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When eight bells sounded the hour of four, I got upon my feet and in the mellow dawn saw a panorama of peak and precipice, dark and threatening, the coast of Fatu-hiva and the entrance to Oomoa Bay, the southernmost island of the Marquesas, and the harbor in which the first white men who saw the islands anchored over three hundred years ago.
They could not follow me, for there were no canoes left. I paddled to Oomoa after a day, during which I did what I have no memory of." "They had guns?" I asked him. "They had a few guns, but they used in them nails or stones, having no balls of metal. Their slings were worse.
Recalling the cake-walks, sand-sifting, pigeon-winging, and Juba-patting of the south, the sailor's hornpipe, the sword-dance of the Scotch, and the metropolitan version of the tango, I did my best, while the thrilled air of Oomoa Valley echoed these words, yelled to my fullest lung capacity: "There was an old soldier and he had a wooden leg, And he had no tobacco, so tobacco did he beg.
I saw the infant, clutching it in one hand, toddling and stumbling river-ward again when after breakfast I set out for a walk up Oomoa Valley. Oomoa was far wilder than Atuona, more lonely, with hundreds of vacant paepaes. Miles of land, once cultivated, had been taken again by the jungle, as estates lapsed to nature after thousands of years of man.
Long has he been in Oomoa, just and brave and generous has he been, and his rum is the best that is made in the far island of Tahiti.
The rain began to fall again, and the wind came stronger, but now we were going down in earnest. The sea shone again, but it was on the Oomoa side. We passed under trees hung with marvelous orchids, the puaauetaha, Orivie said, parasitic vines related to the vanilla as the lion is related to the kitten, cousins, but with little family likeness.
I was introduced to Monsieur François Grelet, a Swiss, who had lived here for more than twenty years, and who during that time had never been farther away than a few miles. Not even Tahiti had drawn him to it. Since he arrived, at the age of twenty-four years, he had dwelt contentedly in Oomoa. After we had chatted for a few moments he invited me to be his guest.
I led the talk to the work of the mission. "We have been here thirty-five years," said Père Olivier, "and I, thirty. Our order first tried to establish a church at Oomoa, but failed. You have seen there a stone foundation that supports the wild vanilla vines? Frère Fesal built that, with a Raratonga islander who was a good mason. The two cut the stones and shaped them.
But this procedure was not necessary. Red Chicken got well rapidly, and in a few days was walking about as usual, though with a thoughtful look in his eye that promised a soul-struggle with Père Olivier, whose new gods had not protected the fisherman against the gods of the sea. A journey over the roof of the world to Oomoa; an encounter with a wild woman of the hills.
We heard the sound of the surf, and letting the horse go, Orivie led me, by that sense we surrender for the comforts of civilization, down the bed of a cascade to the River of Oomoa, which we waded, and then arrived at Grelet's house. We had come thirteen miles. I was tired, but Orivie made nothing of the journey.
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