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The bride and her friends, taking with them her dowry, proceeded to the home of the bridegroom, which might be in another settlement, or on an adjacent island. If they were people of rank it was the custom that the ceremonies of the occasion pass off in the marae.
"After Mowno had concluded his conference with Rokoa, he led us to a large building near the beach, in a very ruinous and decayed state, and completely over-shadowed by aged tamanu-trees. It seemed, from its size and peculiar structure, to be a deserted marae, or native temple.
On the very spot I stood had been the marae, or Tahitian temple, in which the images were housed, now a rude heap of stones. A hundred years ago exactly this exchange of deities had been made. Alas! it could not have been the true Christ who was brought to them, for they had flourished mightily under Oro, and they began almost at once to die.
I thought of the moss-grown marae in the dark wood, with its hideous idols, its piles of human bones, and its hoary priest fit minister of such a religion. I remembered the aged woman at Mowno's house, and the frightful doom in reserve for her.
Here he had been a deacon of the church, as he was in Papenoo, because it meant social rank, and was possible insurance against an unknown future. The church edifice was the gathering-place, as once had been the marae, the native temple. This was Sunday, and I passed a church every few miles, the Roman Catholic and the Protestant vying.
As I thought once more of the marae in the forest, and of the unhappy Malola, I told the people that our Father beyond the sky could alone hear their prayers, and should alone be worshipped; that he desired no sacrifices of living things; that he was offended and displeased with all cruelty and bloodshed; and that the offering of human sacrifices, and the killing of aged persons, were crimes which he detested, and would be sure to punish; that he had expressly commanded children to love and honour their parents, and that it was their duty, the older, the more infirm and helpless they became, the more faithfully to cherish and protect them.
"Every man in Tahiti brought one stone, and the marae was builded," said Tetuanui. "We were many then." He had not been there in fifty years. We crawled down the other side, a broken incline, and to the beach. Land-crabs scrambled for their holes, the sole inhabitants of the spot once given to chants and prayers, burials, and the sacrifice of humans to the never-satisfied gods.
Just as I glanced round in search of the threatening looks, to which Barton alluded, a frightful figure sprang up on the outer edge of the circle of listeners, directly in front of me, and with cries of rage forced its way towards the spot where I stood. I recognised at once the old priest of the marae, but how changed since I last saw him!
In Borobodo, in the jungle of Java, I had seen, as near Cairo, the proudest trophy, temple, and tomb of king and priest humbled in the dust by the changing soul of man in his fight to throw off the shackles of the past. This marae had not been a place of cannibalism, as the Paepae Tapu of the Marquesas Islands. The Tahitians had no record of ever having eaten humans.
"As we turned, and plunged into the grove again, resuming our flight in a somewhat altered direction, an eager shout announced that we had been seen. But this cry proceeded, not from the group in front of the marae, who were wholly absorbed in their savage orgies, but from a straggling party of pursuers from the village, to whom the light of the bonfire had betrayed us.
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