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Updated: May 16, 2025
The crash of a falling cocoanut awakened me at midnight, and I saw on my paepae Apporo, Flower, Water, and Chief Kekela Avaua, asleep. The chief had hung his trousers over the railing, and was in his pareu, his pictured legs showing, while the others lay naked on my mats.
Popoi bowls and wooden platters of the roasted breadfruit were brought within shelter, and while the hissing rain put out the fires on the paepae the candlenuts were lighted and all squatted for the evening meal. Breadfruit and yams, with a draught of cocoanut milk, satisfied the hunger created by my arduous climb.
Nevertheless, as I smoked at ease in my pareu upon the paepae of my simple hosts I felt some misgivings rise in me. Yet why cavil at the vehicle by which one arrives at Nirvana? Had I not tasted the chicha beer of the Andes, and found it good? And vague analogies and surmises floated before me in the curls of smoke that rose in the clear evening light.
"I have been here many years, and never before did I come here, and again. Jamais de la vie! I must begin to go to church again." We said nothing more as we slid and slipped downward on the wet trail, but when we came again to the straw hut hidden in the trees Mohuto was still on the paepae, watching us, and I paused to speak to her. "You knew Hemeury Francois when he was young?"
"Exploding Eggs," said I hastily, "make tea for all." Every shade vanished from shining eyes when I produced the bottle of rum and added a spoonful of flavor to each brimming shellful. All perplexing questions were forgotten, and simple social pleasure reigned again on my paepae, while Great Fern explained to all his idea of the Christian devil.
A laughing Juno of thirty years, large and rounded as a breadfruit-tree, more than six feet in height, with a mass of blue-black hair and teeth that flashed white as a fresh-opened cocoanut, she rose from her mat on the paepae and rubbed my nose ceremoniously with hers.
The woman who had spoken came half-way down the worn and dirty steps of her paepae. She was old, but with an age more of bitter and devastating emotion than of years. Her haggard face, drawn and seamed with cruel lines, showed still the traces of a beauty that had been hard and handsome rather than lovely.
In a sharp angle of a glen, on a rushing brook and under fathoms of cool foliage, we struck a house upon a well-built paepae, the fire brightly burning under the popoi-shed against the evening meal; and here the cries became a chorus, and the house folk, running out, obliged us to dismount and breathe.
M'Callum; or rather they had dwelt together once, and were now amicably separated. The captain is to be found near one end of the bay, in a wreck of a house, and waited on by a Chinese. At the point of the opposing corner another habitation stands on a tall paepae.
Good-byes even to the sons and daughters of cannibals are sorrowful. I had come to think much of these simple, savage neighbors. Some of them I shall never forget. Mauitetai, a middle-aged woman with a kindly face, was long on my paepae.
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