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Updated: June 28, 2025
She was dark, as are all Marquesans who live a hardy and vigorous life unsheltered from sun and wind, and in the half shadow of the forest she seemed like an animal, wild and savage. Her scarlet pareu and necklace of red peppers added color to a picture that struck me at once as bizarre and memorable.
When we had pulled through to the opposite shore, I was reduced to a dry pareu, and in it alone, barefooted, I reached the rustic paradise, the loveliness of which was to content me more than any spot except the strangely fascinating valley of Atuona in the sad isle of Hiva-Oa. In a delta formed by the Vaitapiha the settlement lay among tents of verdure.
With unconscious grace she flung back her head many times to shake the moisture from her thick hair, and ran her fingers through it until the strands were fairly separated. The pareu disclosed the rounded contour of her figure as if it were painted upon her.
All were garlanded with gold and crimson and orange flowers, while each wore about the hips a scarlet pareu. There were flowers everywhere, flowers, flowers, flowers, without out end. The whole thing was an orgy of colour. On the platform forward resting on the bows of the canoes, Tehei and Bihaura were dancing. All voices were raised in a wild song or greeting.
'Life is short, he would say, 'and there is not long to paint. "He would not talk politics, but after the light was gone he would sit at the organ in his studio and make one cry with his music. When at home he wore only a pareu, but he would put on trousers when he went out. He worked and drank and injected his morphine, and one morning when the boy came he found him dead, and he was smiling.
While I held the canoe, Miss Impossibility would remove her shapeless calico wrapper, and attired only in scarlet pareu, her hair piled high on her head and tied with the white filet of the cocoanut-palm, she would go overboard in one curving dive, a dozen feet or more beneath the sea.
She was tall and voluptuously formed, but she had made the loin-cloth, two yards long and a yard wide, cover her in a manner that was modest, though revealing. It was the art of her ancestors, for this was the shape of their common garment of tapa, a native cloth. With a knot or two she arranged the pareu so that it was like a chemise, coming to a foot above her knees and covering her bosom.
From the time she played naked on the beach she wore the tiki of Bernadette in the silver box given her by her father, and she said the prayers Père Simeon taught her from the book. She wore a blue pareu, and that was strange, for only old people, and few of them, wear any but the red or yellow loin-cloth. But blue, said little Anna, is the color of Maria Peato, mother of Christ."
About his middle he wore a red and yellow pareu, and his naked body was like a small and perfect statue as he handled his tiny craft. When he came over the side I saw that he was about thirteen years old and very handsome, tawny in complexion, with regular features and an engaging smile. His name, he said, was Nakohu, which means Exploding Eggs.
At midnight the man with the elephantiasis removed his pareu to free his enormous legs for dancing, and he and the others, their hands joined, moved ponderously in a tripping circle before the couch on which I lay. He steers a whale-boat with a finger, but no wave can tear the helm from his grasp.
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