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So strongly did the old feeling still prevail that only three or four of her friends could be persuaded by the nuns to accompany the coffin up the trail. Exploding Egg's consignment of Aumia to Havaii, the underworld, spoke strongly of the clinging of his people to their old beliefs in the destiny of the spirit after death.
The carcass had been denuded of hair in a pail of hot water and buried underground with fire below and above him. When the meat was well done, I had a portion of it, and Sister Serapoline, who had come in her black nun's habit to console Aumia with the promises of the church, ate with us, and accepted a haunch for the nun's house.
Aumia, eating her burial meats and looking with pleasure at her coffin, carefully and beautifully built by her husband's hands, smiled at me as serenely as a child. But the melancholy sound of her coughing followed me up the trail to the House of the Golden Bed. It was barely daylight next morning when I awoke, a soft, delicious air stirring the breadfruit leaves.
Aumia coughed at night, her neighbor took it up, and then, like laughter in a school, it became impossible to resist, and down to the beach and up to the heights the valley echoed with the distressing sounds. So, a breadfruit season ago, had Aumia coughed for the first time, and the way she was going would be followed by many of my neighbors.
If no new visitor came they fell to chatting and smoking, but the sight of a fresh and unharrowed person started them off again in their mechanical, though nerve-racking, cry. I had known Aumia well, and at noon, desiring to observe the proprieties, I stepped upon the paepae of her home.
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 coffin of Aumia was then beside the house, turned over so that rain might not make it unpresentable. She had asked for it weeks before. To the Marquesan his coffin is as important as, to us, the house the newly-married pair are to live in.
To omit a vowel, to say too many, or to mix their order, would be disrespect to the spirit of the dead, and a reflection on the mourner. Nine times the "ke," fourteen "a's," fifteen "e's," eighteen "i's" and fifteen "o's" and "u's." Aumia was carried to Calvary in the afternoon and put in the grave for which the pig had been paid.
They see it without fear, but with a melancholy so tragic and deep that the sorrow of it is indescribable. "I have seen many go as Aumia has gone," said Father David to me. "All these lovable races are dying. All Polynesia is passing. Some day the whites here will be left alone amid the ruins of plantations and houses, unless they bring in an alien race to take the places of the dead."
"I have been at the side of many in their last moments. It is a terrible thing to die, but they have no fear at all." The husband of Aumia, a jolly fellow of thirty, was practising on a drum for the entertainment of his wife. He said that the corpse of his grandfather, a chief, had been oiled and kept about the house until it became mummified. This, he said, had been quite the custom.
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