My wife's mother lives on Ahu Ahu, where her ancestors have been
hereditary rulers since Maui fished the island out of the sea. I've
known the family a good many years, and long before I married Apakura
the old lady was kind enough to take a motherly interest in me. I
always put up with her when we touched at Ahu Ahu. Once, after I
had been away for several months, I sat down to have a yarn with
her, and was beginning to tell about where I'd been and what I'd
done when she stopped me. 'No, let me tell you,' she said, with an
odd smile; and, upon my honor, she did--down to the details! I got
the secret out of her the same evening. She is very friendly, it
seems, with an ancestor of hers--a woman named Rakamoana, who lived
twenty-eight generations--seven hundred years--ago, and is buried in
the big _marae_ behind the village. When one of the family is off on
a trip, and my mother-in-law suspects that he is in trouble or not
behaving himself, she puts herself into a kind of trance, calls up
old Rakamoana, and gets all the facts. I hope the habit won't come
into general use--might prove jolly awkward, eh? Seriously, though,
I can't account for the things she told me without accepting her own
explanation. Strange if there were a germ of truth in the legends of
how the old sea-going canoes were navigated--the priests, in a state
of trance, directing the helmsmen which way to steer for land....
"There is another old woman on Ahu Ahu whose yarns are worth hearing.
Many years ago a Yankee whaling vessel called at the island, and a
Portuguese harpooner, who had had trouble with the captain, deserted
and hid himself in the bush. The people had taken a fancy to him
and refused to give him up, so finally the captain was obliged to
sail away without his man. From all accounts this harpooner must
have been a good chap; when he proved that he was no common white
waster, the chief gave him a bit of land and a girl of good family
for a wife--now the old lady of whom I spoke. I think it was tools
he needed, or some sort of gear for a house he was building; at any
rate, when another whaler touched he told his wife that he was going
on a voyage to earn some money and that he might be gone a year.
There was a kind of agreement, current in the Pacific in those days,
whereby a whaling captain promised to land a man at the point where
he had signed him on.
"Well, the harpooner sailed away, and, as might have been expected,
his wife never saw him again; but here comes the odd part of
the story. The deserted wife, like so many of the Ahu Ahu women,
had an ancestor who kept her in touch with current events. Being
particularly fond of her husband, she indulged in a trance from
time to time, to keep herself informed as to his welfare. Several
months after his departure the tragedy occurred--described in detail
by the obliging and sympathetic dweller in the _marae_. It was a
kind of vision, as told to me, singularly vivid for an effort of
pure imagination--the open Pacific, heaving gently and ruffled by
a light air; two boats from rival vessels pursuing the same whale;
the Portuguese harpooner standing in the bows of one, erect and
intent upon the chase, his iron the first, by a second of time, to
strike. Then came a glimpse of the two boats foaming side by side
in the wake of the whale; the beginning of the dispute; the lancing
and death flurry of an old bull sperm; the rising anger of the two
harpooners, as the boats rocked gently beside the floating carcass;
the treacherous thrust; the long red blade of the lance standing out
between the shoulders of the Portuguese.
"The woman awoke from her trance with a cry of anguish; her husband
was dead--she set up the widow's _tangi_. One might have thought it
an excellent tale, concocted to save the face of a deserted wife, if
the same vessel had not called at Ahu Ahu within a year, to bring
news of the husband's death under the exact circumstances of the
vision.
"What is one to believe? If seeing is believing, then count me a
believer, for my own eyes have seen an incredible thing. It was on
Aitutaki, in the Cook group. An old chief, the descendant of a very
ancient family, lay ill in the village. I had turned in early, as
I'd promised to go fishing on the reef when the tide served, an hour
after midnight. You know how the spirits of the dead were believed
to flee westward, to Hawaiki, and how their voices might be heard at
night, calling to one another in the sky, as they drove past, high
overhead. Early in the evening, as I lay in bed, a boy came into the
next room, panting with excitement. He had been to a plantation in
the hills, it seemed, and as he returned, just after dusk, had heard
the voices of a shouting multitude passing in the air above him. I
was tired and paid little attention to his story, but for some reason
I found it impossible to sleep. It was a hot night, very still and
sultry, with something in the air that made one's nerves twitch every
time a coconut frond dropped in the distance. I was still lying awake
when my fishing companions came to get me; a little ahead of time,
for, like me, they had been unable to sleep. We would wait on the
reef, they suggested, where it was sure to be cool, until the tide
was right.
"We were sitting on the dry coral, smoking. I had just looked at my
watch, I remember; it lacked a few minutes to one o'clock. Our canoes
were hauled up on one side of the Arutunga Passage--the western pass,
by the way. There was no moon. Suddenly one of the boys touched me.
'What is that?' he exclaimed, in a startled voice. I looked up; the
others were rising to their feet. Two flaring lights were moving
across the lagoon toward us--together and very swiftly. Nearer and
nearer they came, until they revealed the outlines of a canoe larger
than any built in the islands nowadays--a canoe of the old time, with
a flaming torch set at prow and stern. While we stood there, staring
in silence, it drew abreast of us, moving with the rush of a swift
motor boat, and passed on--out to sea. I was too amazed to think
clearly until I heard one of the boys whisper to another, '_Kua mate
te ariki_--the chief is dead; the great canoe bears him out to the
west.' We launched our canoes and crossed the lagoon to the village.
Women were wailing; yes, the old man was dead--he had drawn his last
breath a little before one o'clock. Remember that I saw this thing
myself.... Perhaps it was a dream--if so, we all dreamed alike."
* * * * *
It was late. The singing died away; the lights in the village went
out one by one. The passage in the Ahu Ahu reef is a bad place by
daylight--the chances were that no canoes would risk it till dawn.
Tari struck a match for an instant and lay down on the mat beside
his wife. In the little flare of light I saw her sleeping in the
unconscious manner of a child.
I know their story--a pretty one, in pleasant contrast to the usual
ignoble and transitory loves of white and brown. Apakura is the
daughter of the principal family of this island--her mother and
father for many years the warm friend of Tari. He had petted the
child from the time she was three; she was always on the beach to
meet the canoe that brought him ashore, and he, for his part, never
forgot the small gifts for which she waited with sparkling eyes. On
his rambles about the island the little girl followed Tari with the
devotion of a dog; many a time, clambering along the base of the
cliffs at dawn, his first knowledge of her presence came with the
shrill cry of, "_Tiaké mai, Tari!_" and he waited while his small
follower managed some difficult pile of coral in the rear. Their
friendship had only Tari's two or three visits a year to feed on,
but neither forgot, and in the course of time, as the child learned
to read and write, a correspondence began--very serious on her side,
pleased and amused on his. When he went away to the war she was
eleven--a slim, dark-eyed child; when he returned she was sixteen,
and a woman, though he did not know it.
On this occasion, in the evening, when the rest of the family had
gone to bed, he sat talking with Apakura's mother--or, rather,
listening while the old woman told one of her stories of life on Ahu
Ahu, equally fascinating and long drawn out. It is not difficult to
reconstruct the scene in imagination--Tari comfortable in bare feet
and a _pareu_, half reclining against the wall as he smoked his pipe
in absent-minded puffs; the woman cross-legged on the floor, leaning
forward in earnest speech--her voice rising, falling, and dying to
a whisper in the extraordinary manner of the Polynesian teller of
tales; her hands from time to time falling simultaneously with a loud
slap to her knees, in emphasis of some point in the narrative. The
story ended, little by little the mother led the conversation to the
subject of her daughter. Tari began to praise the girl.
"What do you think of her," asked the old woman, "now that you have
been away these five years?"
"There is no other girl like her," said Tari.
"Since that is so, take her with you; we shall be pleased, all
of us--I in particular, who look on you as a son. She is a good
girl; she can sew, she can cook, and the young men say that she is
beautiful."
"You propose that I take her as a wife?" exclaimed the astonished
Tari, to whom, in truth, the idea had not occurred.
"Yes. Why not? You need a wife, now that the little affair of
Tukonini has blown over."
"But think, mamma--I am forty and the child is sixteen; it is not
fitting."
"Young wives are best if they are faithful; Apakura will never look
at another man."
"I will think it over," said Tari; "let us leave it so. Not this
year, at any rate--she is too young."
As he bade her good night and turned to go to his sleeping place the
old woman spoke again.
"Bear one thing in mind," she said, with a smile; "it will help you
to decide. Consider, now and then, the thought of my daughter married
to another."
In the end, as is often the case, it was Apakura who settled the
matter. Next morning Tari was busy with some stock taking and did
not board the schooner till the last moment, or notice--in his
preoccupation--the mysterious smiles with which the crew greeted
him. They were a dozen miles offshore before he folded the last of
his papers, lit a pipe, and went on deck for a breath of air. The
old woman's last words stuck unpleasantly in his mind, I fancy,
as he stood there smoking, with his back to the companionway. All
at once he saw the helmsman--an Ahu Ahu boy he had known since
childhood--lift his eyes from the binnacle and grin from ear to ear;
at the same moment Tari felt a hand slip into his own, and heard a
small, familiar voice say, "I am here." It was Apakura--more serious
than usual and a little frightened, but not to be put off longer.
They were married in Tahiti a fortnight later.
It was Apakura's voice that awakened me. She was leaning over the
bulwark in eager conversation with her mother, who had come off in
the first canoe. The air was fresh with the cool of dawn; in the east
the sky was flushing behind scattered banks of trade-wind clouds,
tinted in wonderfully delicate shades of terra cotta. A dozen big
outrigger canoes, of the type peculiar to this island, were coming
out through the passage, each paddled by four men, who shouted as
their heavy craft dashed through the breakers.
Little by little, not at all after the manner of traditional dawn in
the tropics, the light increased, until Ahu Ahu lay fully revealed
before us--the smoking reef, the shallow lagoon, and the cliffs,
their summits plumed with coconut palms. A crowd of islanders was
already gathering on the reef, and I could see others making their
way down the steep path from the settlement. As the sun rose the
colors of the scene grew stronger--green palms, gray cliffs, white
walls of the village, pale blue of the sky, azure of the sea water.
There is no color in the world--that I have seen--like the blue of
the water off the Ahu Ahu reef; so vivid, so intense, one felt that
a tumbler of it, held up to the sun, would be a mass of sapphire, or
that a handkerchief dipped in it would emerge strongly dyed.
Apakura was going ashore with her mother. Standing in the narrow
canoe, she directed the stowing of her luggage--a mat, a bright
patchwork quilt, a box of cedar wood. Tari was awaiting the coming of
the traders, for the schooner was stocked with good Tahiti rum, and
the rites of welcome would take place on board.
"There they are," he said, pointing to two white figures wading
gingerly across the shallow lagoon to the reef; "you're going to meet
a pair of rare ones--they've been hard doers in their time!"
The distant figures reached the edge of the boat passage and I could
see a boy beckoning them into a waiting canoe, but now they stopped
and seemed to argue, with many gestures. Tari chuckled.
"No use trying to hurry them," he told me; "they are discussing
the loss of the _Esperanza_. She went ashore here in the late
'nineties--a full-rigged ship. Peter was one of her crew; Charley
had just come here to trade, and saw the whole thing. They've spent
twenty years thrashing out the question of whether or not the wreck
might have been avoided. Every morning, after breakfast, Charley
strolls across to Peter's house to smoke a pipe and discuss some of
the fine points; every evening, after tea, Peter returns the visit,
and the argument goes on till bedtime. Charley's an American--an old
man now, close to seventy. He put in thirty years on Hiva Oa, in the
Marquesas, before he came to Ahu Ahu; I'd like to have some of his
memories. Notice his arms if he pulls his sleeves up. He has sixteen
children on Hiva Oa and fourteen here--all numbered; he says he never
can remember their heathen names. When his wife died in the north he
gave all his land to the children and left on the first schooner. She
touched at Papeete, but he didn't go ashore. Then she made Ahu Ahu,
where he landed and established himself a second time. He has never
seen a motor car, a telephone, or an electric light."
Presently the canoe came dancing alongside, and the two old men
clambered painfully over the rail--Peter thin, hatchet faced, and
stooping; Charley the ruin of a magnificent man. He towered above
any of us on the deck--this ancient dweller among cannibals--still
erect, his head still carried proudly, but the flesh hanging loose
and withered on his bones. It was easy to fancy the admiration he
must have inspired forty years ago among the wild people, in whose
eyes physical strength and perfection were the great qualities of
a man. In the cabin, while the cook squeezed limes for the first of
many rum punches, Charley took off his tunic of white drill, and as
he sat there in his singlet I saw that his arms and chest, like his
face, were tanned to an indelible dull brown, and that patterns in
tattooing ran from wrist to shoulder--greenish blue and barbaric.
I never learned his history--it must have been a thing to stir the
imagination. Once, as we sat drinking, Tari mentioned Stevenson, and
the old man's face brightened.
"_É_," he said, slowly, in native fashion, "I remember him well; he
came to Hiva Oa with the _Casco_. A funny fellow he was ... thin!
There was nothing to him but skin and bones. And questions--he'd ask
you a hundred in a minute! I didn't take to him at first, but he was
all right. He didn't care how he dressed; one day I saw him walking
on the beach with nothing on but a pair of drawers."
The cook plied back and forth, removing empty glasses and bringing
full ones. As each tray was set on the table, Peter--typical of a
lively and garrulous old age--seized his glass and held it up.
"Hurrah!" he exclaimed. "Down she goes," drawled Charley, and
Tari murmured, "Cheerio!" At the end of two hours Charley's eyes
were beginning to glaze, and Peter was mumbling vaguely of the
_Esperanza_. Tari rose and beckoned to me.
"Make yourselves at home," he said to the old men; "I've got to go
ashore. Akatara will give you lunch whenever you want it."
As our canoe made for the reef my companion told me there was to be
a feast in his honor, and that his wife wished me to be present.
We shot into the passage without a wetting; the people crowded
about Tari, laughing, shaking his hand, speaking all at once--an
unmistakable warmth of welcome.
The settlement, reached by a short, steep trail, lies at the base
of a break in the cliffs. At the door of her mother's house Apakura
met us--turned out, as becomes a supercargo's wife, in the choicest
of trade finery. She wore heavy golden earrings; bands of gold were
on her fingers, and her loose frock was of pale embroidered silk.
Her mother--the keen-eyed old woman I had seen in the canoe--made me
welcome.
In the afternoon, when the feast was over and we rose stiffly,
crammed with fish and taro and baked pig, I asked Tari if he knew
a youngster who would show me the best path to the interior of the
island. A boy of ten was soon at the door--a dark-skinned child with
a great shock of hair, and legs disfigured by the scars of old coral
cuts.
A twisting path, cobbled, and wide enough to walk two abreast, led
us to the summit. The stones were worn smooth by the passage of bare
feet, for, excepting fish, all the food of the village is brought
over this road from the plantations to the sea. There could be
no doubt that the ring of cliffs on which we stood was an ancient
reef; in places one could recognize the forms of coral, imbedded,
with shells of many varieties, in the metamorphosed rock. Here and
there one found pockets of a material resembling marble, veined
and crystalline--formed from the coral by processes impossible to
surmise. The bulk of the rock is the fine-grained white limestone
called _makatea_ in the eastern Pacific. The level summit of the
cliffs, over which, in centuries gone by, the sea had washed and
thundered, forms a narrow plain, sparsely wooded and cultivated in
spots where a thin soil has gathered in the hollows.
We halted under the palms crowning the inner brink. The trail wound
down giddily ahead--so steep in places that ladders had been fastened
to the rock. To right and left of us the cliffs were sheer walls of
limestone, rising from a level little above that of the sea. The low
hills of the interior, volcanic and fern covered, draining in every
direction toward the foot of the _makatea_, have formed a circling
belt of swamp land, on which all the taro of the island was grown.
One could look down on the beds from where we stood, a mosaic of pale
green, laid out by heathen engineers in days beyond the traditions of
men.
Another time, perhaps, I will tell you of that afternoon--how we
climbed down the trail and walked the dikes among the taro; how my
escort increased to a merry company as the people began to come after
food for the evening meal; of a boisterous swim in a pool beneath a
waterfall; of how I found the remains of an ancient house, built of
squared stone so long ago that over one end of it the wooded earth
lay two yards deep.
Toward evening, in the bush at the edge of the taro swamps, I came
upon a large house, built of bamboo and pandanus in the native
fashion. A man was standing framed in the doorway--a tall, white man,
dressed in pajamas of silk. His gold-rimmed spectacles, gray beard,
and expression of intelligent kindliness were vaguely academic--out
of place as the cultivated voice which invited me to stop. The boys
and girls escorting me squatted on their heels outside; a brace
of pretty children, shy and half naked, scurried past as I entered
the house. My host waved his hand toward a mat. There was only one
chair in the room, standing before a table on which I saw a small
typewriter and a disordered heap of manuscript. Otherwise the place
was unfurnished except for books, ranged in crude bookcases, tier
upon tier, stacked here and there in precarious piles, standing in
rows along the floor.
"I am glad to see you," he said, as he offered me a cigarette from a
case of basketwork silver; "it is not often that a European passes my
house."
I shall not give his name, or attempt to disguise him with a
fictitious one; it is enough to say that he is one of the handful of
real scholars who have devoted their lives to Polynesian research. I
had read his books, published long before, and wondered--more than
once--whether he still lived and where he hid himself. The years
of silence had been spent (he told me) in a comparative study of
the ocean dialects, through which he hoped to solve the riddle of
the Pacific--to determine whence came the brown and straight-haired
people of the islands. Now, with the material in hand, he had chosen
Ahu Ahu as a place of solitude, where he might complete his task of
compilation undisturbed.
"On the whole," he said, with agreeable readiness to speak of his
work, "I am convinced that they came from the west. The Frenchman's
theory that the race originated in New Zealand, like the belief
that they migrated westward from the shores of America, is more
picturesque, more stirring to the imagination; but the evidence
is too vague. If one investigates the possibilities of an eastward
migration, on the other hand, one finds everywhere in the western
islands the traces of their passage. Far out in the Orient, in
isolated groups, off the coast of Sumatra, about Java and Celebes,
and in the Arafura Sea, I can show you people of the true Polynesian
type. Even in such places, where the last migration must have passed
nearly two thousand years ago, scraps of evidence remain--a word, a
curious custom, the manner of carrying a basket. These things might
seem coincidences if the trail did not grow warmer as one travels
east.
"Though no trace of their blood is left, New Guinea must at one time
have been a halting place in the migration. Papua it is called, and
one finds the word current in Polynesia, meaning a garden, a rich
land. The natives of New Guinea are as unlike the people of the
eastern Pacific, I should say, as the average American or Englishman,
and yet throughout New Guinea there is a most curious cropping out
of Polynesian words, pointing to a very ancient intercourse between
the races. Consider the word for woman among the Polynesians. In
Rarotonga, it is _vaine_; in Tahiti, _vahine_; in the Marquesas,
_vehine_; in Hawaii, _wahine_; in Samoa, _fafine_. The same root
runs through the dialects of Papua. In Motu, woman is _habine_; in
Kerepunu, _vavine_; in Aroma, _babine_; and in Motumotu it is _ua_,
which in this part of the Pacific means, variously, female, seed,
and rain. I could cite you dozens of similar examples. Now and then
one comes across something that sets one's imagination to work ... as
you must know, the word for sun in the islands is _ra_, but in Tahiti
they have another word, _mahana_. In New Guinea, thirty-five hundred
miles away, and with all Melanesia between, the tribes of the South
Cape call the sun _mahana_. What a puzzle it is!
"Though it may be the merest coincidence, that _ra_ has a flavor of
Egypt. I wonder if there could be a connection? I used to know a girl
in Tahiti whose strange and rather beautiful name--hereditary as far
back as the records of her family went--was that of a queen of Egypt
who ruled many hundreds of years before Christ. But I mustn't ride my
hobby too fast.
"It is a pity you can't stop on Ahu Ahu for a time--there are not
many islands so unspoiled. I've grown very fond of the place; I doubt
if I ever leave it permanently. If you are interested in ghosts,
you had better change your mind. I have a fine collection here; the
house is built on the site of a tumble-down _marae_. There is our
white rooster, the spirit of an old chief, which appears during the
new moon--perfectly harmless and friendly, but the people rather
dread him. Then we have a ghostly pig, very bad indeed; and a pair
of malignant women, who walk about at night with arms and long hair
entwined, and are suspected of ghastly appetites. I shall not say
whether or not I have seen any of these; perhaps it is living too
much alone, but I am not so skeptical as I was...."
It was not easy to part with such a host, but the sun was low over
the _makatea_, and the prospect of crossing the dikes among the taro
and scaling the cliff by dark drove me at last to take reluctant
leave.
Lamps were shining in the village when I returned; in some of the
houses I heard the voice of the father, reading aloud solemnly from
the Bible in the native tongue; in others, the people were assembled
to chant their savage and melancholy hymns. Tari was alone on the
veranda, smoking in his absent-minded fashion, and motioned me to sit
down beside him. I told him how I had spent the afternoon. When I had
finished he puffed on in silence for a time.
"It is a strange place, Ahu Ahu," he said at last. "My mother-in-law
has finished her prayers, sung her _himines_, and put away the family
Bible. Now she has gone to the house of one of her pals for a session
with old Rakamoana. Like the land itself, the people are relics of an
elder time--pure heathen at heart."