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We passed the rough fort, broken-down and mossy, and moving carefully along the trail, clambering over rocks and tearing away twigs and broad leaves, we reached a dismantled and crumbling chalet. We sat down upon its steps, and I removed my coat and was naked to my pareu in the afternoon zephyr.
A second stoutly maintained our earthly origin, and attributed our paleness to the influence of some strange sickness; while a third, being of a sceptical and suspicious turn of mind, suddenly seized Barton by the wrist and spitting upon the skirt of her pareu, commenced scrubbing his hand with great vigour, to see whether the colours were fast.
I wore the pareu, the red strip of calico, bearing designs by William Morris, which the native buys instead of his original one of tapa, the beaten cloth made from tree bark or pith. I met Lovaina coming out of the shower, a sheet about her which could not cover half of her immense and regal body.
I plunged into the river, and returning to my house was about to dress that is, to put on my pareu when a shriek arose from the forest. It was sudden, sharp, and agonizing. "Aumia mate i havaii" said Exploding Eggs, approaching to build the fire.
The pool itself was tapu save for those consecrated to the gods, yet this wretched pair crept through the lantana there on the bank, and watched her. She stood on the rock above the pool and put off her pae, her cap of gauze, her long robe, and her pareu, all of finest tree-cloth, for in those days before the whites came our people were properly clothed.
A deacon of the church went to him, and informed him that the umu was ready, and he came slowly toward us. He wore a white pareu of the ancient tapa, and a white tiputa, a poncho of the same beaten-bark fabrics. His head was crowned with ti-leaves, and in his hand he had a wand of the same. He was in the dim light a vision of the necromancer of medieval books.
Garbed in brilliant yellow pareu, he bore on his shoulders an immense kooka, or basket of cocoanut fiber, filled with quite two hundred pounds of breadfruit. The superb muscles stood out on his perfect body, wet with perspiration as though he had come from the river. "Kaoha, Great Fern!" I said. "Where do you go with the mei?" "It is Meinui, the season of the breadfruit," he replied.
She is seventeen, café au lait beaucoup de lait, kohl-eyed, meter-tressed, and slim-bodied. She sings the himene of the battle of the limes and coal and potatoes, with a new stanza concerning the return of the Noa-Noa, and the vengeance of the Tahitian braves upon the pigs of Peretania, Britain. "Ia or a na! Bonjour, Goo' night!" she says impartially, and modestly slips her pareu about her.
A friendly call of "Kaoha!" in response to mine, summoned me to the family meeting-place, and I mounted the steps with eagerness. I was met by a stalwart and handsome savage, in earrings and necklace and scarlet pareu, who rubbed my nose with his and smelled me ceremoniously, welcoming me as an honored guest.
"Kaoha!" he said, with a wide smile of welcome, and with him and Vai, my next-door neighbor, I returned gladly to my paepae. Vai, or in English, Water, was a youth of twenty years, a dandy; on ordinary occasions naked, except for the pareu about his loins, but on Sundays or when courting rejoicing in the gayest of Europeanized clothes.
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