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One circumstance alone might strike the experienced: here is a convenient beach, deep soil, good water, and yet nowhere any paepaes, nowhere any trace of island habitation. It is but a few years since this valley was a place choked with jungle, the debatable land and battle-ground of cannibals.
It is true they died, too, most of them, but some you can find where McHenry lives half a mile from here at Patutoa. We sold off the stock to Chileans, and that country owns the island now. "I think the island had a superior race once. There are immense platforms of stone, like the paepaes of the Marquesas, only bigger, and the stones are all fitted together without cement.
Many people sitting on their paepaes called to us, and one woman pointed to me and said that she wished to take my name and give me her own. This is their custom with one to whom they are attracted, but I affected not to understand.
The rotting homes of the Marquesan people speak more eloquently of death than do sunken graves. In these vales, which each held a thousand or several thousand when the blight of the white man came, the abandoned paepaes are solemn and shrouded witnesses of the death of a race. The jungle runs over them, and only remnants remain of the houses that sat upon them.
They are great builders here in Hiva-oa; I saw in my ride paepaes that no European dry-stone mason could have equalled, the black volcanic stones were laid so justly, the corners were so precise, the levels so true; but the retaining-wall of the new graveyard stood apart, and seemed to be a work of love. The sentiment of honour for the dead is therefore not extinct.
Dare we indeed string them together, and add the case of the deserted ruin, as though the dead continually besieged the paepaes of the living: were kept at arm's-length, even from the first foundation, only by propitiatory feasts, and, so soon as the fire of life went out upon the hearth, swarmed back into possession of their ancient seat? I speak by guess of these Marquesan superstitions.
She would give you food and treat you with kindness as a man does his bride. You know, in the old days the strong women had more than one husband; sometimes four or five, and they chose them in this way. If you were nearer where Tepu lives, she would make you a prisoner. They have often done that." "Do we go near her home?" said I. "No; we see no more paepaes," replied Orivie.
None was left of the blood of the chief's daughter. No man was left alive on the plateau of Ahao. "Their popoi pits are the wallows of the wild boar; on their paepaes sit the wild white dogs. The horned cattle wander where they walked. Hee i te fenua ke! They are gone, and the stranger shall have their graves."
Little children, beginning to eat popoi ere they were fairly weaned, put their whole hands into the dish, and often the lean and mangy curs that dragged out a wretched dog's existence about the paepaes were not deprived of their turn. If one accept the germ theory, one may find in the popoi bowl a cause for the rapid spread of epidemics since the whites brought disease to the islands.
The houses on the Hatiheu side begin high up; higher yet, the more melancholy spectacle of empty paepaes. When a native habitation is deserted, the superstructure pandanus thatch, wattle, unstable tropical timber speedily rots, and is speedily scattered by the wind.
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