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Paepae signifies a floor or platform such as a native house is built on; and even such a paepae a paepae hae may be called a paepae tapu in a lesser sense when it is deserted and becomes the haunt of spirits; but the public high place, such as I was now treading, was a thing on a great scale. As far as my eyes could pierce through the dark undergrowth, the floor of the forest was all paved.
He had with him a bundle in a towel, and setting it down on my paepae, introduced himself nonchalantly as Broken Bronck, "Late manager of the stable of native fighters of the Count de M of the island of Tahaa, near Tahiti." "I'm here to stay," he said carelessly. "I have a few francs, and I hear they're pretty hospitable in the Markeesies.
So it happened that one morning as I sat on my paepae eating a breakfast of roasted breadfruit prepared for me by Exploding Eggs, my naked skin enjoying the warmth of the sun and my ears filled with the bubbling laughter of the brook, I beheld two stately visitors approaching. Exploding Eggs named them to me as they came up the trail. Both were leading chiefs of the islands.
Unhappy Hinatini feared that she was about to be disgraced before her people by the white man's scorn of her beauty. I was fain to invent a romance upon the spot. I was madly enamoured of an Atuona belle, I said. She waited for me upon my own paepae; she was a mighty woman and swift to anger. She would wreak vengeance upon me, and upon Vanquished Often. I would adopt Vanquished Often as my sister.
One of the most distinguished authors, who has chosen that delectable clime for his researches was arrested for napping on his own paepae partly clothed. The parson informed upon him, and the gendarme fined him. In the British South Seas, where I was recently, prohibition had cast a blight upon the more poetical whites.
The forts of the belligerents were over against each other, and close by. Pigs were cooking. Well-oiled braves, with well-oiled muskets, strutted on the paepae or sat down to feast. No business, however needful, could be done, and all thoughts were supposed to be centred in this mockery of war.
In the ruins of a broken and abandoned paepae, in the shadow of an acre-covering banian, I smoked and asked myself what a Christ would think of the havoc wrought by men calling themselves Christians. Journey on the Roberta; the winged cockroaches; arrival at a Swiss paradise in the valley of Oomoa.
Every house built by a native since their time began has been set on a paepae, and mine had been erected in days beyond the memory of any living man. It was fifty feet broad and as long, raised eight feet from the earth, which was reached by worn steps.
It is new magic to them, a comfort, an occupation, and an entertainment. But who knows the human heart, or understands the soul? That afternoon while Neo and I lay on my paepae awaiting the favoring wind which should carry him back to his own isle, my neighbors gathered from far and near to lounge the sunny hours away in conversation.
In Borobodo, in the jungle of Java, I had seen, as near Cairo, the proudest trophy, temple, and tomb of king and priest humbled in the dust by the changing soul of man in his fight to throw off the shackles of the past. This marae had not been a place of cannibalism, as the Paepae Tapu of the Marquesas Islands. The Tahitians had no record of ever having eaten humans.
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