THE PRINCESS LOLÓMA.
As I rambled about the mountain solitudes, the sound of the lali, or
native drum, beaten in celebration of some heathen rite, and faint
echoes from the shrill blast of the conch-shell, blown in honour of some
chiefly observance, not infrequently floated up from an extensive valley
lying in the centre of the hill country. Occasionally I had seen men
moving in the distance, but I was always careful to keep out of view.
One day a party of village maidens, searching for the gay flowers of the
forest, with which to decorate themselves for some festival, approached
my hiding-place. I observed their gambols on a wooded slope, as they
laughed, and danced, and sang with gladsome air, and I would willingly
have joined the merry throng had not prudence forbidden. The queen of
the company, to whom a certain deference was always paid, was a handsome
girl of fifteen. Her dress and mien proclaimed her to be a lady in the
land.
The elegant simplicity of her attire was well calculated to heighten the
charm of her fine figure. She wore a cincture of hibiscus fibres a few
inches broad, forming a girdle of beautifully variegated braidwork, from
which depended a fringe of coloured grasses ten inches deep, ornamented
with small shells and berries. The long fringe playing on her
softly-rounded limbs had a most graceful appearance. Her ears were
decorated with the brilliant blossom of the Chinese rose; garlands of
bright flowers were hung on her neck, and a chaplet of pure white ivi
blossoms lay on her brow, emitting a delicious perfume, and contrasting
well with the glow of her dusk bosom. The likus or petticoats worn by
her handmaidens were much scantier. They were of a bright, jet black
colour, made from the stem of a parasite called waloa. They did not meet
by several inches at the hip, and they were put on in such a coquettish
way that they gave the idea that they must fall off every moment.
I could not but watch with interest the lovely forms of these gentle
savages of the wild as they capered in the shade of the tropic
afternoon. Soon they tired for a while of their innocent sports. The
queen sank luxuriously into a crown of fern leaves, and lay like
Aphrodite in her shell, with all her dimpled loves around her.
The whole party slept for a time in careless abandonment upon the leaves
and grass, their floral treasures thrown around them in picturesque
disorder. In the cool of the evening they awoke from refreshing slumbers
and regaled themselves on the luscious fruits which hung around. The
full moon arose, filling the dell with a soft splendour, and the maidens
looked timorously at the shimmering trees, for the woods of Fiji are
filled with diminutive fairies and elves, whose delight it is to plague
poor mortals, who are no match for the trickeries of these little folks,
who people the tangled grass and bushes, spring from hollows of the pine
trees, tread softly as the lizards, and will eat the banquet spread for
others when the feasters’ backs are turned, laughing merrily the while,
and then retire to the branches of the trees, where anyone may hear them
chattering together, and singing their little songs with the
multitudinous voices of the cicadæ.
Breaking into a wild dance, full of animation and graceful movements,
the girls, with rustling leaves and streamers of green about them,
imitated the ebb and flow of the tide, counterfeiting the rippling and
soft sighing of the water on some sandy beach with wonderful accuracy.
After this they performed the flying-fox dance, mimicking with equal
cleverness the gyrations of that animal as it lazily hangs from the
branch of a tree, or, suddenly spreading its wings, takes its dive-like
flight from some monarch of the wood to the lowest branch of a
bread-fruit. The girls tripped as lightly over the grass as their fabled
fairy elves, singing the while in merry measure—
“Away, away, away to the trees,
To dance, and dance as long as you please,
To sing and dance all night in the breeze,
As from trees the flying foxes!”
“Away to dance, the yellow-flow’r dance,
The white flow’r dance, the scarlet-flow’r dance!
Come dance and sing, and merrily dance.
For the world will soon be empty!”
While I was the unobserved witness of these pretty dramas of gesture I
could not but think of the fabled dead dancing maidens whom the Germans
call “The Willeis.” They are young brides who died the day before their
happiness was to be consummated, but who, their passion for dancing
still living within them, leave their graves at midnight, and give
themselves up to the wildest measures, while the nearer the approach of
the hour which recalls them to the silence of the tomb, the more
deliriously they abandon themselves to the enjoyment of the
fast-fleeting moments.
But I had no feeling that the mysterious rites of which I was the
privileged beholder were fraught with perdition to man. The twittering
prattle of voices low and sweet, and the vigorous gambols of these merry
lassies, seemed full of the palpitating passion of life; while the
dances of the fairies, the pirouettes of the elves, and the gambadoes of
the earth-spirits, could not have had more of dainty grace. As for the
queen herself, when she danced, like Perdita’s admirer, I wished her a
wave of the sea that she might never do anything but that.
The evening’s madcap revels over, the frolicsome party prepared to
return to their village. They ran down the green slopes, waking the
echoes with their wild laughter. I followed at a distance, and saw that
they gradually became divided into small knots, often walking in twos
and threes linked in each other’s arms.
The queen, while roaming alone, struck her foot on a sharp twig, and
stayed to bathe the injured member in a transparent pool into which a
miniature cascade, lacing a bank like a thread of silver, fell. She sat
looking at her reflection in the water with the innocent delight of a
flower enjoying its own perfume.
Her companions passed on, and I confronted her. She was speechless with
terror. She thought at first, as I afterwards learned, that I was either
the departed spirit of some ancestor who had undergone a strange
metamorphosis in the other world, or else that I was a goblin of a kind
that she had never before heard of. Then she recollected the fables of
the Kalou vulavula or white God, she had heard the court minstrel
relate, and determined in her own mind that I must belong to that
species of deity.
I reassured her by making use of a few Fijian phrases I had at command,
and she soon felt satisfied that my intentions were friendly. I
contrived to make her understand that I was tambu, and that my presence
in the woods must be kept a profound secret. I also gained enough of her
good will to feel sure that we should meet again. The event justified
that belief. Whenever the Princess and her companions visited the
locality I managed to have a secret interview with her.
In course of time I was able to explain to her that I had been cast
ashore in the recent hurricane, and had wandered into the hills after
the death of my companions. All she knew of white men was that they were
god-like beings who lived in a far country beyond the seas, and who
voyaged in ships as large as islands. Much that she had heard on this
subject from the tribal minstrel she had always regarded as an idle tale
invented for the amusement of the populace.
I said that I feared to surrender myself to her people, told her I was
living in a cave which was difficult of access, and obtained from her a
promise that she would come back alone some day, and advise me whether
it would be safe for me to enter the town. I learned that her name was
Lolóma, and that she was the daughter of Tui Thangi-Levu (King
Big-Wind), who lived in Koroivónu (Turtle Town), in the neighbouring
valley, and was sovereign of the inland tribes for many miles around.
One day the Princess sought me out alone. She brought me a welcome
addition to my fare—some native puddings made of ripe bananas, served
with a sauce compounded of the milky juice expressed from the cocoanut,
and sweetened with rasped sugar-cane.
I showed her the mysterious entrance to the cave. She ascended the tree
with the infinite grace of her nation. As she glided through the leaves
into the darkened cavern, I thought she must be a veritable wood nymph
or sylvan goddess. The sun penetrating through the thick-leaved trees’
glossy veil of green, dimly showed the fretted buttresses, the aisles,
the naves, and the fantastic columns and architraves of our sparry
bower.
Lolóma was not darker than a Spanish-born gipsy. Though a child in
years, as judged in colder climes, she had the rounded form of perfect
womanhood. Short curly hair set off a bright and laughing face, in which
a pair of dark eyes danced like twin stars in the first shade of night.
The soft caressing fingers and daintily-turned feet, the arched neck and
the dimpled knee, were as perfect as statuary. The voice so sweet, and
untaught smile so flattering, proclaimed the unsophisticated
_naturelle_. And there was that which no sculptor’s art could copy—the
heightened color which shone in her face and neck as her bosom heaved
with some fresh emotion of joy or fear, and showed on her nut-brown skin
like the red coral of the still lagoon seen blushing through the
shadowed wave, or the warm glow of the young leaves of the dawn, which
often makes a whole forest look in the distance as if it were in bloom.
She was as natural as the plants and flowers among which she lived, and
as joyous as a waterfall. She was subject to none of the distractions of
her compeers of civilisation. No sorrow had as yet fallen on her young
life, and she knew not “passion’s desolating joy.”
Under the instruction of my teacher I made rapid progress in the Fijian
language, that soft labial tongue,
“Which melts like kisses from a female mouth,
And sounds as if it should be writ on satin.”
The meaning of her name in Fijian I found to be love or pity. My home in
the grotto soon ceased to be a hermit’s cell. A supply of
elegantly-worked mats and printed tapa gave one nook in it an air of
comfort. When illuminated with flambeaux of resinous wood, and liberally
furnished with all the delicacies of the Fijian cuisine, it was a
dwelling-place which an epicure need not have despised.
Lolóma pitied me for my loneliness and complete severance from kith and
kin. Our daily conversation turned on the advisability of adopting some
plan by which I could join her tribe and have full liberty among her
people.
The Princess’s frequent unexplained absences from the village green of
Koroivónu had been noticed. On several occasions she was followed up the
mountain steep, but whenever she approached the tree which guarded the
entrance to the cave she disappeared as if she had been swallowed up in
the earth, and the mystery remained unsolved. The report in the village
was that she was in secret communion with the spirits of the departed.
One day Lolóma suggested that she should announce to her friends her
discovery of a hobgoblin in the woods, whose acquaintance was worth
making. I knew that the superstitions of the common people would induce
them to believe anything, but I was not so sure of passing muster with
the more intelligent chiefs in the character of an elf. However, the
experiment seemed to be worth trying, and as I had escaped the cannibal
pot of the coast tribe, I was not likely to be treated as flotsam and
jetsam here, where the people were milder-mannered, and rarely indulged
in human sacrifices, except in time of war, which but seldom visited
their peaceful vale. The interest the account of the hobgoblin would
excite would at least cause some search to be made, and I should have
the opportunity of disclosing myself if the circumstances seemed
favorable.