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These footholds are made every three feet on opposite sides. They are cut shallowly, inclining downward and outward, in order not to wound the wood of the tree or to form pockets in which water would collect and rot it. With these aids they climb with ease, using a rope of purau bark tied about the wrists, and by these they pull themselves from notch.
It was bound, as is all Tahiti tobacco, in a purau rope, which had to be unwound and which weighed two pounds. The eleven pounds of tobacco were hard as wood, the leaves cemented by moisture. Le Brunnec hacked it with an axe into suitable portions to sell for three francs a pound, the profit on which is a franc. His face was grilled with ama ink. One streak of the natural skin alone remained.
The bandsmen, all natives but one, wore garlands of purau, the scarlet hibiscus, and there was an atmosphere of abandonment to pleasure about them and the party. A schooner swung at her moorings near by, under a glowing, flamboyant tree, and her crew was aboard in expectation of sailing at any hour. Another small craft, a sloop, was preparing to sail for Moorea, also.
In this dismal, noisome spot was a wretched hut built of purau saplings, as crude a dwelling as the shelter a trapper builds for a few days' habitation. It was ten feet long and four wide, shaky and rotten. Inside it was like the lair of a wild beast, a bed of moldy leaves. A line stretched just below the thatched roof held a few discolored newspapers.
She said nothing, but went away in the darkness. "And it is written, Haabunai, that searchers for the mei came upon her next day in the upper valley, and she was hanging from a tall palm-tree with a rope of purau about her neck." "That may be a true story," said Haabunai. "Though it is the custom here to eat the eva when one is made sick by life.
As we moved on I saw that the yellow flowers of the purau, dried red by the sun, poultices for natives' bruises, and candlenuts in heaps, torches ready to hand, littered the moss. The mountain loomed in the distance, and the immense Pic du Français towered in shadow. Faintly I heard the boom of the waterfall, and knew we were nearing the goal.
In every shade of green, as run by the overhead sun upon the altering facets of precipice and shelf, of fei and cocoa, candlenut and purau, giant ferns and convolvulus, tier upon tier, was a riot of richest vegetation. But everywhere in the lagoon were bristling and hiding dangers from hummocks of coral and sunken banks.
Max burst into a fit of laughter, when following the direction of his eye, we looked up, and espied an enormous parrot perched upon a purau branch, directly over our heads, from which he eyed us with a disdainful and truculent air. "There's your wild Frenchman at last, Johnny," said Max, "I expect he'll call us to account presently for our treatment of his hat."
Eiulo was the only one of our number, who would have dreamed of undertaking to climb either of them; he, however, after finding a young purau, and providing himself with a strip of the bark, fastened the ends about his ankles, and then firmly clasping the trunk of one of the trees with his hands and feet alternately, the latter being as wide apart as the ligature would permit, he vaulted rapidly and easily upward, and soon gained the dizzy height where the nuts grew.
I dragged my canoe to the edge of the quai des Subsistances, so-called because of the naval depot. The craft was dubbed out of a breadfruit-tree trunk, and had an outrigger of purau wood, a natural crooked arm, with a small limb laced to it. The canoe was steady enough in such smooth water, and I paddled off to Motu Uta.