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"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."
"He would have a hula about him all the time. He loved the national dance. He would sit or lie and drink all day and night. He loved to see young people drink and enjoy themselves. Ah, those were gay times! Dancing the nights away. Every one crowned with flowers, and rum and champagne like the falls of Fautaua.
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.
"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.
A dawn on the beach, a swim in the lagoon, the end of the fish strike, were vastly more entertaining. We passed the gorge of Fautaua, where Fragrance of the Jasmine and I had had a charmed day. The pinnacles of the Diadem were black against the eastern sky. Aorai, the tallest peak in sight, more than a mile high, hid its head in a mass of snowy clouds.
It was a shower, and the water from the far Fautaua valley the softest, most delicious to the body, cool and balmy in the heat of the tropic. Coming and going to baths here, whites throw off easily the fear of being thought immodest, and women and men alike go to and fro in loin-cloths, pajamas, or towels.
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?"
The guilelessness and cunning of child and fiend were in his dumb soul. 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.
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.
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