Chapter XX
Rupert Brooke and I discuss Tahiti--We go to a wedding feast--How the cloth was spread--What we ate and drank--A Gargantuan feeder--Songs and dances of pa.s.sion--The royal feast at Tetuanui"s--I leave for Vairao--Butscher and the Lermontoffs.
At Mataiea weeks pa.s.sed without incident other than those of the peaceful, pleasant round of walking, swimming, fishing, thinking, and refreshing slumber. My mind dismissed the cares of the mainland, and the interests thrust upon me there--business, convention, the happenings throughout the world. I achieved to a degree the state in which body and spirit were pliant instruments for the simple needs and indulgences of my being, and my mind, relieved of the cark of custom in advanced communities, considered, and clarified as never before, the values of life. It was as if one who had been confined indoors for years at a task supervised by critical guardians was moved to a beautiful garden with only laughing children for playmates and a kindly nature alone for contemplation and guide.
Brooke, who was busied an hour or two a day at poems and letters, and was physically active most of the time, spoke of this with me. There were few whites in Tahiti outside Papeete except in the suburbs. The French in the time of Louis le Debonnaire and of all that period thought nature unbeautiful. The nation has ever been afraid of it, but let natural thoughts be freely spoken and written, and natural acts be less censured than elsewhere. Even in late years their conception of nature has been that of the painter Corot, delicate, tender, and sad; not free and primitive. They had possessed Tahiti scores of years, and yet one hardly saw a Frenchman, and never a Frenchwoman, in the districts. The French seldom ever ventured in the sea or the stream or to the reef. Other Europeans and Americans found those interesting, at least, a little. Brooke and I swam every day off the wharf of the chefferie. The water was four or five fathoms deep, dazzling in the vibrance of the Southern sun, and Brooke, a brilliant blond, gleamed in the violet radiancy like a dream figure of ivory. We dived into schools of the vari-colored fish, which we could see a dozen feet below, and tried to seize them in our hands, and we spent hours floating and playing in the lagoon, or lying on our backs in the sun. We laughed at his native name, Pupure, which means fair, and at the t.i.tles given Tahiti by visitors: the New Cytherea by Bougainville, a russet Ireland by McBirney, my fellow voyager on the Noa-Noa and Aph-Rhodesia by a South-African who had fought the Boers and loved the Tahitian girls and who now idled with us. Brooke, as we paddled over the dimpled lagoon, quoted the Greek for an apt description, the innumerable laughter of the waves. Brooke had been in Samoa, and was about to leave for England after several months in Tahiti. He wrote home that he had found the most ideal place in the world to work and live in. On the wide veranda he composed three poems of merit, "The Great Lover," "Tiare Tahiti," and "Retrospect." He could understand the Polynesian, and he loved the race, and hated the necessity of a near departure. Their communism in work he praised daily, their singing at their tasks, and their wearing of flowers. We had in common admiration of those qualities and a fervor for the sun. For his Greek I gave him St. Francis"s canticle, which begins:
Laudate sie, mi signore, c.u.m tuote le tue creature, Spetialmente messer lo frate sole.
Praised be my Lord, with all his creatures, and especially our brother the Sun, our sister the Moon, our brother the Wind, our sister Water, who is very serviceable unto us and humble and chaste and clean; our brother Fire, our mother Earth, and last of all for our sister Death.
We remarked that while we plunged into the sea bare, Tahitians never went completely nude, and they were more modest in hiding their nakedness than any white people we had ever met. They could not accede to the custom of Americans and Englishmen of public school education when bathing among males of stripping to the buff and standing about without self-consciousness. The chief had said that in former times men retained their pareus except when they went fishing, at which time they wore a little red cap. He did not know whether this was a ceremonial to propitiate the G.o.d of fishes or to ward off evil spirits in scales. Man originated on the seash.o.r.e, and many of the most primitive habits of humans, as well as their bodily differences from the apes, came from their early life there. Man pushed back from the salt water slowly.
The official affairs of the chefferie, beyond the repair of roads and bridges, were few. Crime among Tahitians being almost unknown, the chief"s duties as magistrate were negligible, and the family uttered many aues when I related to them the conditions of our countries, with murders, a.s.saults, burglaries and rapine as daily news. The French law required a civil ritual for marriage, and Tetuanui tied the legal knots in his district. I was at the chefferie when a union was performed. The bride and groom were of the middle cla.s.s of prosperous landholders. They arrived in an automobile wonderfully adorned with flowers, with great bouquets of roses and ferns on the lamps. They were accompanied by cars and carriages filled with their families and friends. The bride was in a white-lace dress from Paris, with veil and orange-blossoms, and the groom in a heavy black frock-coat over white drill trousers with lemon-colored, tight shoes; both looking very ill at ease and hot. The father of the groom must have us to the church and to the wedding feast, so Brooke and I rode in a cart, I on the mother"s lap, and the poet on the knees of the father. The jollity of the arearea was already apparent, and the father vainly whipped his horse to outspeed the automobile. All the vehicles raced along the road and into the yard of the Protestant church of Mataiea at top gait.
It was the season of a.s.semblage of the manu patia, the wasps brought from abroad, and quite ten thousand were cl.u.s.tered on the church ceiling, while thousands more patrolled the air just over our heads, courting and quarreling, buzzing and alighting on our heads and necks. The preacher in a knee-length Prince Albert of black wool, opened so that I saw he had nothing but an undershirt beneath, recited the ceremony and addressed the couple. He took a ring from his trousers-pocket, unwrapping and opening its box. A bridesmaid in a rose-colored satin gown had taken off the bride"s glove, and the pastor put the ring upon her finger. A number of young men acted as aids and witnesses, and all who stood were pounced upon by the wasps. They betrayed no evidence of nervousness, but at the installation of the ring, the groom, with a desperate motion, tore off his stiff collar and bared his robust neck. He did not replace it that day. The bride"s mother wept upon my shoulder throughout the quarter of an hour. Not a trace was indicated of the old wedding customs of the Tahitians, as Christianity had effaced them rigorously, and though the Tahitians had had plenty of ceremonies for all public acts, as had the Greeks and Romans, many had been forgotten under the scourge of orthodoxy before any white wrote freely of the island. They are lost to record with the old language.
After the rite, all made a dash for their equipages, and raced for the bride"s home, where, as customary, the fete champetre was given. Again on mama"s lap, and Brooke on papa"s, both ample, we hurried, the bon pere not averse to taking a wheel off the bridal party"s motor-car. With cries of delight we drove into a great cocoanut-grove, and a thousand feet back from the Broom Road emerged into a sunlit, but shady, clearing. Huro! the banquet was already being spread. From different parts of the plantation men came bearing huge platters of roasted pig, chicken, taro, breadfruit, and feis, with bamboo tubes of the taiaro sauce like the reeds of a great pipe-organ. Caldrons of shrimp, crabs, prawns, and lobsters bubbled, and monstrous heaps of tiny oysters were being opened. Fresh fruit was in rich h.o.a.rds: bananas, oranges, custard-apples, papayas, pomegranates, mangoes, and guavas.
A magnificent bower a hundred feet long, broad and high, had been erected of bamboo and gigantic leaves. It was similar to a temple builded by the ardent worshipers of Dionysus to celebrate the vine-G.o.d"s feast. The roof of green thatch was supported on a score of the slender pillars of the ohe, the golden bamboo, and there were neither sides nor doors. The pillars were wreathed with ferns and orchids from the forest near by, and on the sward between them were spread a series of yellow mats woven in the Paumotu atolls. They carpeted the green floor of the temple, and upon them, in the center, the graceful leaves of the cocoanut stretched to mark the division of the vis-a-vis.
From these long leaves rose graduated alabaster columns, the inner stalks of the banana-plants, and on them were fastened flowers and ornaments, fanciful creations of the hands of Tahitian women, fashioned of brilliant leaves and of bamboo-fiber and the glossy white arrowroot-fiber. From the top of each column floated the silken film of the snowy reva-reva, the exquisite component of the interior of young cocoa-palm-leaves, a gossamer substance the extraction of which is as difficult as the blowing of gla.s.s goblets. Varos, marvelously spiced, prawns, and crayfish, garlanded the bases of these sylvan shafts, all highly decorative, and within reach of their admirers.
The stiff hand of the white which had garbed the wedding party in the ungraceful clothing of the European mode had failed to pose the natural att.i.tude of the Tahitian toward good cheer.
A pile of breadfruit-leaves were laid before each feaster"s s.p.a.ce in lieu of plates, and four half-cocoanut-sh.e.l.ls, containing drinking water, cocoanut-milk, grated ripe cocoanut, and sea-water. The last two were to be mixed to sauce the dishes, and the empty one filled with fresh water for a finger-bowl.
The bride and groom sat at the head of the leafy board, their intimates about them, and the pastor, who had joined them, stood a few moments with bowed head and closed eyes to invoke the blessing of G.o.d upon the revel, as did the orero, the pagan priest of Tahiti a few generations ago. The pastor and I, with the owner of the Atimaona plantation and a Mr. Davey, had had an appetizer a moment before.
We all sat on the mats according to bodily habit, the lithe natives on their heels, the grosser ones and we whites with legs crossed, and with the minister"s raising of his head we fell to, with ease of position, and no artificial instruments to embarra.s.s our hands. We transferred each to his own breadfruit-leaves what he desired from the stores in the center, meat and vegetables and fruit, and seasoned it as we pleased. New leaves brought by boys and girls constantly replaced used ones, and the sh.e.l.ls of salt and fresh water were refilled.
Barrels of white and red wine had been decanted into bottles, and with American and German beer stood in phalanges beside the milky banana columns, and from these all replenished their polished beakers of the dark nuts.
The oysters, of a flavor equaling any of America or Europe, were minute and of a greenish-copper hue, and we removed them with our tongues, draining the ambrosial juice with each morsel, and ate twenty or thirty each. The fish was steeped in lime-juice, not cooked, and flavored with the cocoanut sauce and wild chillies. The crayfish were curried with the curry plant of the mountains, the shrimp were eaten raw or boiled, and the goldfish were baked.
The sucking pig and fowl had been baked in a native umu, or oven, on hot stones, and the taro and yams steamed with them. Taro tops were served with cocoanut cream. One was not compelled by any absurd etiquette to choose these dishes in any sequence. My left-hand neighbor was indifferent in choice, and ate everything nearest to him first, and without order, taking feis or bananas or a goldfish, dozens of shrimps, a few prawns, a crayfish, and several varos, but informing me, with a caress of his rounded stomach, that he was saving most of his hunger for the chicken, pig, and poi. He was a Tahitian of middle age, with a beaming face, and happy that I spoke his tongue. When the pig and poi were set before us, he devoured large quant.i.ties of them. The poi was in calabashes, and was made of ripe breadfruit pounded until dough with a stone pestle in a wooden trough, then baked in leaves in the ground, and, when cooked, mixed with water and beaten and stirred until a ma.s.s of the consistency of a glutinous custard. He and I shared a calabash, and his adroitness contrasted with my inexperience in taking the poi to our mouths. He dipped his forefinger into the poi, and withdrew it covered with the paste, twirled it three times and gave it a fillip, which left no remnant to dangle when the index was neatly cleaned between his lips. Custom was to lave the finger in the fresh-water sh.e.l.l before resuming relations with the poi.
My handsome neighbor ate four times as much as I, and I was hungry. His appet.i.te was not unusual among these South Sea giants. I noticed that he ate more than three pounds of pig and a quart of poi after all his previous devastation of sh.e.l.lfish, feis, chicken, and taro, besides two fish as big as both my hands. My right-hand neighbor was Mr. Davey, an urbane and unreserved American, who informed me in a breath that he was a dentist, a graduate of Harvard University, seventy-two years old, and had been in Tahiti forty-two years. He called his granddaughter of eighteen to meet me, and she brought her infant. Only he of his tribe could speak English, but she talked gaily in French.
He practised his profession, he said, but with some difficulty, as the eminent Acting-Consul Williams had by law a monopoly of dentistry in the French possessions in the South Seas. The monopoly had been certified to by the courts after a controversy between them, but his Honor Willi did not enforce the prohibition except as to Papeete, and besides was very rich, and had more patients than he could possibly attend.
At the lower end of the mats the bachelors sat,--there were only three whites at the feast,--and merriment had its home there. After the first onslaught, the vintages of Bordeaux and of the Rhineland, and the brews of Munich and Milwaukee shared attention with the viands. The head of the mats had a sedate atmosphere, because of the several preachers there, and those Tahitians ambitious to shine in a diaconal way talked seriously of the problems of the church, of future himenes, and the waywardness of those who "knew not the fear of Ietu-Kirito." Their indications of grief at the hardness of the heathens" hearts grew more lively as they sipped the wine, thinking perhaps of that day when the Master and the disciples did the same at another wedding feast.
Soon their voices were drowned by the low notes of an accordion and the chanting by the bachelors of an ancient love-song of Tahiti. Miri and Caroline and Maraa, being of Mataiea, had returned for this arearea, and were seated with the young men. The Tahitians are charitable in their regard of very open peccadilloes, especially those animated by pa.s.sion or a desire for amus.e.m.e.nt, thinking probably that were stones to be thrown only by the guiltless, there would be none to lift one; certainly no white in Tahiti. The dithyramb of a baccha.n.a.l sounded, and the outlaw dentist was reminded of his former intimate friend, King Pomare the Fifth.
"I was a bosom chum of the king," he said confidentially as he poured me a sh.e.l.l of Burgundy. "He was much maligned. He drank too much for his health, but so do almost all kings, from what I"ve read and seen. Lord! what a man he was! He"d sit around all night while the hula boomed, applauding this or that dancer, and seeing that the booze circulated. He was a fish, that"s a fact. He never had enough, and he could stow away a cask. Good-hearted! When he would go to the districts he always sent word when he had laid out his course, and after a few days in each place he would go on with his crowd. He paid for everything except, of course, gifts of fruit and fish. Every night there would be a big time, dancing and drinking. Jiminy! But times were different then. Look at me! I"ve lived freely all my life, and I am over forty years here, but you wouldn"t know I was past seventy. It"s the climate and not worrying or being worried about clothes or sin."
The bride had long since left the table, removed her shoes, and put on a Mother Hubbard gown. She and her mother I saw having a bite together in private comfort.
There were many speeches by Tahitians, most of them long, and some referring to the happy couple and their progeny in the quaint way of the medieval French in the chamber scenes after marriage, as related in story and drama. The pastors depressed their mouths, the deacons filled theirs with food to stifle their laughter, and the groom was the subject of flattering raillery. The women did not sit down, because mostly occupied in the service; but the hetairae, Miri, Caroline, and Maraa, entertained the bachelors without criticism or compet.i.tion. The Tahitian women had no jealousy of these wantons, or, at least, no condemnation of them. They have always had the place in Polynesia that certain ancient nations gave them, half admired and half tolerated. They had official note once a year when the most skilful of them received the government cachet for excellence in dances before the governor and his cabinet celebrating the fall of the Bastile. They became quite as well known in their country by their performance on those festal days as our greatest dancers or actresses.
When the mats became deserted, and the pastors had taken their carts for their homes, a little elated but still quoting holy writ, the nymphs and a dozen other girls of seething mirth took possession of the temple with a score of young men, and sang their love-songs and set the words to gesture and somatic harmony. Brooke and I lay and mused as we listened and gazed. When a youth crowned with ferns began to play a series of flageolets with his nose, the poet put his foot on mine.
"We are on Mount Parna.s.sus," he whispered. "The women in faun skins will enter in a moment, swinging the thyrsus and beating the cymbals. Pan peeps from behind that palm. Those are his pipes, as sure as Linus went to the dogs."
I met others of the royal family than the former queen, Marao, and her daughters, the Princesses Tekau and Boots, at an amuraa maa given at the mansion of Tetuanui. The preparations occupied several days, and we all a.s.sisted in the hunt for the oysters, shrimp, crabs, mao, and fish, going by twos and threes to the lagoon, the reef, the stream, and the hills for their rarest t.i.tbits. The pigs and fowl were out of the earth by the day of the feast, and Haamoura and Tatini set the table, a real one on legs. The veranda was elegantly decorated with palms, but the table was below stairs in the cooler, darker, unwalled rooms, on the black pebbles brought from a far-away beach. The pillars of the house were hung with banana-leaves and ferns, but the atmosphere was not vividly gay because of the high estate and age of Tetuanui and his visitors.
The company arrived in automobiles, conspicuous among them Hinoe Pomare, the big hobbledehoy son of Prince Hinoe, and, next to his father, heir to the throne. With him was his sister, Tetuanui, who was departing for Raratonga, and her husband. He was a brother of Cowan, the prize-fighter, and in their honor was the luncheon. Introduced to all by the chief of Mataiea, I was asked to sit with them. The group was extraordinarily interesting, for besides the prince"s heir and his sister, Chief Tetuanui, and his brother-in-law Charlie Ling, was Paraita, son of a German schooner captain, who was adopted by Pomare V, and Tinau, another adopted son of the late king, who owned, and ran for hire, a motor-car. There were other men, but among the women, all of whom sat below the humblest man, myself, was the Princesse de Joinville of Moorea, mother of Prince Hinoe, and grandmother of the youth at the head of the table, and of the boy, Ariipae, who attended to the chief"s garden.
This grandmother, known as Vahinetua Roriarii, was one of the very last survivors among the notable figures of the kingdom. She had a cigarette in the corner of her sunken mouth, but she tossed it away when she and Haamoura, the chief"s wife, kissed each other on both cheeks in the French way. The Princesse de Joinville was tottering, but with something in her face, a disdain, a trace of power, that attracted me before I knew her rank or history. Her once raven hair was streaked with gray, she trembled, and her step was feeble; but all her weaknesses and blemishes impressed me as the disfigurement by age and abrasion of a beautiful and n.o.ble statue. She was more savage-looking than any modern Tahitian woman, more aboriginal, and yet more subtle. I once contemplated in the jungle of Joh.o.r.e an old tigress just trapped, but marked and wounded by the pit and the blows of her captors. She looked at me coolly, but with a glint in her eye that meant, I thought, contempt for all that had occurred since her last hour of freedom.
In the curious network of lines all over the worn face of the princess there were suggestions of the sensual lure that had made her the mistress of the court; a gentle but pitiful droop to the mouth that I had noticed persisting in the roues and sirens of Asia after senility had struck away all charm. The princess refused a third gla.s.s of wine at the table, but smoked incessantly, and listened absent-mindedly to the music and the songs. Her thoughts may have been of those mad nights of orgy which Davey, the dentist, and Brault, the composer, had described. Her cigarettes were of native tobacco wrapped in panda.n.u.s leaf, as the South American wraps his in corn husk. They were short; merely a few puffs.
Afa, the tane of the lovely Evoa of the Annexe, brought to the luncheon Annabelle Lee, the buxom wife of Lovaina"s negro chauffeur. She was a quadroon, a belle of dark Kentucky, with more than a touch of the tar-brush in her skin and hair, and her gaudy clothes and friendly manner had won the Tahitians completely. She was receiving much attention wherever she went in Tahiti, for she had the fashion and language and manners of the whites, as they knew them, and yet was plainly of the colored races. The chauffeur himself, a self-respecting negro, had sat at table with Lovaina many times. There was in Tahiti no color-line. In America a man with a drop of colored blood in his veins is cla.s.sed as a colored man; in Cuba a drop of white blood makes him a white man. The whites honor their own pigment in all South America, but in the United States count the negro blood as more important. In Tahiti all were color-blind.
The amuraa maa was over in a few hours. There were no speeches, but much laughter, and much singing of the himene written by the king, "E maururu a vau!"
The tune was an old English hymn, but those were all the words of the song, and they meant, "I am so happy!" They were verses worthy of monarchy anywhere, and equaled the favorite of great political gatherings in America, "We"re here because we"re here!"
"When I was made chief of Mataiea," said Tetuanui, reminiscently to me as we sang, "I went, as was the custom, to Papeete to drink with the king. He had just fallen down a stairway while drunk, and injured himself severely, so that our official drinking was limited. He hated stairs, anyhow, but his trouble was that he mixed his drinks. That is suicidal. He would empty into a very large punch-bowl champagne, beer, absinthe, claret, whisky and any other boissons, and drink the compound from a goblet. He could hold gallons. He was dead in two weeks after I had my chiefly toasts with him. His body was like an old calabash in which you have kept liquor for a quarter of a century. We had no alcohol until the whites brought it." Tetuanui ended with a line of Brault"s song about Pomare: "Puisqu"il est mort ... N"en parlons plus!"
Mataiea was the farthest point on Tahiti from Papeete I had reached, and wishing to see more of the island, I set out on foot with Tatini, my handmaid. We bade good-bye to Tetuanui and Haamoura and all the family after the dawn breakfast. Mama Tetuanui cried a few moments from the pangs of separation, and the chief wrung my hand sorrowfully, though I was to be back in a few days.
From the reef at Mataiea I had glimpsed the south-west of Tahiti, the lower edge of the handle of the fan-shaped double isle, mountainous and abrupt in form, and called commonly the presqu"ile de Taiarapu. The chief said that at the isthmus of Taravao, the junction of the fan and handle, there was the Maison des Varos, a famous roadhouse, kept by M. Butscher, where one might have the best food in Tahiti if one notified the host in advance.
"One must wake him up," said Tetuanui. "He is asleep most of the time."
I wrote him a letter, and on the day appointed, Tatini and I, barefooted, started. We went through Tetuanui"s breadfruit-grove, and there, as wherever were choice growths, I stopped to examine and admire. No other tree except the cocoa equals the maori in usefulness and beauty. The cocoa will grow almost in the sea and in any soil, but the breadfruit demands humus and a slight attention. The cocoas flourish on hundreds of atolls where man never sees them, but the maoris ask a clearing of the jungle about their feet. The timber of the breadfruit is excellent for canoes and for lumber, and its leaves, thick and glossy, and eighteen inches long by a foot broad, are of account for many purposes, including thatch and plates. There are half a hundred varieties, and each tree furnishes three or four crops a year, hundreds of fruits as big and round as plum-puddings, green or yellow on the tree, pitted regularly like a golf-ball, in lozenge-shaped patterns. The bark of the young branches was used for making a tough tapa, native cloth, and resin furnishes a glue for calking watercraft. The tree bears in the second or third year, is hardy, but yields its life to a fungus, for which there is no remedy except, according to the natives, a lovely lily that grows in the forest. Transplanted, at the roots of the maori, the lily heals its disease and drives away the parasite. The missionaries cited this as a parable of Christianity, which would save from d.a.m.nation the convert no matter how fungusy he was with sin. In tribal wars the enemy laid a sea-slug at the heart of the maori, and, its foe unseen, the tree perished from the corruption of the hideous trepang.
Papeari, the next district west of Mataiea, was well watered, as its name signified, and we pa.s.sed cows and sheep and horses grazing under the trees or in pastures of lush gra.s.s. Swamps had been ditched and drained, and there was evidence of unusual energy in agriculture. The country gained in tropical aspect as we approached the narrow strip of land which is the nexus of Tahiti-nui and Tahiti-iti, of the blade and the handle of the fan. Tahitian mythology does not agree with geology, any more than does the catechism; for though the scientists aver that these separate isles were not united until ages after their formation, a legend ran that at one time the union was complete, but that a sea-G.o.d conceived a hatred for the inhabitants of the Presqu"ile of Taiarapu, the fearless clans of the Teva-i-tai and the Te-Ahupo.
One very dark night when the moon was in the ocean cavern of this evil Atua, he began his horrid labors to sever the tie. He smote the rocks from the foundations, and the people heard in terror throughout the night the thunders of his blows. He had almost achieved his task when the goodly sun-G.o.d appeared over the mountains far in advance of his usual time, and blinded the t.i.tan so that he sought safety beneath the ocean. Tatini showed me the fearful signs of the demon"s fury. Monstrous ma.s.ses of rock were in the sea, and the isthmus was reduced to a mere mile of width, an extensive bay filling the demolished area. The deep inlet of Port Phaeton swept in there like the Gulf of Corinth in Greece. All this peninsula of Taiarapu was ceded to Captain Cook. He called it Tiaraboo in his journal, but he never took possession of his princ.i.p.ality, realizing that the cession was in the fashion of the Spaniard who says, "All I have is yours,"
but would think you unmannerly to carry away anything of value.
Port Phaeton is famed in the annals of the early French conquerors, for in it they anch.o.r.ed their warships, and the Paris chauvinists dreamed of a navy-yard and a large settlement there. On the plateau of Taravao, a hilltop raised fifty feet, is an old fort of the French, a solid construction against the stubborn Tahitians whom they insisted, with cannon and musket, must receive Christianity through the French clergy of the Order of the Sacred Heart of Jesus instead of through English dissenters. From the plateau we could see the immense extent of the forests, which rose almost from the water to the tops of the mountains.
A dozen magnificent kinds of trees were all about us. The earth wore a verdant coat of gra.s.s, ferns, and vines, so profuse and bright that by contrast a remembrance of the barren parts of America crossed my mind, with the fulsome praise of them by the pious thieves of that region who sell them. It would be impossible and cruel, I reflected, to convey to those extravagants in adjectives the richness of herbage and the brilliancy of scene about the isthmus. The vegetation was ampler than anywhere else in Tahiti.
The tamanu-, the hotu-, and the mape-trees were in abundance. The tamanu yields tacamac, a yellow, resinous substance with a strong odor and a bitter, aromatic taste, that is used as incense and in ointments. The Tahitians call the tamanu the healing-tree. It grows just above high water on any kind of sh.o.r.e, embowering, with dark foliage, and peculiarly easeful in midday on the hot sands. I have had a tamanu-leaf soaked in fresh water laid upon my eye inflamed by too long a vigil in the sun on the reef. The small gray ball within its round green fruit affords a greenish oil that is a liniment of wizardry for bruises, stiffness, rheumatism, and fevers. In every house was a gourd stored with it.
The mape, the Tahitian chestnut, grew farther from the water, a powerful, commanding figure, with flowers of sublimated sweetness, and with it the tiairi, or tutui-tree, covered with blossoms, like white lilac, and bearing nuts with oily kernels. It is the candlenut-tree, which has furnished lights for Tahitians since they wandered to these lat.i.tudes. The nuts are baked to make brittle their sh.e.l.l, and the kernels of walnut size easily extracted and pierced. Strung on the midrib of a palm-leaf, the combination makes wax and wick, and has lighted many a council and many a dance in Polynesia.
The panda.n.u.s likes the coral sand, and is in appearance a tree out of a dream. It grows twenty feet high and stands on aerial roots resembling inclined stilts. The leaves are in tufts at the tips of the branches, set like a screw, twisting around the stem in graceful curves, and marking the stem with a spiral pattern from the root upward. The leaves are edged with spines. The wood is close, hard, and hollow, and full of oil. From the panda.n.u.s are made posts five or six inches through. The leaves, four or five feet long, are torn into strips for making hats, thatch, mats, and canoe sails. They are steeped in sea-water, and beaten with a mallet to remove the green outer skin, the residue being white, silken fiber. This is dyed to weave hats and belts. The aerial roots are crushed to make a tougher fiber for ropes, baskets, and mats. The fruit is something like a coa.r.s.e pineapple, and the blossoms are very fragrant. The ripe fruit is crimson, and strings like beads into favorite necklaces. The fruit separates into cones, and one chews the inner end like licorice, while, when dried, the kernels can be ground into a brown, sweet flour for cakes, a wholesome, nourishing food, but esteemed only in more barren islands, where fish and cocoanuts are the princ.i.p.al diet. From the fruit is distilled a fiery liquor that the early whalers taught the line islanders to drink.
At the isthmus was the only crossing of the belt or, Broom Road, about Tahiti. One had to choose the left or the right, and we wound to the right to reach the Maison des Varos. To the left we could have gone to Tautira, famous as the last stand of the G.o.d Oro against the cross, and still under the chieftaincy of Ori-a-Ori, with whom R.L.S. and his family lived several months.