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He set out a bottle of rum and several glasses, and we toasted him while I looked over the register. Hardly any one had neglected to write beside his name tributes to the charm of the place and the kind heart of McTavish. Charmian and Jack London's signatures were there, with a hearty word for the host, and "This is the most beautiful spot in the universe," for Moorea and Urufara.
It was three o'clock when the scores were settled, and, the chief leading with a lantern, we tramped through the great cocoanut-grove to his residence. Landers and I each took a bed, I being warned to be forehanded by my experience in Moorea, where I slept on the floor. The chief retired, and Polonsky went off with his arm about his inamorata's waist, she having apparently awaited his return.
The holder of the spoons jingled them in perfect harmony with the accordion, and the can-operator tapped and thumped the tin, so that the three made a singular and tingling music. It had a timbre that got under one's skin and pulsated one's nerves, arousing dormant desires. I felt like leaping into the arena and showing them my mettle on alternate feet, but a Moorea beauty anticipated me.
The lagoon is now a glistening pearly gray. Moorea, the isle of the fairy folk, is jagged and rough, as if a new throe of earth had torn its heights and made new steeps and obelisks. Moorea is never the same. Every hour of the day and every smile and frown of the sun creates valleys and spires, and alters the outlines of this most capricious of islets.
They gave the old names to Polynesia that they knew in Asia, as all over the world emigrants carry their home names, not only Hawaii, or Savaii, for Java, but Moorea, a Javan place, to the island near Tahiti; Bora-Bora from Sumatra to a Society island; Puna of Borneo to places in Tahiti, Kauai, and Hawaii; Ouahou of Borneo to Oahu, on which Honolulu is; and Molokai, from the Moluccas, to another island of Hawaii.
Some learned to like liquor, and French saloons in Papeete and throughout Tahiti and Moorea encouraged the taste. Profits, as ever under the business rule of the world overweighed morals or health. These girls in our bower drank sparingly of wine, but needed no artificial spirits to spur their own. Music runs like fire through their veins.
The mountains of Moorea were only half the height of Tahiti's, but so artfully had they been piled in their fantastic arrangement that they seemed as high, though they were entirely different in their impress upon the beholder.
These native tongues of the South Seas, with their many vowels and short words, seem to be made for singing. The voyage from Tahiti to Moorea was a two-hours' panorama of magnificence and anomalism in the architecture of nature. Facing my goal was Moorea, and behind me Tahiti, scenes of contrary beauty as the vessel changed the distance from me to them.
If his spirit had senses, it heard the lapping of the waves upon the beach of the lagoon across which his ancestor, the first Pomaré, had come from Moorea to be a king. We left the Broom Road for Point Venus to see the monument to Captain James Cook, the great mariner of these seas. The only lighthouse on Tahiti is there.
I saw all the fruits of the islands in matchless profusion, intermingled with magnificent ferns, the dazzling bougainvillea, the brilliant flamboyant-tree, and a thousand creepers and plants. Every few minutes the road rushed to the water's-edge, and the glowing main, with its flashing reef, and the shadowy outlines of Moorea, a score of miles away, appeared and fled.
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