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Updated: May 16, 2025
"He would not climb the palm to bring down the nuts; he lay and laughed on his paepae in the Meinui, the season of breadfruit, when all were busy; and when they brought him rusty old muskets to care for, he turned his back upon them. Sometimes he fished, going out in a canoe that Tahia paddled, and making her fix the bait on the hook, but he caught few fish.
On one of the stones of the paepae was a footprint, perfect from heel to toe, and evidently not artificially made. "Hoouiti stood here when he hurled his spear across the island," said Strong in Battle. "He was not a big man, as you see by his foot's mark." "Fifteen kilometers! A long hurling of a spear," said I. "Aue! he was very strong. He lived on this paepae.
Smothered in the embraces of Daughter of the Pigeon, covered with embarrassment, I struggled and cursed, and had desperately decided to fling her bodily over the eight-foot wall of the paepae into the jungle, when another arrival dashed up the trail. This was the brother of Daughter of the Pigeon.
I backed hastily away, and sought to take refuge beside a boulder, but she vaulted after me, and seizing me again, resumed her passionate attack. "She is a woman of the mountains! She will take you away to her paepae!" my excited guide yelled warningly. That was her intention. There was no doubt about it. She seized me by the arm and tried to drag me away from the boulder to which I clung.
"She loved the Menike!" shouted the old women in chorus, and they threw themselves upon me and smelt me and made as if I had been one of the dead's husbands. The followed me up the trail to my cabin and sat on my paepae wailing and shrieking. It was some time before I realized that their poignant sorrow should force consolation from me. There was not a moan as the rum went round.
Said the soldier to the sailor, 'Will you give me a chew? Said the sailor to the soldier, 'I'll be damned if I do! Keep your mind on your number and your finger on your rocks, And you'll always have tobacco in your old tobacco box." Dancing and singing thus on the flat stones of the paepae of the six Fatu-hiva ladies, I gave back a thousand-fold their aid to my disordered trousers.
We were met beneath a giant banian-tree by the chief, who greeted us with simple dignity and led us at once to his house. The most pretentious in the village, it consisted of two rooms, built of redwood boards from California, white-washed, clean, and bare, opening through wide doors upon the broad paepae. This house, the chief insisted, was to be my home while I remained his guest in Vait-hua.
The paepae is an oblong terrace built without cement or black volcanic stone, from twenty to fifty feet in length, raised from four to eight feet from the earth, and accessible by a broad stair.
Fending her off as best I could, I conjured the chief by the red stripe on the sleeve of his white jacket, his badge of office, to rescue me, for Madame Bapp was now on her paepae, craning her fat neck, and I had no mind to be laughed at by my own tint. The chief, however, maintained the impartial attitude of the bystander at a street fight.
I have seen a leper alone on his paepae, deep in the Scriptures, and when I asked him if he got comfort from them I was answered, "They are strong words for a weak man, and better than pig." But only a St. Francis Xavier or a Livingstone, a great moral force, could lift the people now from the slough of despond in which they expire.
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