A visit to Typee; story of the old man who returned too late.
I said, of course, that I must visit Typee, the scene of Porter's
bloody raid and Herman Melville's exploits, and while I was making
arrangements to get a horse in Tai-o-hae I met Haus Ramqe,
supercargo of the schooner _Moana_, who related a story concerning
the valley.
"I was working in the store of the Socéité Comerciale de l'Ocean in
Tai-o-hae when the _Tropic Bird_, a San Francisco mail-schooner,
arrived. That was ten years ago. An old man, an American, came into
our place and asked the way to Typee.
"'Ah,' I said, 'you have been reading that book by Melville.' He
made no reply, but asked me to escort him to the valley. We set out
on horseback, and though he had not said that he had ever been in
these islands before, I saw that he was strangely interested in the
scenes we passed. He was rather feeble with age, and he grew so
excited as we neared the valley that I asked him what he expected to
see there.
"He stopped his horse, and hesitated in his reply. He was terribly
agitated.
"'I lived in Typee once upon a time,' he said slowly. 'Could there
by chance be a woman living there named Manu? That was a long time
ago, and I was young. Still, I am here, and she may be, too.'
"I looked at him and could not tell him the truth. It was evident he
had made no confidant of the captain or crew of the _Tropic Bird_,
for they could have told him of the desolation in Typee. I hated,
though, to have him plump right into the facts.
"'How many people were there in your day?' I asked him. He replied
that there were many thousands.
"'I lived there three years,' he said. 'I had a sweetheart named Manu,
and I married her in the Marquesan way. I was a runaway sailor, and
one night on the beach I was captured and taken away on a ship. I
have been captain of a great American liner for years, always
meaning to come back, and putting it off from year to year. All my
people are dead, and I thought I would come now and perhaps find her
here and end my days. I have plenty of money.'
"He seemed childish to me--perhaps he really had lost mental poise
by age. I hadn't the courage to tell him the truth. We came on it
soon enough. You must see Typee to realize what people mean to a
place.
"The _nonos_ were simply hell, but as I had lived a good many years
in Tai-o-hae I was hardened to them. The old man slapped at them
occasionally, but made no complaint. He hardly seemed to feel them,
or to realize what their numbers meant. It was when we pushed up the
trail through the valley, and he saw only deserted _paepaes_, that
he began to look frightened.
"'Are they all gone?' he inquired weakly.
"'No,' I said, 'there are fifteen or twenty here.' We came to a
clearing and there found the remnant of the Typees. I questioned them,
but none had ever heard of him. There had been many Manus,--the word
means bird,--but as they were the last of the tribe, she must have
been dead before they were born, and they no longer kept in their
memories the names of the dead, since there were so many, and all
would be dead soon.
"The American still understood enough Marquesan to understand their
answers, and taking me by the arm he left the horses and led me up
the valley till he came to a spot where there were fragments of an
old _paepae_, buried in vines and torn apart by their roots.
"'We lived here,' he said, and then he sat on the forsaken stones
and cried. He said that they had had two children, and he had been
sure that at least he would find them alive. His misery made me feel
bad, and the damned _nonos_, too, and I cried--I don't know how damn
sentimental it was, but that was the way it affected me. The old
chap seemed so alone in the world.
"'It is three miles from here to the beach,' he said, 'and I have
seen men coming with their presents for the chief, walking a yard
apart, and yet the line stretched all the way to the beach.'
"He could hardly ride back to Tai-o-hae, and he departed with the
_Tropic Bird_ without saying another word to any one."
Typee, they told me, was half way to Atiheu and a good four miles by
horse. The road had been good when the people were many, and was
still the main road of the island, leading through the Valley of
Hapaa. My steed was borrowed of T'yonny Howard, who, though he owned
a valley, poured cement for day's wages.
"What I do?" he asked, as if I held the answer. "Nobody to help me
work there. I cannot make copra alone. Even here they bring men from
other place do work. Marquesan die too fast."
If T'yonny revered his father's countrymen, his horse did not. These
island horses are unhappy-looking skates, though good climbers and
sliders.
"You don't need person go with you," said the son of the former
living picture. "That horsey know. You stay by him."
The saddle must have been strange to the horsey, for uneasiness
communicated itself from him to me as we set out, an uneasiness
augmented to me by the incessant vicious pricks of the ever-present
_nonos_.
The way led ever higher above the emerald bay of Tai-o-hae set in
the jade of the forest, and valley after valley opened below as the
trail edged upward on the face of sheer cliffs or crossed the little
plateaus of their summits. Hapaa lay bathed in a purple mist that
hid from me the mute tokens of depopulation; Hapaa that had given
Porter its thousands of naked warriors, and that now was devoid of
human beings.
Dipping slightly downward again, the trail lay on the rim of a deep
declivity, a sunless gulf in which the tree-tops fell away in rank
below rank into dim depths of mistiness. There was no sign of human
passing on the vine-grown trail, a vague track through a melancholy
wilderness that seemed to breathe death and decay. A spirit of gloom
seemed to rise from the shadowed declivity, from the silence of the
mournful wood and the damp darkness of the leaf-hidden earth.
I had given myself over to musing upon the past, but suddenly in the
narrowest part of the trail the beast I rode turned and took my
canvas-covered toes in his yellow teeth. A vague momentary flash of
horror came over me. Did I bestride a metempsychosized man-eater, a
revenant from the bloody days of Nuka-hiva? In those wicked eyes I
saw reflected the tales of transmigatory vengeance, from the wolf of
Little Red Riding Hood to the ass that one becomes who kills a
Brahman. I gave vent at the same second to a shriek of anguish and
struck the animal upon the nose, the tenderest part of his anatomy
within reach. He released my foot, whirled, cavorted, and, as I
seized a tree fern on the bank, went heels over head over the cliff.
T'yonny had said to "stay by horsey," but he could not have foreseen
the road he would take. I was sorry for him as I heard the
reverberations of his crashing fall. No living thing could escape
death in such a drop, for though the cliff down which he had
disappeared was not absolutely perpendicular, it was nearly so.
Peering over it, I could not see his corpse, for fern and tree-top
hid all below. At least, I thought, he had surcease of all ills now.
And so I descended the steep trail on foot--mostly on one
foot--until I reached the vale of Typee.
I found myself in a loneliness indescribable and terrible. No sound
but that of a waterfall at a distance parted the somber silence. The
trail was through a thicket of ferns, trees, and wild flowers. The
perfume of _Hinano_, of the _vaovao_, with its delicate blue flowers,
and the _vaipuhao_, whose leaves are scented like violets, filled
the heavy air, and I passed acres of _kokou_, which looks like
tobacco, but has a yellow fruit of delicious odor. It was such a
garden as the prince who woke the _Sleeping Beauty_ penetrated to
reach the palace where she lay entranced, and something of the same
sense of dread magic lay upon it. Humanity was not so much absent as
gone, and a feeling of doom and death was in the motionless air,
which lay like a weight upon leaf and flower.
The thin, sharp buzzing of the _nonos_ was incessant. They had come
when man departed; there were none when Porter devastated the valley,
nor when Melville spent his happy months here thirty years later. One
must move briskly to escape them now, and I was pushing through the
bushes that strove to obliterate the trail when I came upon a native.
He was so old that he must have been a youth in the valley when it
was visited by the American-liner captain as a boy. He was quite
nude save for a ragged cincture, and his body had shrunk and puckered,
and his skin had folded and discolored until he looked as if life
had ebbed away from him and left him high and dry between the past
and the hereafter. A ragged chin beard, ashen in hue, hung below his
gaping, empty mouth. But there was a spirit in his bosom still, for
upon his head he wore a circle of bright flowers to supplement the
sparse locks.
His eyes were barely openable, and his face, indeed, his whole body,
was a coppery green, the soot of the candlenut, black itself, but
blue upon the flesh, having turned by age to a mottled and hideous
color. Only the striking patterns, where they branched from the
biceps to the chest, were plain.
That he had been one of the great of Nuka-hiva was certain; the fact
was stamped indelibly upon his person, and though worn and faded to
the ghastly green of old copper, it remained to proclaim his lineage
and his rank.
"_Kaoha te iki!_" said this ancient, as he stood in the path.
"_Kaoha e!_" I saluted him.
"_Puaka piki enata_" he said further, and pointed down the trail.
What could he mean? _Puaka_ is pig, _piki_ is to mount or climb,
and _enata_ is man. A great white light beat about my brow. "The pig
men climb?" Could he mean Rozinante, the steed to whom T'yonny had
entrusted me, and who had so basely deserted his trust over a cliff?
I hurried on incredulous, and, in a clearing where there were three
or four horses, beheld the suicide grazing upon the luscious grass.
He had lost much cuticle, and the saddle was in shreds, but the
_puaka piki enata_ was evidently in fairly good health.
The old man had slowly followed me down the trail, and he stood
within the doorway of a rude hut, blinking in the sun as he watched
my movements. In the houses were altogether fewer than a dozen people.
They sat by cocoanut-husk fires, the acrid smoke of which daunted
the _nonos_.
The reason any human beings endure such tortures to remain in this
gloomy, deserted spot can only be the affection the Marquesan has
for his home. Not until epidemics have carried off all but one or
two inhabitants in a valley can those remaining be persuaded to leave
it.
This dozen of the Taipi clan are the remainder of the twenty Ramqe
saw with the heartbroken American. They have clung to their lonely
_paepaes_ despite their poverty of numbers and the ferocity of the
_nonos_. They had clearings with cocoanuts and breadfruit, but
they cared no longer to cultivate them, preferring rather to sit
sadly in the curling fumes and dream of the past. One old man read
aloud the "Gospel of St. John" in Marquesan, and the others
listlessly listened, seeming to drink in little comfort from the
verses, which he recited in the chanting monotone of their _uta_.
Nine miles in length is Typee, from a glorious cataract that leaps
over the dark buttress wall where the mountain bounds the valley, to
the blazing beach. And in all this extent of marvelously rich land,
the one-time fondly cherished abode of the most valiant clan of the
Marquesas, of thousands of men and women whose bodies were as
beautiful as the models for the statues the Greeks made, whose
hearts were generous, and whose minds were eager to learn all good
things, there are now this wretched dozen too old or listless to
gather their own food. In the ruins of a broken and abandoned
_paepae_, in the shadow of an acre-covering banian, I smoked and
asked myself what a Christ would think of the havoc wrought by men
calling themselves Christians.