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While the chief and I reclined upon mats and Exploding Eggs sat vigilant at my side, she vanished into the house, and shortly returned to set before us a bowl of popoi and several cocoanuts. These we ate while Neo discoursed sadly upon the evil times that had befallen his reign. "Me very busy when prenty ship come," he mourned. "Me fix for wood; get seven dollar load.
Their popoi pits were opened and emptied, their women were stolen, and their men seized and eaten. Month after month and year after year the clan lost its strength. "They had almost ceased to tattoo their bodies, for they asked what it served them when they were so soon to bake in the ovens of the Hana-uaua people.
"I have seen through a karahi mea tiohi i te fetu, the Mirror Thing Through Which One Looks At The Stars, long as a tree and big around as a pig. Miope has people upon it." "Are they Marquesans?" "They must be Marquesans for there are islands," I replied. "And popoi and pigs?" demanded the ena-perfumed one. "Namu?
For a quarter of an hour the only sounds were the plup of fingers withdrawn from mouths filled with popoi, and the faint creaming of waves on the beach. Marquesans feel that eating is serious business. The devil-fish and crabs were the delicacies, and served as dessert. Blackened by the fire, squid and crustacean were eaten without condiment, the tentacles being devoured as one eats celery.
Immediately after sunset, when the popoi and fish had been eaten, and all had bathed in the brook, when the women had perfumed their bodies and put the scarlet hibiscus in their hair, and after Kivi had drunk thrice of kava, the game began. The valley was deserted, the paepaes empty. No fires twinkled from the mountainsides.
We hastened to my cabin, Exploding Eggs running before us up the trail with my luggage balanced on his shoulders. Cocoanuts and popoi, coffee and tinned biscuits, were waiting when we arrived. We ate hastily and then donned proper garments, Exploding Eggs rejoicing in a stiff collar and a worn sailor-hat once mine.
"We fill the popoi pit beside my house." There is a word on the Marquesan tongue vividly picturing the terrors of famine. It means, "one who is burned to drive away a drought." In these islands cut off from the world the very life of the people depends on the grace of rain.
Kivi shouted then. The women hurried forward with the food, and we fell to with a will. Pig and popoi, shark sweetbreads, roasted breadfruit and sweet potatoes, fruits and cocoanut-milk leaped from the broad leaf platters to wide-open mouths. Hardly a word was spoken.
Anaho is known as 'the country without popoi. The word popoi serves in different islands to indicate the main food of the people: thus, in Hawaii, it implies a preparation of taro; in the Marquesas, of breadfruit. And a Marquesan does not readily conceive life possible without his favourite diet.
"He has three popoi pits," they said, as we would speak of a man who owned a superb jewel or a Velasquez. The grated breadfruit in the holes was called ma, and bore the same relation to popoi as dough bears to bread. When the ma was sufficiently soured Apporo opened the pit each morning and took out enough for the day's provision, replacing the stones on the banana leaves afterward.
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