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The sunlight on the water at that hour was like silver spangles on a sapphire robe. I paddled near to the Marara, and watched her let go her anchor and send her boat ashore with a stern line. Fastened to a cannon and passed around a bitt on the schooner, the crew hauled her close to the embankment, and soon she was broadside to, and her gangway on the quay.

The stars, thunder and lightning, and similar phenomena are generally considered as "lights or signs" belonging to the spirits, yet one frequently hears hazy tales such as that "the constellation Marara is a one-legged and one-armed man who sometimes causes cloudy weather at planting time so that people may not see his deformities," or we are told that "the sun was placed in the sky by the creator, and on it lives an evil spirit who sometimes kills people.

The weeds, brush, and trees, after being cut and allowed to dry are fired, while the logs remaining after this initial burning are piled together and again set on fire, and the field is ready for the planting. No soil is broken and not a seed goes into the ground until the spirits again designate the time, by placing the constellation Marara in the sky.

She passed within a few hundred feet of me, and I saw that she was the Marara, the Flying-Fish. I did not know it then, but I was to go on that little vessel to the blazing atolls of the Dangerous Archipelago, and to see stranger and more fascinating sights than I had dreamed of on the Noa-Noa during my passage to Tahiti.