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Fishing in Hanavave; a deep-sea battle with a shark; Red Chicken shows how to tie ropes to shark's tails; night-fishing for dolphins, and the monster sword-fish that overturned the canoe; the native doctor dresses Red Chicken's wounds and discourses on medicine. Grelet returned to Oomoa in the whale-boat, but I remained in Hanavave for the fishing.
Small and shapely feet, bare, peeped from under her filmy frills. Her eyes were the large, limpid orbs of the typical Marquesan, like sepia, long-lashed; her nose straight and perfect, her mouth sensuous and demanding. Ghost Girl, her name signified, and she flitted about the islands like a sprite. "She levies tribute on all whom she likes," said Grelet. "Her devotions are rum and tobacco."
Grelet had innumerable books in French and German, all the great authors old and modern; he took the important reviews of Germany and France, and several newspapers. He knew much more than I of history past and present, of the happenings in the great world, art and music and invention, finances and politics.
Begole meanwhile had caught a wind, and the first he knew of the message was when the boys climbed aboard the schooner many miles to sea. He did not trouble to land them, but brought them on to the Marquesas and sold them to Grelet.
The pipe was passing, and Grelet took his pull at it in the circle. The chant was of the adventures of the day. The hunters and specially Namu Ou Mio, the slayer of the three boars, told of the deed of prowess on the cliff-side, while the others sang of their journey and the sea.
But he had not the labor, for the fruits of a commercial civilization had killed the islanders who had had their own dreams, their own ships, and their own pleasures and profits in life. Labor in the South Seas; some random thoughts on the "survival of the fittest." "I pictured myself cultivating many hundreds of acres when I first came here," said Grelet.
There were half a dozen indentations in the bleak and rugged coast, each a little valley guarded by cliffs on both sides, the natural obstacle to neighborliness that made enemies of the clans. Inhabitants of plains are usually friendly. Mountains make feuds. We passed the valley of Hana Ui, inhabited when Grelet came, and full of rich cotton-fields, now a waste with never a soul in it.
The lilies, oranges, and pandanus trees yielded food for the bees, whose thatched homes stood thick on the hillside above the house. Grelet was a skilled apiarist, and replenished his melliferous flocks by wild swarms enticed from the forests. The honey he strained and bottled, and it was sought of him by messengers from all the islands.
The two Paumotan youths, Tennonoku and Kedeko-lio, lay motionless on the floor of the veranda twenty feet away. They had been sold to Grelet for a small sum by Begole, captain of a trading-schooner.
The white man who danced in Oomoa Valley; a wild-boar hunt in the hills; the feast of the triumphant hunters and a dance in honor of Grelet. Grelet had gone in a whale-boat to Oia, a dozen miles away, to collect copra, and I was left with an empty day to fill as I chose.
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