White Shadows in the South Seas Part 18

[Ill.u.s.tration: Enacting a human sacrifice of the Marquesans]

It stood in a grove of shadowy trees, which even at mid-afternoon cast a gloom upon the ponderous black rocks of the platform and the high seats where chiefs and wizards once sat devouring the corpses of their foes. Above them writhed and twisted the distorted limbs of a huge banian-tree, and below, among the gnarled roots, there was a deep, dark pit.

We paused in a clear s.p.a.ce of green turf delicately shaded by mango-trees walled in with ferns and gra.s.s and flowering bushes, and gazed into the gloom. This was forbidden ground until the French came.

No road led to it then; only a narrow and dusky trail, guarded by demons of Po and trod by humans only in the whispering darkness of the jungle night, brought the warriors with the burdens of living meat to the place of the G.o.ds. But the French, as if to mock the sacred things of the conquered, made two roads converge in this very spot, from which one wound its way over the mountains to Hanamenu and the other followed the river to an _impa.s.se_ in the hills.

"My forefathers and mothers ate their fill of 'long pig' here and danced away the night," said Hot Tears, the hunchback, as he lighted a cigarette and sat upon the stone pulpit that once had been a wizard's. His heavy face, crushed down upon his crooked chest, showed not the slightest trace of fear; a pale imp danced in each of his narrowed eyes as he looked up at me.

"That banian-tree, my grandfather said, held the _toua_, the cord of cocoanut fiber that held the living meat suspended above the baking pit. There, you see, among the roots--that was the oven, above which the prisoners hung. Here stood the great drums, and the servants of the priests beat them, till the darkness was filled with sound and all the valleys heard.

"_Aue!_" The hunchback leaped to the edge of the pit. He raised his thin arms in the air, and I seemed to see, amidst the contorted limbs of the aged banian, fifty feet above, the quivering bodies swaying. "The _toua_ breaks! They fall. Here on the rocks. They are killed with blows of the _u'u_, thus! And thus the meat is cut, and wrapped in the _meika aa_. Light the fire! Pile in the wood! It roasts!"

His ghoulish laughter rose in the dark stillness of the jungle, and the hair stirred on my scalp. To my vision the high black seats were filled with shadowy figures, the light of candlenut torches fell on tattooed faces and gleaming eyes. When the hunchback moved from the tree of death, feigning to carry a platter, first to the great seats of the chiefs, then to the wide platform below, the flesh crawled on my bones.

"_Ai!_ They dance! _Ai! Ai! Ai!_ They danced, and they loved! All night the drums beat. The drums! The drums! The drums!" He flung his twisted body on the green and laughed madly, till the old banian itself answered him. For a moment he writhed in a silence even more ghastly than his laughter, then lay still.

"_Au!_" he said, turning over on his back. "My grandfather believed this Pekia to be the abode of demons." He paused. "As for me, I believe in none of them, or in any other G.o.ds." And he blew out his breath contemptuously.

Le Moine surveyed the scene critically.

"What a picture at night, with torches flickering, and the seats filled with men in red _pareus_! _Mais, c'est terrible!_"

He got off a hundred feet and squinted through a roll of paper.

"I wish I could paint it," he said. "It must be a big canvas, and all dark but the torches and a few faces. _Mon dieu!_ Magnificent!"

Is cannibalism in the Marquesas a thing of the past? Do those grim warriors who survive the new regime ever relapse? Who can say? It is not probable, for the population of the valleys is so small and the movements of the people so limited that absence is quickly detected.

Yet every once in awhile some one is missing.

"_Haa mate_. He has leaped into the sea. He was _paopao_. Life was too long."

Or, if the disappearance was in crossing from one valley to another, it is said that a rock or a fall of earth had swept the absent one over a cliff. These are reasonable explanations, yet there persist whispers of foul appet.i.tites craving gratification and of old rites revived by the _moke_, the hermits who hide in the mountains.

Two such dissappearances had occurred during my brief stay in Atuona, and I had made little of the whispers. But now, with the hideous laughter of the hunchback still ringing in my ears, they slipped darkly through my mind, and I never felt the suns.h.i.+ne sweeter or tasted the mountain air with more delight than when we left that unholy place and were out on the trail again.

Our destination was a waterfall, with a pool in which we might bathe, and after leaving the _Pekia_ we followed the stream, climbing higher and higher from the sea. In the Marquesas all the rivers begin in the high mountains, where from the precipices leap the torrents in times of rain. As the valleys are mere ravines at their heads, the waters collect in their depths and roll to the ocean, rippling gently on sunny days, but after a downpour raging, rolling huge boulders over and over and tearing away cliffs.

These streams are the life of the people in the upper valleys. In the old days of warfare many of these mountain dwellers never knew the sea; they were prevented from reaching it by the beach clansmen who claimed the fis.h.i.+ng for their own and made it death for the hill people to venture down to the sh.o.r.e. All the people of a single valley, six or perhaps a dozen clans, united to war against other valleys, its people risking their lives if they trespa.s.sed beyond the hills. Yet under a wise and powerful chief a whole valley lived in amity and knew no cla.s.s or clan divisions.

"We are going to _Vaihae_, The Waters of the Great Desire," said Malicious Gossip. "It was a sacred place once upon a time."

We climbed painfully, Le Moine and I suffering keenly from the sharp edges of the stones that cut even through the thick soles of our shoes. The others, who were barefooted, made nothing of them, walking as easily and lithely as panthers on the jagged trail.

Soon we heard the crash of the _Vaihae_, and sliding down the mountain-side a hundred feet we came into a depths of a gorge a yard or two wide, a mere crack in the rocks, filled with the boom and roar of rus.h.i.+ng water. The rain-swollen stream, cramped in the narrow pa.s.sage, flung itself foaming high on the spray-wet cliffs, and dashed in a mighty torrent into a deep howl riven out of the solid granite twenty feet below.

We put off our clothes and leaped into the pool, enjoying intensely the coolness of the swirling water after the sweat of our climb.

Malicious Gossip and her sister would not go in at first, but when I had climbed the face of a slippery rock twenty feet high to dive, and remained there gazing at the melancholy grandeur of the scene, Malicious Gossip put off her tunic and swam through the race, bringing me my camera untouched by the water. She was a naiad of the old mythologies as she slipped through the green current, her hair streaming over her shoulders and her body moving effortlessly as a fish. Once wetted, she remained in the water with us, and she told me there was a cave behind the waterfall, hidden by the gla.s.sy sheet of water.

"It is called _Enamoa_ (Behold the Servant of the Priest) and it has a terrible history," said Malicious Gossip. "Follow me and we will enter it."

She swam across the pool and turning lithely in the water curved out of sight beneath the surface of the vortex. _Kekela_ followed her, and I made several attempts, but each time was flung back, bruised and breathless. It was not until Kekela, finding a long stick in the cave, thrust it through the white foam, that by catching its end in the whirling water I was able to fight through the roaring and smas.h.i.+ng deluge.

The cave was obscure and damp, its only light filtering through the moving curtain of green water. Black and crawling things squirmed at our feet, and darkness filled the recesses of the cavern. Malicious Gossip's body was a blur in the dimness, and her low soft voice was like an overtone of the deep organ notes of the torrent.

"The tale of the cave of _Enamoa_ is not a legend," she said, "for it is more. It was a happening known to our grandfathers. There were two warriors who coveted a woman, and she was _tapu_ to them.

She was a _taua vehine_, a priestess of the old G.o.ds. But they coveted her, and they were friends, who shared their wives as they divided their _popoi_."

"_Pa.n.a.lua_," said Kekela. "That is 'dear friend custom.' We had it in Hawaii. Brothers shared their wives, and sisters their husbands."

"These two were name-brothers, and loved as though they were brothers by blood," said Malicious Gossip. "And their hearts were consumed with flame when they looked on this girl. It was evil of them, for it was against the will of the G.o.ds. She was of their own clan, and the priests had made her _tapu_ until she had reached a certain age. Her brother was the servant of the priests, and she was consecrated to the G.o.ds. She was guarded by most sacred custom. It was forbidden to touch her or her food.

"Yet these warriors, _toa_ they were, and renowned in battle, coveted her with a desire that ate their sleep. And at last when they had drunk the fiery _namu enata_ till their brains were filled with flames, they lay in wait for her.

"She came down to this pool to bathe. The pool itself was _tapu_ save for those consecrated to the G.o.ds, yet this wretched pair crept through the lantana there on the bank, and watched her. She stood on the rock above the pool and put off her _pae_, her cap of gauze, her long robe, and her _pareu_, all of finest tree-cloth, for in those days before the whites came our people were properly clothed. All naked then in the sunlight, she lifted her arms toward the sky and laughed, and sat down on a rock to bathe her feet.

"Suddenly the l.u.s.tful warriors sprang upon her, and stopping her cries with her own _pae_ they swam with her into this cave. Thought and breath had left her; she lay as one dead, and before they had attained their will they heard a sound of one approaching and singing on the rocks. They had no time to kill her, as they had intended, that she might not bring death to them. They left her and fled along the cliffs, barely escaping before the other man came.

"He had seen from the corner of his eye a sight of some one fleeing from the cave. He was curious, and swam to it. It was late in the day, for the priestess had come for the evening bath. The sun had hidden himself behind Temetiu and the cave was dark. The man came, then, stepping with care, and his feet found in the darkness a living body, warm and soft and perfumed with flowers.

"Then in the darkness, finding her very sweet, he yielded to the demon. But when he brought her at last through the falling water to the evening light, he cried aloud. He was the _moa_, the servant of the high priest, and this was his sister whom he loved.

"He screamed thrice, so that all the valley heard him, and then he flung her into the pool to drown. The people saw him fleeing to the heights. He never returned to them. He became a _moke_, a sorcerer, who lived alone in the forest, dreaded by all. He was heard shrieking in the night, and then the storms came. His eyes were seen through the leaves on jungle trails, and he who saw died.

"Then the people gave the cave a name, the name of _Enamoa_, Behold the Servant of the Priest. It was much larger then than now, as large as a grove. But one night the people heard the noise of the falling of great rocks, and in the morning the cave was small as now.

The _moke_ was never seen again. He had brought down the walls of the cave upon himself, because it had seen his sin."

Malicious Gossip, having finished her tale, slipped again beneath the green curtain of the waterfall. When I had fought through the blinding, cras.h.i.+ng waters and floated with aching lungs on the surface of the pool, she was donning her tunic on the rocks above it, and soon, with our clothes over our wet bodies, we strolled back to Atuona, Tahiapii smoking Kekela's pipe.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Interior of Island of Fatu-hiva, where the author walked over the mountains]

[Ill.u.s.tration: The plateau of Ahoa]

CHAPTER XVIII

A search for rubber-trees on the plateau of Ahoa; a fight with the wild white dogs; story of an ancient migration, told by the wild cattle hunters in the Cave of the Spine of the Chinaman.

I went one day with Le Brunnec, the French trader, in search of rubber trees on the plateau of Ahao, above Hanamenu, on the other side of Hiva-oa Island.

Mounted on small, but st.u.r.dy, mountain ponies, we followed the trail across the river and up the steep mountain-side clad with impenetrable jungle, climbing ever higher and higher above deep gorges and dizzying precipices, until at noon we crossed the loftiest range and dipped downward to the wide plateau.

A thousand feet above the valley, level as a prairie, and indescribably wild and deserted, the plain stretched before us. At some distance to our right a long and narrow mound rose five hundred feet from the plateau, a hill that did not mar the vast level expanse, but seemed instead a great earthwork piled upon it by man. Its green terrace was a wild garden of flowers and fruit growing in luxuriant confusion, watered by a stream that leaped sparkling among tall ferns.

There was no breadfruit, for it will live only where man is there to tend it, and in all the extent of the tableland there was no human being or sign of habitation. Wild cattle and boars moved in droves among the scattered trees, or stood in the shallow stream watching us with curiosity as we pa.s.sed. Thousands of guinea-pigs scampered before our horses' feet, and the free descendants of house-trained cats from the cities of Europe and America perched upon lofty branches to gaze down at our cavalcade.

I have seen the Garden of Allah, and the Garden of Eden,--if I can believe the Arab sheik whose camel I bought for the journey,--I have been in Nikko at its best, and known Joh.o.r.e and Kandy _en fete_, but for the hours in which I looked upon it this plateau of Ahao was the most exquisite spot upon the earth. The wilderness of its tropic beauty, the green of its leaf.a.ge, the rich profusion and splendor of its flowers, the pale colors that s.h.i.+mmered along its far horizon, and the desolate grandeur of Temetiu's distant summit wrapped in thunderous clouds, gave it an aspect primitive, mysterious, and sublime.