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Updated: May 16, 2025
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.
Exploding Eggs was gone from his mat. The little house was silent and empty. Straining my ears I heard it unmistakably through the rustling noises of the forest and the dripping of rain from the eaves. It was the far, dim, almost inaudible beating of a drum. Old tales stirred my hair as I stood on my paepae listening to it. At times I thought it a fancy, again I heard it and knew that I heard it.
It was a far flight for fancy to take, from my paepae in the jungle at the foot of Temetiu, but looking at the beauty and grace of Malicious Gossip as she sat on my mats in her crimson pareu, I liked to think that it was so. "We are cousins," I said to her, handing her a freshly-opened cocoanut which Exploding Eggs brought.
Too soon the time came when I must return to my own paepae in Atuona. Vanquished Often wept at my decision, and Mrs. Seventh Man rubbed my nose long with hers as she entreated me to remain in the home she had given over to me. The chief, finding remonstrance useless, volunteered to accompany me on my return, and one midnight woke me to be ready when the wind was right.
My Golden Bed, lurching precariously in the narrow path, led me through tangled jungle growth to the first sight of my new home, a small house painted bright blue and roofed with corrugated iron. Set in the midst of the forest, it was raised from the ground on a paepae, a great platform made of basalt stones, black, smooth and big, the very flesh of the Marquesas Islands.
Toho's eyes gleamed, and her toes curled and uncurled like those of a cat, while she told me that the afternoon would see an old dance, a drama of the sea, of war, and feasting such as the islands had known before the whites came. The air thrummed with the resonance of the drums. All morning I sat alone on my paepae, hearing them beat.
Mouth of God and his wife, Malicious Gossip, soon became intimates of my paepae. Coming first to see the marvelous Golden Bed and to listen to the click-click of the Iron Fingers That Make Words, they remained to talk, and I found them both charming. Both were in their early twenties, ingenuous, generous, clever, and devoted to each other and to their friends.
They are tapu; about them flit the veinahae, the matiahae, and the etuahae, dread vampires and ghosts that have charge of the corpse and wait to seize the living. Well have these ghoulish phantoms feasted; whole islands are theirs, and soon they will sit upon the paepae of the last Marquesan. I reached the top of the gulch and paused to gaze at its extent.
Death of Aumia; funeral chant and burial customs; causes for the death of a race. On the paepae of a poor cabin near my own lived two women, Aumia and Taipi, in the last stages of consumption. Aumia had been, only a few months earlier, the beauty of the island. "She was one of the gayest," said Haabunai, "but the pokoko has taken her."
That afternoon she was sitting on my paepae, a bewitching sight as she held the suckling to her breast and crooned of his forefather's deeds before the white had gripped them. Visit of Chief Seventh Man Who is So Angry He Wallows in the Mire; journey to Vait-hua on Tahuata island; fight with the devil-fish; story of a cannibal feast and the two who escaped.
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