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Updated: June 27, 2025
We launched a large canoe, and two sturdy natives, relations of Tatini, took the paddles. They had made the journey more than once, but not at this season. We got into difficulties from the start. The shores were very different from those of Mataiea, Papeari, and Vairao, the three districts I had come through from the house of Tetuanui.
"Because of those ears," said Tiura, "all the eels in this lake have very large ears, and it is so because the father of all the Mataiea folk was an eel. We shall see the eels to-morrow, but I must tell you of the chief of the district of Arue, near Papeete, about which M. Tourjee, the American, wrote the himene.
I leaned on the side of the canoe or on my spears and laughed at the fools of cities, and at myself, who had been a fool among them for most of my life. Just how this train of reasoning ran I cannot say, but it moved inexorably at the contemplation of the sublime radiancy of the vivarium of the Mataiea lagoon.
"You will find the Papara country full of oranges," Fragrance of the Jasmine had said. The fruit was as sweet and delicious as any I had eaten, and the trees larger than their parents of Sydney, Australia. I strolled along the road eating, speaking all who passed or were in sight within their gardens, and came to Mataiea, where I was to live months and to learn the Tahitian mind and language.
A heathen temple The great Marae of Oberea I visit it with Rupert Brooke and Chief Tetuanui The Tahitian religion of old The wisdom of folly. Reading one day from Captain Cook's Voyages about a heathen temple not far from Mataiea which Cook had visited, I suggested to Brooke that we go to it.
Tati would have me stay indefinitely his guest, but I had written to Mataiea of my intended arrival there, and though there were insistent cries that I return soon, I said farewell. Tati himself walked with me to the bridge over the Taharuu River, one of the hundred and fifty streams I crossed in a circuit of Tahiti.
I had seen a canoe with the head of an eel carved in wood, and had heard often a hesitant reference to a legend of metempsychosis, of a human and eel transmigration. The chief, after much persuasion, said that the clans of Mataiea had always believed they were descended directly from eels; that an eel of Lake Vaihiria had been the progenitor of all the people of the valley.
With him was his sister, Tetuanui, who was departing for Raratonga, and her husband. He was a brother of Cowan, the prize-fighter, and in their honor was the luncheon. Introduced to all by the chief of Mataiea, I was asked to sit with them.
Seeing the way the Lermontoffs lived, caused me to resolve that during the remainder of my stay in Tahiti I would go even farther from Papeete than Mataiea. They suggested Tautira, a village they had never visited, but which was at the very end of the habitable part of the Presqu'île of Taiarapu.
Then she left, with the ipu in her hand, for Lake Vaihiria." Tiura halted his tale a minute to point out the constellation of the Scorpion, and to say, "Those stars are Pipiri Ma, the children, who lived at Mataiea long ago. That is a strange story of their leaving their parents' house for the sky!" "Aue!
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