The princess suggests a walk to the falls of Fautaua, where Loti went
with Rarahu--We start in the morning--The suburbs of Papeete--The Pool
of Loti--The birds, trees and plants--A swim in a pool--Arrival at
the cascade--Luncheon and a siesta--We climb the height--The princess
tells of Tahitian women--The Fashoda fright.
The falls of Fautaua, famed in Tahitian legend, are exquisite in
beauty and surrounding, and so near Papeete that I walked to them
and back in a day. Yet hardly any one goes there. For those who have
visited them they remain a shrine of loveliness, wondrous in form and
unsurpassed in color. Before the genius of Tahiti was smothered in the
black and white of modernism, the falls and the valley in which they
are, were the haunt of lovers who sought seclusion for their pledgings.
A princess accompanied me to them. She was not a daughter of a king
or queen, but she was near to royalty, and herself as aristocratic in
carriage and manner as was Oberea, who loved Captain Cook. I danced
with her at a dinner given by a consul, and when I spoke to her of
Loti's visit to Fautaua with Rarahu, she said in French:
"Why do you not go there yourself with a Rarahu! Loti is old and an
admiral, and writes now of Egypt and Turkey and places soiled by crowds
of people, but Rarahu is still here and young. Shall I find you her?"
I looked at her and boldly said:
"I am a stranger in your island, as was Loti when he met Rarahu. Will
you not yourself show me Fautaua?"
She gave a shrill cry of delight, and in the frank, sweet way of the
Tahitian girl replied:
"We will run away to-morrow morning. Wear little, for it will be warm,
and bring no food!"
"I will obey you literally," I said, "and you must find manna or
charm ravens to bring us sustenance."
I had coffee opposite the market place in the shop of Wing Luey, and
chatted a few moments with Prince Hinoe, the son of the Princesse
de Joinville, who would have been king had the French not ended
the Kingdom of Tahiti. No matter what time Hinoe lay down at night,
he was up at dawn for the market, for his early roll and coffee and
his converse with the sellers and the buyers. There once a day for
an hour the native in Papeete touched the country folk and renewed
the ancient custom of gossip in the cool of the morning.
The princess--in English her familiar Tahitian name, Noanoa Tiare,
meant Fragrance of the Jasmine--was in the Parc de Bougainville,
by the bust of the first French circumnavigator.
"Ia ora na!" she greeted me. "Are you ready for adventure?"
She handed me a small, soft package, with a caution to keep it safe
and dry. I put it in my inside pocket.
The light of the sun hardly touched the lagoon, and Moorea was still
shrouded in the shadows of the expiring night. As we walked down the
beach, the day was opening with the "morning bank," the masses of
white clouds that gather upon the horizon before the tradewind begins
its diurnal sweep, to shift and mold them all the hours till sunset.
Fragrance of the Jasmine was in a long and clinging tunic of pale
blue, with low, white shoes disclosing stockings also of blue, and
wore a hat of pandanus weave. She carried nothing, nor had I anything
in my hands, and we were to be gone all day. I regretted that I had
not lingered longer with Prince Hinoe over the rolls and coffee.
We fared past the merchants' stores, the Cercle Bougainville, and
the steamship wharf, and over the Pont de l'Est, or Eastern bridge,
to Patutoa. The princess pointed out to me many wretched straw
houses, crowded in a hopeless way. They were like a refugee camp
after a disaster, impermanent, uncomfortable, barely holding on to
the swampy earth. One knew the occupants to be far from their own
Lares and Penates.
"Those are the habitations of people of other islands," she said. "The
people of the Paumotus, the Australs, and of Easter Island settled
there. They were brought here by odious labor contractors, and died
of homesickness. Those men murdered hundreds of them to gain un
pen d'argent, a handful of gold. Eh b'en, those who did it have
suffered. They have faded away, and most of their evil money,
too. Aue!"
Llewellyn's dark face as he protested against Lying Bill's sarcastic
statement of guilt came before me.
To lighten the thought of the princess I told her the thread of
"The Bottle Imp," and that the magic bottle had disappeared out of
the story right there, by the old calaboose. She was glad that the
white sailor who did not care for life had saved the Hawaiians.
Framed in the door of a rough cabin I saw McHenry. He was in pajamas,
barefooted, and unshaven. I recalled that he had an "old woman"
there. Llewellyn had reproved him for speaking contemptuously of
her as beneath him socially. I waved to McHenry, who nodded charily,
and pulled down the curtain which was in lieu of a door. The shack
looked bare and cheap, as if little money or effort had been spent
upon it. Perhaps, I thought, McHenry could afford only the drinks and
cards at the Cercle Bougainville and economized at home. He did not
reappear, but a comely native woman drew back the curtain, and stood
a moment to view us. She was large, and did not look browbeaten, as
one would have supposed from McHenry's boast that he would not permit
her even to walk with him except at a "respectful distance." Of course
I knew him as a boaster.
The church of the curious Josephite religion was near by, and in the
mission house attached to it I saw the American preachers of the sect.
"What do they preach?" I asked Noanoa Tiare.
"Those missionaries, the Tonito? Oh, they speak evil of the Mormons. I
do not know how they speak of God." She laughed. "I am not interested
in religions," she explained. "They are so difficult to understand. Our
own old gods seem easier to know about."
We had arrived at the part of the beach into which the broad avenue
of Fautaua debouched.
The road was beside the stream of Fautaua, and arching it were
magnificent dark-green trees, like the locust-trees of Malta. This
avenue was in the middle of the island, and looking through the
climbing bow of branches I saw Maiauo, the lofty needles of rock
which rise black-green from the mountain plateau and form a tiara,
Le Diademe, of the French. A quarter of an hour's stroll brought us
to a natural basin into which the stream fell. It was of it Louis
Marie Julien Viaud, shortly after he had been christened Loti, wrote:
The pool had numerous visitors every day; beautiful young women of
Papeete spent the warm tropical days here, chatting, singing and
sleeping, or even diving and swimming like agile gold fish. They
went here clad in their muslin tunics, and wore them moist upon their
bodies while they slept, looking like the naiads of the past.
We were already warm from walking, and I, in my pareu and light coat
of pongee silk, looked longingly at the water sparkling in the sun,
but the princess took me by the hand and led me on.
"It were better to go directly up the valley and out of the heat,"
she advised. "We shall have many pools to bathe in."
It was at the next that I took from my pocket "Rarahu, ou le mariage
de Loti," a thin, poorly printed book in pink paper covers that I had
possessed since boyhood, and which I had read again on the ship coming
to Tahiti. The princess, like all reading Tahiti, knew it better than
I, for it was the first novel in French with its scenes in that island,
and for more than forty years had been talked about there.
"Here at this pool," she said, with her finger on the page, "Loti
surprised Rarahu one afternoon when for a red ribbon she let an old
and hideous Chinese kiss her naked shoulder. Mon dieu! That French
naval officer made a bruit about a poor little Tahitian girl! We will
talk about her when we are at déjeuner."
Déjeuner! My heart leaped. Whence would the luncheon come? Had this
child of Tahiti arranged beforehand that she should be met by a jinn
with sandwiches and cakes? I dared not ask.
We pushed on, and passed many residences of natives. They were almost
all of European construction, board cottages, because the houses of
native sort are forbidden within the municipal limits. Beyond them we
saw no houses. The Tahitian families were cooking their breakfasts,
brought from the market, on little fires outside their houses. They
all smiled, and called to us to partake with them.
"Ia ora na! Haere mai amu!"
"Greeting! Come eat with us!"
They looked happy in the sunshine, the smoke curling about them in
milky wreaths, the men naked except for pareus, and the children
quite as born. Fragrance of the Jasmine answered all with pleasant
badinage, and each must know whither we were bound. They thought it
not at all odd, apparently, that a princess of their race should be
going to the waterfalls with a foreigner, and they beamed on me to
assure me of their interest and understanding.
The broad avenue lessened into a broken road, roofed by many kinds
of trees. Though the sun ascended from the ocean on the other side of
Tahiti above the fantastic peak of Maiauo, it had not shed a beam upon
the ferns and mosses. The guava was a dense growth. Like the lantana
of Hawaii and Ceylon, imported to Tahiti to fill a want, it had abused
hospitality, and become a nuisance without apparent remedy. How often
man works but in circles! Everywhere in the world plants and insects,
birds and animals, had been pointed out to me that had been acquired
for a beneficent purpose, and had become a curse.
The mina-bird was brought to Tahiti from the Moluccas to eat wasps
which came from South America, and were called Jack Spaniards. The
mina, perhaps, ate the insects, but he also ate everything else,
including fruit. He stole bread and butter off tables, and his hoarse
croak or defiant rattle was an oft-repeated warning to defend one's
food. The minas were many in Tahiti, and, like the English sparrow
in American cities and towns, had driven almost all other birds to
flight or local extinction. The sparrow's urban doom might be read
in the increasing number of automobiles, but the mina in Tahiti,
as in Hawaii, had a sinecure.
Noanoa Tiare said that the guava had its merits. Horses and cattle
ate its leaves and fruit, and the wood was a common fuel throughout
Tahiti. The fruit was delicious, and in America or England would be
all used for jelly, but only Lovaina preserved it. The passion-flowers
of the granadilla vines, white and star-like, with purpling centers,
were intermingled with the guavas, a brilliant and aromatic show,
the fruit like miniature golden pumpkins. Their acid, sweetish pulp
contained many seeds, each incased in white jelly. One ate the seeds
only, though the pulp, when cooked, was palatable.
The road dwindled into a narrower path, and then a mere trail. The
road had crossed the brook many times on frail bridges, some tottering
and others only remnants. Habitations ceased, and we were in a dark,
splendid gorge, narrow, and affording one no vision straight ahead
except at intervals.
The princess named many of the growths we passed, and explained their
qualities. The native is very close to the ground. The lantana, with
its yellow and magenta flowerets, umbrella ferns, and aihere, the herbe
de vache, and the bohenia, used by the Tahitians for an eye lotion,
were all about. Palms, with cocoanuts of a half dozen stages of growth,
and giant banana-plants lined the banks, and bushes with blue flowers
like violets, and one with red buttons, intermingled with limes and
oranges to form a thicket through which we could hardly force our way.
We were yet on the level of the rivulet, but now, the princess said,
must take to the cliff. We had come to a pool which in symmetry and
depth, in coolness and invitingness, outranked all before. I was very
hot, the beads of perspiration like those in a steamroom.
"We will rest here a few minutes, and you may bathe," said my lovely
guide. "I have not been to Fautaua vaimato for several years, but I
never forget the way. I will make a basket, and here we will gather
some fruit for our déjeuner for fear there might not be plenty at
the waterfalls."
I took off my tennis-shoes, hung my silk coat on a limb, and plunged
into the pool. Never but in the tropics does the human being fully
enjoy the dash into cool water. There it is a tingling pleasure. I
dived time and again, and then sat in the small glitter of sunlight
to dry and to watch Noanoa Tiare make the basket. She said she had
a wide choice there, as the leaves of the banana, cocoanut, bamboo,
pandanus, or aihere would serve. She had selected the aihere, the
common weed, and out of its leaves she deftly fashioned a basket a
foot long and wide and deep.
Although she had been in Paris and London and in New York, knew how
to play Beethoven and Grieg and Saint-Saëns, had had gowns made by
Paquin, and her portrait in the salon, she was at home in this glade
as a Tahitian girl a hundred years ago. The airs of the avenue de
l'Opéra in Paris, and, too, of the rue de Rivoli in Papeete, were
rarefied in this simple spot to the impulses and experiences of her
childhood in the groves and on the beaches of her beloved island.
When I had on my coat, we gathered limes, bananas, oranges, and a wild
pineapple that grew near by in a tangle of coffee and vanilla, and
the graceful acalypha. The yellow tecoma, a choice exotic in America,
shed its seeds upon the sow thistle, a salad, and the ape or wild
taro. The great leaves of the ape are like our elephant's ear plant,
and the roots, as big as war-clubs, are tubers that take the place
of potatoes here. In Hawaii, crushed and fermented, and called poi,
they were ever the main food. The juice of the leaf stings one's skin.
The princess removed her shoes and stockings, and I carried them over
my shoulder. We deflected from the rivulet to the cliff above it,
and there forced our way along the mountain-side, feeling almost by
instinct the trail hidden by the mass of creepers and plants.
It was a real jungle. Man had once dwelt there when his numbers in
this island were many times greater. Then every foot of ground from
the precipices to the sea was cleared for the breadfruit, the taro,
the cocoanut, and other life-giving growths, which sowed themselves
and asked no cultivation. Now, except for the faint trail, I was on
primeval ground, from all appearances.
The cañon grew narrower and darker. The undefined path lay inches
deep in water, and the levels were shallow swamp. Nature was in vast
luxuriance, in a revel of aloofness from human beings, casting its
wealth of blazing colors and surprising shapes upon every side. We slid
down the edge of the hill to the burn, where the massive boulders and
shattered rocks were camouflaged by the painting of moss and lichen,
the ginger, turmeric, caladium, and dracaena, and by the overhanging
palms covered with the rich bird's-nest ferns.
We sat again in this wild garden of the tropic to invite our souls
to drink the beauty and quietude, the absence of mankind and the
nearness of nature. We became very still, and soon heard the sounds
of bird and insect above the lower notes of the brawling stream.
The princess put her finger on her lips and whispered in my ear:
"Do you hear the warbling of the omamao and the olatare? They are
our song-birds. They are in these high valleys only, for the mina has
frightened them from below--the mina that came with the ugly Chinese."
"Noanoa Tiare," said I, "you Tahitians are the birds of paradise
of the human family. You have been driven from the rich valleys of
your old life to hills of bare existence by the minas of commerce
and politics. I feel like apologizing for my civilization."
She pressed my hand.
"Taisez-vous!" she replied, smiling. "Aita peapea. I am always
happy. Remember I still live in Tahiti, and this is my time. My
foremothers' day is past. Allons! We will be soon at the vaimato,
and there we will have the déjeuner."
As we moved on I saw that the yellow flowers of the purau, dried
red by the sun,--poultices for natives' bruises,--and candlenuts in
heaps,--torches ready to hand,--littered the moss.
The mountain loomed in the distance, and the immense Pic du Français
towered in shadow. Faintly I heard the boom of the waterfall, and
knew we were nearing the goal.
The cañon grew yet narrower and darker, and the crash of water
louder. We had again attained a considerable height over the stream,
and the trail seemed lost. The princess took my hand, and cautiously
feeling the creepers and plants under our feet, we slipped and crept
down the hidden path. Suddenly, the light became brilliant, and I
found myself in a huge broken bowl of lava rock, the walls almost
vertical. From the summit of the precipice facing me fell a superb
cascade into a deep and troubled tarn. The stream was spun silver in
the sun, which now was warm and splendid. So far it fell that much of
it never reached the pool as water, but, blown by the gentle breeze,
a moiety in spume and spray wet the earth for an acre about. Like
the veil of a bride, the spindrift spread in argent clouds, and a
hundred yards away dropped like gentle rain upon us. Verdure covered
everything below except where the river ran from the tarn and hurried
to the lesser things of the town. The giant walls, as black as the
interior of an old furnace, were festooned with magnificent tree
ferns, the exquisite maidenhair, lianas, and golden-green mosses,
all sparkling in the sun with the million drops of the vaimato.
We withdrew a few paces from the vapor, and found a place on the edge
of the brook to have our fruit and, perhaps, a siesta. A carpet of
moss and green leaves made a couch of Petronian ease, and we threw
ourselves upon it with the weariness of six miles afoot uphill in
the tropics. It was not hot like the summer heat of New York, for
Tahiti has the most admirable climate I have found the world over,
but at midday I had felt the warmth penetratingly. Noanoa Tiare made
nothing of it, but suggested that we both leap into the tarn.
I knew a moment of squeamishness, echo of the immorality of my
catechism and my race conventions. I felt almost aghast at finding
myself alone with that magnificent creature in such a paradisiacal
spot. I wondered what thoughts might come to me. I had danced with her,
I had talked with her under the stars, but what might she expect me
not to do? And what was an Occidental, a city man, before her? She
retired behind a bird's-nest fern, on the long, lanceolate leaves
of which were the shells of the mountain snail. At her feet was the
bastard canna, the pungent root of which makes Chinese curry.
When she emerged, she was an amazing and enchanting personage. She had
removed her gown, and wore a pareu of muslin, with huge scarlet leaves
upon white. She was tall and voluptuously formed, but she had made
the loin-cloth, two yards long and a yard wide, cover her in a manner
that was modest, though revealing. It was the art of her ancestors,
for this was the shape of their common garment of tapa, a native
cloth. With a knot or two she arranged the pareu so that it was like
a chemise, coming to a foot above her knees and covering her bosom.
Her black, glossy hair was loose and hung below her waist, and upon
it she had placed a wreath she had quickly made of small ferns. That
was their general custom, to adorn themselves when happy and at the
bath. The eyes of Fragrance of the Jasmine were very large, deep brown,
her skin a coppery-cinnamon, with a touch of red in the cheeks, and
her nose and mouth were large and well formed. Her teeth were as the
meat of the cocoanut, brilliant and strong. Her limbs were rounded,
soft, the flesh glowing with health and power. She was of that line
of Tahitian women who sent back the first European navigators, the
English, to rave about an island of Junos, the French to call Tahiti
La Nouvelle Cythère, the new isle of Venus.
I had but to tie up my own pareu of red calico with white leaves in
the manner Lovaina had shown me to have an imitation of our usual
swimming-trunks.
"Allons!" cried the princess, and running toward the waterfall, she
climbed up the cliff to a height of a dozen feet, and threw herself,
wreathed as she was, with a loud "Aue!" into the pool.
I followed her, and she dived and swam, brought up bottom, treaded
water, and led me in a dozen exercises and tricks of the expert
swimmer. The water was very cool, and ten minutes in it, with our
sharpening hunger, were enough delight. Fragrance of the Jasmine, as
she came dripping from water and lingered a few moments on the brink,
was a rapturous object. With unconscious grace she flung back her
head many times to shake the moisture from her thick hair, and ran
her fingers through it until the strands were fairly separated. The
pareu disclosed the rounded contour of her figure as if it were
painted upon her. She was one of those ancient Greek statues, those
semi-nudes on which the artists painted in vivid tints the blush of
youth, the hue of hair, and a shadow of a garment. She entranced me,
and I called out to her, "Nehenehe!" "Beautiful!"
She ran to her boudoir behind the bird's-nest fern, and soon returned
in her tunic, still barefoot, and with her pareu in her hand for
drying on a rock. She brought two wreaths now and put one upon me. We
resumed our couches upon the green sward, and the princess laid the
basket of fruit between us.
"Maintenant pour le déjeuner!" she said.
We ate the bananas first, and then the pineapple, which we cut with a
sliver of basalt,--we were in the stone age, as her tribe was when the
whites came,--and last the oranges. She made cups of leaves and filled
them with water, and into them we squeezed the limes for a toast.
"Inu i te ota no te!" she said and lifted her cup. "A health to
you! He who eats the fei passes under a spell; he must return again
to the islands. Have you eaten the fei?"
"Not yet, Princess," I replied.
"There they are in abundance on the hillside," she said. "Look! If we
had fire, I would roast one for you, but to-morrow will be another
day."
The fei, the mountain banana, the staple of the Tahitian, was there
aplenty. The plant or stalk was that of the banana, but very dark at
the base, and the leaves thicker. The fruit was two or three times
as large, and red, and a striking difference was that it was placed
on the bunches erect, while bananas hang down from the stem.
I drank to her increasing charm, and I told her how much the beauty
and natural grace of the Tahitians appealed to me; how I intended to
leave Papeete and go to the end of the island to be among the natives
only; that I had remained thus long in the city to learn first the
ways of the white in the tropics, and then to gain the contrast by
seeking the Tahitian as nearly as possible in his original habitat.
Noanoa Tiare took the orange-peel and rubbed it upon her hair.
"Noanoa!" she said. "Mon ami américain, I will give you a note to
Aruoehau a Moeroa, the tava, or chief of Mataiea district, and you
can stay with him. You will know him as Tetuanui. He will gladly
receive you, and he is wise in our history and our old customs. Do
not expect too much! We ate in the old day the simple things at hand,
fish and breadfruit, feis and cocoanut milk, mangoes and bananas and
oranges. Now we eat the dirty and prepared food of the Tinito, the
Chinaman, and we depend on coffee and rum and beer for strength. The
thin wheat bread has no nourishment compared with the breadfruit
and the fei, the yam and the taro. And clothes! The fools taught us
that the pareu, which left the body exposed to the air, clean and
refreshed by the sun and the winds, was immodest. We exchanged it for
undershirts and trousers and dresses and shoes and stockings and coats,
and got disease and death and degeneration.
"You are late, my friend," the princess went on, with a note of pity
in her soft voice. "My mother remembered the days Loti depicted in
'Rarahu.' My grandmother knew little Tarahu of Bora-Bora of whom he
wrote. Viaud was then a midshipman. We did not call him Loti, but Roti,
our coined word for a rose, because he had rosy cheeks. But he could
not call himself Roti in his novel, for in French, his language, that
meant roasted, and one might think of boeuf à la rôti. We have no L
in Tahitian. We also called him Mata Reva or the Deep-Eyed One. Tarahu
was not born on Bora-Bora, but right here in Mataiea."
She lay at full length, her uptilted face in her hands, and her
perfect feet raised now and then in unaware accentuation of her words.
"What Tahitian women there were then! Read the old French writers! None
was a pigmy. When they stood under the waterfall the water ran off
their skins as off a marble table. Not a drop stayed on. They were
as smooth as glass."
Fragrance of the Jasmine sighed.
"Aue! Hélas!"
I had it in my mouth to say that she was as beautiful and as
smooth-skinned as any of her forebears. She was as enticing as
imaginable, her languorous eyes alight as she spoke, and her bare
limbs moving in the vigor of her thoughts. But I could not think of
anything in French or English not banal, and my Tahitian was yet too
limited to permit me to tutoyer her. She was an islander, but she
had seen the Midnight Follies and the Bal Bullier, the carnival in
Nice, and once, New Year's Eve in San Francisco. An Italian and a
Scandinavian prince had wooed her.
I spoke of Loti again, and of other writers' comments upon the attitude
of women in Tahiti toward man.
The princess sat up and adjusted her hei of ferns. She studied a
minute, and then she said:
"I have long wanted to talk with an intelligent American on that
subject; with some one who knew Europe and his own country and these
islands. There is a vast hypocrisy in the writing and the talking about
it. Now, Maru (I already had been given my native name), the woman
of Tahiti exercises the same sexual freedom as the average white man
does in your country and in England or France. She pursues the man she
wants, as he does the woman. Your women pursue, too, but they do it
by cunning, by little lies, by coquetry, by displaying their persons,
by flattery, and by feeding you.
"The Tahitian woman makes the first advances in friendship openly,
if she chooses. She arranges time and place for amours as your women
do. She does not take from the Tahitian man or from the foreigner his
right to choose, but she chooses herself, too. I feel sure that often
an American woman would give hours of pain to know well a certain
man, but makes no honest effort to draw him toward her. They have
told me so!"
I got up, and standing beside her, I quoted:
"Ships that pass in the night and speak each other in passing;
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and silence."
"Mais, c'est vrai!" she said, musingly. "The Tahitian woman will not
endure that. She is on a par with the man in seeking. Without fear
and without shame, and, attendez, Maru, without any more monogamy
than you men. I have told some of those suffrage ladies of London
and of Washington that we are in advance of their most determined
feminism. They will come to it. More women than men in Europe will
bring it there."
Her long, black lashes touched her cheeks.
"We are a little sleepy, n'est-ce pas?" she asked. "B'en, we will
have a taoto."
She made herself a pillow of leaves with her pareu, and arranging her
hair in two braids, she stretched herself out, with her face toward
the sky, and a cool banana-leaf laid over it. I copied her action,
and lulled by the falling water, the rippling of the pool, and the
drowsy rustling of the trees, I fell fast asleep, and dreamed of Eve
and the lotus-eaters.
When I awoke, the princess was refreshing her face and hands in
the water.
"A hio! Look!" she said eagerly. "O tane and O vahine!"
In the mist above the pool at the foot of the cascade a double rainbow
gleamed brilliantly. O tane is the man, which the Tahitians call the
real arch, and O vahine, the woman, the reflected bow. They appeared
and disappeared with the movement of the tiny, fleecy clouds about
the sun. The air, as dewy as early morn in the braes o' Maxwelton,
was deliciously cool.
"If you have courage and strength left," the princess said excitedly,
"we will go to the fort of Fautaua, and I will show you where the
last of my people perished fighting to drive out the French invader,
and where the French officials fled with the treasure-box when they
feared war with England not very long ago."
She pointed up to the brim of the precipice, where the river launched
itself into the air, to drop six hundred feet before it fed the stream
below. Sheer and menacing the black walls of the crevasse loomed, as if
forbidding approach, but through a network of vines and bushes, over
a path seldom used, we climbed, and after half a mile more of steeps,
reached the fort. Rugged was the way, and we aided each other more
than once, but rejoiced at our effort when we surmounted the summit.
The view was indescribably grand. One felt upon the roof of the
island, though the farther heights of the valley culminated in a
gigantic crag-wall, a saddle only a yard across, and wooded to the
apex, and above that even towered Orohena, nearly a mile and a half
high, and never reached by man despite many efforts. Tropic birds,
the bo's'ns of the sailor, their bodies whitish gray, with their
two long tail-feathers, had their haunt there, and piped above the
trees. The river was a fierce torrent, and leaped into a water-hewn
lava basin, where it swirled and foamed before it rushed, singing,
through a stone funnel to the border of the chasm, and sprang with
a dull roar into the ether.
There was a chorus of sounds from the cataract, the river, the wind,
the trees, and the birds, a mighty music of elements of the earth
and of life, rising and falling rhythmically, and inspiring, but
nerve-racking. Fragrance of the Jasmine seized my hand and held it.
"Let us go to a more peaceful spot, where I can tell you the story,"
she said in my ear. We passed the rough fort, broken-down and mossy,
and moving carefully along the trail, clambering over rocks and
tearing away twigs and broad leaves, we reached a dismantled and
crumbling chalet.
We sat down upon its steps, and I removed my coat and was naked to
my pareu in the afternoon zephyr.
"That fort," said the princess, "was built by the French in the
forties, when they were stealing my country. From it they could
command the gorge of Fautaua and that and other valleys. This place
was the last stronghold of the Tahitian warriors before the enemy
overcame them, and erected the ramparts and the fort. The last man to
die fell by the river basin. The band of heroes would have held out
longer, but were betrayed by a Tahitian. He led the French troops by
night and by secret paths to a hill overlooking them, so that they
were shot down from above. The traitor lived to wear the red ribbon
of the Legion of Honor and to spend pleasantly the gold the French
Government gave him. C'est la vie."
We cast our eyes over the scene. There was a forest of wild ginger,
ferns, and dracasna all about. Thousands of roses perfumed the air,
and other flowers and strawberries, and feis, green or ripe-red,
wondrous clusters of fruit, awaited man's culling. The stream purled
about worn rocks, and we came to two gloomy pools, black from the
reflection of their bowls, the water bubbling and surging from springs
beneath. It was deliciously cold, and we drank it from leaf cups.
"How about the time the French came here with the treasure?" I
inquired. "Have we time for that history?"
"Mais, oui!" said Noanoa Tiare. "That is too good for you not to
know. You know that the French are excitable, n'est-ce pas? B'en,
a French officer, Major Marchand, put up the tricolor in some place
called Fashoda in Africa, and the English objected. There was some
parleying between the two nations, and the information arrived in
Tahiti that England was going to make war on France. The French papers
or the American papers said so, and every one was alarmed.
"'The treacherous Anglais might strike at any moment,' said the
French, and they were afraid. Then one night some one rode in from near
Point Venus and reported to the Governor that two British frigates had
been sighted. Mon dieu! what to do? There was only a French transport
at Papeete, worth nothing for defense. They tore the trimmings from
that vessel and prepared to scuttle her. The guns were rushed to
Faere Hill for a last, desperate stand against odds. They could die
like Frenchmen! All lights were ordered extinguished, and even the
beacon of Point Venus was dark. The enlisted natives were sent to
watch on every headland, a cabinet meeting was held,--the apothecary,
and the governor, and the secretaries, and the doctor,--and it was
determined to save the money of the city and the archives of the
Government. The valuables and the papers were put in strong boxes
and the governor and all of them made a mad race for this fort."
The princess covered her mouth with her hand to still her laughter.
"Was it not funny? They arrived here at daybreak, and buried
the boxes. They were still at it when an officer of marines came
hurrying to notify them that the frigates were French schooners
from the Paumotus. The whole population had hidden itself away in
the meantime. Well, they had many jokes about it and many songs,
but the governor built this house on the steps of which we sit as a
permanent depository for archives in case of war, and here he used
to come for picnics until a few years ago. There was a post-office,
with a guard of sailors, here. They planted the garden, the flowers,
and strawberries that now run wild. You know our chiefs were always
being secretly warned that England, which owns most of the islands
in these seas, wanted to seize our island."
Over the Diadem the dark shadows were lengthening. The daring pinnacles
of Maiauo were thrust up like the mangled fingers of a black hand
against the blue sky.
Noanoa Tiare pointed to them.
"The ahiahi comes. Night is not far off," she said warningly. "If we
lingered here much longer, we might have to stay all the night."
"How memorable to me would be a sunrise from here," I replied. "I
would never forget it."
She looked at me archly over her shoulder.
"I would like it myself. It would be magnificent, and I have never
spent the night just here."
She considered a moment, and my mind took up the matter of
arrangements. We could cook feis, and there was plenty of other fruit,
with shelter in the house, if we needed that. We could start down early
and be at Lovaina's for the first déjeuner. Zeus! to pass the night in
such a solitude! To hear in the pitch darkness the mysterious voices
of po, the tenebræ of the Tahitian gods; the boom of the cascade in
the abyss; the deep bass of the river in the rocky chute; the sigh of
the wind in the trees; the murmur of the stream near by; the fantasia
and dirge of the lofty night in the tropics. What a setting for her
telling some old legend or fairy-tale of Tahiti!
Fragrance of the Jasmine ended my reverie. She slapped her thigh.
"I dine and dance to-night at eight o'clock," she said. "A rohi! We
must go! Besides, Maru, it would be too cold without blankets. The
mercury here goes to sixty of your thermometer."
We descended by the route we had come, picking up her shoes and
stockings and our hats by our couch, and with the princess leading,
hurrying along the obscuring trail. We passed a Tahitian youth who
had been gathering feis, probably near the tarn, and who was bringing
them to the market of the next morning. He was burdened with more than
a hundred pounds of fruit, which he carried balanced on a pole over
his shoulder, and with this he was to go seven or eight miles from
their place of growth. He was a pillar of strength, handsome, glowing
with effort, clad in a gorgeous pareu of red, and as we went by him,
he smiled and said, "Ia ora na! I hea! Vaimato?" Greeting! Where have
you been? The waterfall?"
"E, hitahita. Yes, we are hurrying back," the princess called
vivaciously.
"Those are our real men, not the Papeete dolts," she said. "If we
had time, we would catch shrimp in the river. I love to do that."
When we came to where the habitations began and the road became
passable for vehicles, Noanoa Tiare sat down on a stone. She put on her
pale-blue silk stockings and her shoes, and asked me for the package
she had given me at starting. She unfolded it, and it was an aahu,
a gown, for which she exchanged, behind a banana-plant, her soiled
and drenched tunic. The new one was of the finest silk, diaphanous,
and thus to be worn only at night. The sun was down, and the lagoon
a purple lake when we were again at the bust of Bougainville.
I thanked her at parting.
"Noanoa Tiare," I said, "this day has a heavenly blue page in my
record. It has made Tahiti a different island for me."
"Maru, mon ami, you are sympathetic to my race. We shall be dear
friends. I will send you the note to Tetuanui, the chief of Mataiea,
to-morrow. Au revoir and happy dreams."