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While Song circulated the wine M. Bauda enlightened me as to the crime that had made him prisoner. He was serving eighteen months for selling cocoanut brandy. When the cask was emptied the people began the dance. Three rows were formed, one of women between two of men, in Indian file facing the veranda. Haabunai and Song of the Nightingale brought forth the drums.
These were about four feet high, barbaric instruments of skin stretched over hollow logs, and the "Boom-Boom" that came from them when they were struck by the hands of the two strong men was thrilling and strange. The dance was formal, slow, and melancholy. Haabunai gave the order of it, shouting at the top of his voice.
At length it touched at an isle, it was carried through the breakers to a resting place on the sand. Its oarsmen rejoiced, they danced a dance of thanksgiving to their gods, and wreathed the ti leaves in their hair. At this moment Haabunai, master of ceremonies, gave a cry of dismay and ceased to beat his drum.
Grandfather saved these marks, and wore them as a tiki, or amulet, until he died, when he gave it to me. He had preserved the skin so that it did not spoil." Haabunai yawned and said his mouth was parched from much talking, but when a shell of rum was set before him and he had drunk, he fetched from his house the tiki.
Aumia's husband and Haabunai, with Great Fern, had dug it and paved it a couple of days ago, and her husband had given the others a pig for their work, slaughtering it on the tomb of the Bishop of Uranopolis. No thought of profanation had entered their minds; it was convenient to lay the pig over the imposing monument, with a man on either side holding the beast and the butcher free-handed.
Death of Aumia; funeral chant and burial customs; causes for the death of a race. On the paepae of a poor cabin near my own lived two women, Aumia and Taipi, in the last stages of consumption. Aumia had been, only a few months earlier, the beauty of the island. "She was one of the gayest," said Haabunai, "but the pokoko has taken her."
The sound carried one back to the days when men first tied the skins of animals about hollow tree-trunks and thumped them to call the naked tribes together under the oaks of England. Those great drums beaten by the hands of Haabunai and Song of the Nightingale made one want to be a savage, to throw a spear, to dance in the moonlight.
A seamy-visaged Frenchman, Pierre Guillitoue, the village butcher a philosopher and anarchist, he told me rapped with a bottle on the veranda railing. The governor, in every inch of gold lace possible, made a gallant figure as he rose and faced the people. His whiskers were aglow with dressing. The ceremony began with an address by a native, Haabunai.
"There is a tale told long ago by a man of Hanamenu to a traveler named Christian," I said to Haabunai, the carver, while we sat rolling pandanus cigarettes in the cool of the evening. "It runs thus: "Some thirty years ago a sailor from a trading schooner that had put into the bay for sandalwood was badly treated by his skipper, who refused him shore-leave.
I seemed to see in this curious fact another proof of the ancient kinship between the first men of my own race and the prehistoric grandfathers of Malicious Gossip and Haabunai. My savage friends, with their clear features, their large straight eyes and olive skins, showed still the traces of their Caucasian blood.
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