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Updated: June 28, 2025
Our torch of cocoanut-husks and reeds, seven feet high, was fixed at the prow, so that it could be lifted up when needed to attract the fish or better to light the canoe. Red Chicken, in a scarlet pareu fastened tightly about his loins, stood at the prow when we had reached his favorite spot off a point of land, while I, with a paddle, noiselessly kept the canoe as stationary as possible.
Wrapped only in a gorgeous red pareu, I sat on the paepae of the chief's house, now become mine. I was the especial care of Mrs. Seventh Man Who Wallows, who all afternoon long had sat on her haunches over a cocoanut husk fire stirring savory foods for me.
Tall, very spare, and his skin pale despite his wearing only a pareu and never a hat, Choti's black eyes shone under long, black hair, and over a Montmartre whisker that covered his boyish face from his chiseled nose. "Hello!" he said. "Come and have déjeuner?" The manner of both T'yonni and Choti, while hospitable, and their glances at my bags, showed a probable wonderment of my intentions.
It was a plain hall, with doors opposite each other in the middle, and at one end a slightly raised platform on which sat the pastor and half a dozen deacons. The pastor was delivering his sermon as I entered, he and all his entourage in black Prince-Albert coats. He had a white shirt and collar and tie, but others masked a pareu under the wool, and were barelegged.
The fools taught us that the pareu, which left the body exposed to the air, clean and refreshed by the sun and the winds, was immodest. We exchanged it for undershirts and trousers and dresses and shoes and stockings and coats, and got disease and death and degeneration.
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.
So to the Marquesan are the goblins that cause him to refuse to go into silent places alone at night, and often make him cower in fear on his own mats, a pareu over his head, in terror of the unknown. But death when it comes to him now is nothing, or it is a going to sleep at the end of a sad day.
I got up at five, and with a pareu about me, followed the stream until I found a delicious pool, where I bathed for an hour, while I read "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." The level land between the sea and the mountains was not more than a quarter mile broad, and the near hills rose rounded and dark green, with mysterious valleys folded in between them.
Ol' time we use that Tahiti cologne. Girl put that on pareu an' on dress, by an' by make whole body jus' like flower. That set man crazee; make all man want kiss an' hug."
They went here clad in their muslin tunics, and wore them moist upon their bodies while they slept, looking like the naiads of the past. We were already warm from walking, and I, in my pareu and light coat of pongee silk, looked longingly at the water sparkling in the sun, but the princess took me by the hand and led me on.
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