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Gossip in Papeete Moorea, a near-by island A two-days' excursion there Magnificent scenery from the sea Island of fairy folk Landing and preparation for the feast The First Christian mission A canoe on the lagoon Beauties of the sea-garden. My acquaintances of the Cercle Bougainville, Landers, Polonsky, McHenry, Llewellyn, David, and Lying Bill, were at this season bent on pleasure.
Tahiti from the sea was like a living being, so vivid, so palpitating was its contour and its color, but Moorea, when far away, was cold and black, a beautiful, ravishing sight, but like the avatars of a race of giants that had passed, a sepulcher or monument of their achievements and their end.
Once a Tahitian stopped the sun as it sank beyond Moorea not to wage war, as Joshua, but to please his old mother. The sea and the heavens are brothers to the Tahitian.
The light of the sun hardly touched the lagoon, and Moorea was still shrouded in the shadows of the expiring night. As we walked down the beach, the day was opening with the "morning bank," the masses of white clouds that gather upon the horizon before the tradewind begins its diurnal sweep, to shift and mold them all the hours till sunset.
British Protestant missionaries, who had led a precarious life in Tahiti, and fled from it to Australia in fear of their lives, were induced to come here and establish a mission. The King of Tahiti, Pomaré, had fled to Moorea after a desperate struggle with opposing clans, and he welcomed the preachers as additions to his strength.
Tati said that when the church was dedicated it was a box-like structure of wood and coral, whitewashed and red-roofed three thousand Tahitians had feasted in a thatched house erected for the arearea. The himene-chorus was made up of singers from every district in Tahiti and Moorea. Tati had presided. "We ate for three days," he related to me.
The Diadem was gilded first, and down the beach the long light tremulously disclosed the faint scarlet of the flamboyant-trees, their full, magnificent color yet to be revealed, and their elegant contours like those graceful, red-tiled pagodas on the journey to Canton in far Cathay. Motu Uta crept from the obscurity of the night, and the battlements of Moorea were but dim silhouettes.
A table fifty feet or longer was made of bamboo, the top of twenty half sections of the rounded tubes, polished by nature, but slippery for bottles and glasses. A bench ran on both sides, and underfoot was the deep-green vegetation that covers every foot of ground in Moorea except where repeated footfalls, wheels, or labor kills it, and which is the rich stamp of tropic fertility.
The Potii Morea had taken on her passengers when we returned, and we put off from the sea-wall at once, with two barrels of bottled beer, and half a dozen demi-johns of wine prominent on the small deck. Often the sea between Tahiti and Moorea is rough in the daytime, and passage is made at night to avoid accident, but we were given a smooth way, and could enjoy the music.
Moorea, four leagues away, loomed like a mammoth battle-ship, sable and grim, her turrets in the lowering clouds on the horizon, her anchors a thousand fathoms deep. The sun was drinking water through luminous pipes. The harbor was a gleaming surface, and the reef from this height was a rainbow of color. All hues were in the water, emerald and turquoise, palest blue and gold.
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