In the South Seas (eBook)

CHAPTER XIV - IN A CANNIBAL VALLEY

THE road from Taahauku to Atuona skirted the north-westerly side of  the anchorage, somewhat high up, edged, and sometimes shaded, by  the splendid flowers of the FLAMBOYANT - its English name I do not  know.  At the turn of the hand, Atuona came in view:  a long beach,  a heavy and loud breach of surf, a shore-side village scattered  among trees, and the guttered mountains drawing near on both sides  above a narrow and rich ravine.  Its infamous repute perhaps  affected me; but I thought it the loveliest, and by far the most  ominous and gloomy, spot on earth.  Beautiful it surely was; and  even more salubrious.  The healthfulness of the whole group is  amazing; that of Atuona almost in the nature of a miracle.  In  Atuona, a village planted in a shore-side marsh, the houses  standing everywhere intermingled with the pools of a taro-garden,  we find every condition of tropical danger and discomfort; and yet  there are not even mosquitoes - not even the hateful day-fly of  Nuka-hiva - and fever, and its concomitant, the island fe'efe'e,  are unknown.

This is the chief station of the French on the man-eating isle of  Hiva-oa.  The sergeant of gendarmerie enjoys the style of the vice- resident, and hoists the French colours over a quite extensive  compound.  A Chinaman, a waif from the plantation, keeps a  restaurant in the rear quarters of the village; and the mission is  well represented by the sister's school and Brother Michel's  church.  Father Orens, a wonderful octogenarian, his frame scarce  bowed, the fire of his eye undimmed, has lived, and trembled, and  suffered in this place since 1843.  Again and again, when Moipu had  made coco-brandy, he has been driven from his house into the woods.   'A mouse that dwelt in a cat's ear' had a more easy resting-place;  and yet I have never seen a man that bore less mark of years.  He  must show us the church, still decorated with the bishop's artless  ornaments of paper - the last work of industrious old hands, and  the last earthly amusement of a man that was much of a hero.  In  the sacristy we must see his sacred vessels, and, in particular, a  vestment which was a 'VRAIE CURIOSITE,' because it had been given  by a gendarme.  To the Protestant there is always something  embarrassing in the eagerness with which grown and holy men regard  these trifles; but it was touching and pretty to see Orens, his  aged eyes shining in his head, display his sacred treasures.

AUGUST 26. - The vale behind the village, narrowing swiftly to a  mere ravine, was choked with profitable trees.  A river gushed in  the midst.  Overhead, the tall coco-palms made a primary covering;  above that, from one wall of the mountain to another, the ravine  was roofed with cloud; so that we moved below, amid teeming  vegetation, in a covered house of heat.  On either hand, at every  hundred yards, instead of the houseless, disembowelling paepaes of  Nuka-hiva, populous houses turned out their inhabitants to cry  'Kaoha!' to the passers-by.  The road, too, was busy:  strings of  girls, fair and foul, as in less favoured countries; men bearing  breadfruit; the sisters, with a little guard of pupils; a fellow  bestriding a horse - passed and greeted us continually; and now it  was a Chinaman who came to the gate of his flower-yard, and gave us  'Good-day' in excellent English; and a little farther on it would  be some natives who set us down by the wayside, made us a feast of  mummy-apple, and entertained us as we ate with drumming on a tin  case.  With all this fine plenty of men and fruit, death is at work  here also.  The population, according to the highest estimate, does  not exceed six hundred in the whole vale of Atuona; and yet, when I  once chanced to put the question, Brother Michel counted up ten  whom he knew to be sick beyond recovery.  It was here, too, that I  could at last gratify my curiosity with the sight of a native house  in the very article of dissolution.  It had fallen flat along the  paepae, its poles sprawling ungainly; the rains and the mites  contended against it; what remained seemed sound enough, but much  was gone already; and it was easy to see how the insects consumed  the walls as if they had been bread, and the air and the rain ate  into them like vitriol.

A little ahead of us, a young gentleman, very well tattooed, and  dressed in a pair of white trousers and a flannel shirt, had been  marching unconcernedly.  Of a sudden, without apparent cause, he  turned back, took us in possession, and led us undissuadably along  a by-path to the river's edge.  There, in a nook of the most  attractive amenity, he bade us to sit down:  the stream splashing  at our elbow, a shock of nondescript greenery enshrining us from  above; and thither, after a brief absence, he brought us a cocoa- nut, a lump of sandal-wood, and a stick he had begun to carve:  the  nut for present refreshment, the sandal-wood for a precious gift,  and the stick - in the simplicity of his vanity - to harvest  premature praise.  Only one section was yet carved, although the  whole was pencil-marked in lengths; and when I proposed to buy it,  Poni (for that was the artist's name) recoiled in horror.  But I  was not to be moved, and simply refused restitution, for I had long  wondered why a people who displayed, in their tattooing, so great a  gift of arabesque invention, should display it nowhere else.  Here,  at last, I had found something of the same talent in another  medium; and I held the incompleteness, in these days of world-wide  brummagem, for a happy mark of authenticity.  Neither my reasons  nor my purpose had I the means of making clear to Poni; I could  only hold on to the stick, and bid the artist follow me to the  gendarmerie, where I should find interpreters and money; but we  gave him, in the meanwhile, a boat-call in return for his sandal- wood.  As he came behind us down the vale he sounded upon this  continually.  And continually, from the wayside houses, there  poured forth little groups of girls in crimson, or of men in white.   And to these must Poni pass the news of who the strangers were, of  what they had been doing, of why it was that Poni had a boat- whistle; and of why he was now being haled to the vice-residency,  uncertain whether to be punished or rewarded, uncertain whether he  had lost a stick or made a bargain, but hopeful on the whole, and  in the meanwhile highly consoled by the boat-whistle.  Whereupon he  would tear himself away from this particular group of inquirers,  and once more we would hear the shrill call in our wake.

AUGUST 27. - I made a more extended circuit in the vale with  Brother Michel.  We were mounted on a pair of sober nags, suitable  to these rude paths; the weather was exquisite, and the company in  which I found myself no less agreeable than the scenes through  which I passed.  We mounted at first by a steep grade along the  summit of one of those twisted spurs that, from a distance, mark  out provinces of sun and shade upon the mountain-side.  The ground  fell away on either hand with an extreme declivity.  From either  hand, out of profound ravines, mounted the song of falling water  and the smoke of household fires.  Here and there the hills of  foliage would divide, and our eye would plunge down upon one of  these deep-nested habitations.  And still, high in front, arose the  precipitous barrier of the mountain, greened over where it seemed  that scarce a harebell could find root, barred with the zigzags of  a human road where it seemed that not a goat could scramble.  And  in truth, for all the labour that it cost, the road is regarded  even by the Marquesans as impassable; they will not risk a horse on  that ascent; and those who lie to the westward come and go in their  canoes.  I never knew a hill to lose so little on a near approach:   a consequence, I must suppose, of its surprising steepness.  When  we turned about, I was amazed to behold so deep a view behind, and  so high a shoulder of blue sea, crowned by the whale-like island of  Motane.  And yet the wall of mountain had not visibly dwindled, and  I could even have fancied, as I raised my eyes to measure it, that  it loomed higher than before.

We struck now into covert paths, crossed and heard more near at  hand the bickering of the streams, and tasted the coolness of those  recesses where the houses stood.  The birds sang about us as we  descended.  All along our path my guide was being hailed by voices:   'Mikael - Kaoha, Mikael!'  From the doorstep, from the cotton- patch, or out of the deep grove of island-chestnuts, these friendly  cries arose, and were cheerily answered as we passed.  In a sharp  angle of a glen, on a rushing brook and under fathoms of cool  foliage, we struck a house upon a well-built paepae, the fire  brightly burning under the popoi-shed against the evening meal; and  here the cries became a chorus, and the...