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Updated: June 2, 2025
I answered these, and other questions, while we walked down the beach, and I marveled at the unconscious grace of her movements. The chief wonder of all these Marquesans is the beauty and erectness of their standing and walking postures.
It is to this indwelling, this universally diffused perception of what is just and noble, that the integrity of the Marquesans in their intercourse with each other, is to be attributed. In the darkest nights they slept securely, with all their worldly wealth around them, in houses the doors of which were never fastened. The disquieting ideas of theft or assassination never disturbed them.
I thought they might fall at any moment, and the Marquesans recount many such happenings. In Tai-o-hae three hundred natives were entombed forever by a landslide, and Orivie pointed out the tracks of such slides, and immense masses of rock in the far depths below, beside strips of soft soil brought down by the rains.
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.
But I praised lavishly her beautifully tattooed legs, and complimented the decoration of her hair until she smiled again, and when from the shadowy edges of the ring of torch-light voices began an old chant of feasting, she took it up with the others. There were Marquesans who could recite one hundred and forty-five generations of their families, covering more than thirty-six hundred years.
The higher Polynesian races, such as the Tahitians, Hawaiians, and Samoans, had one and all outgrown, and some of them had in part forgot, the practice, before Cook or Bougainville had shown a top- sail in their waters. It lingered only in some low islands where life was difficult to maintain, and among inveterate savages like the New-Zealanders or the Marquesans.
The sea surged in leaping fountains through a thousand blow-holes carved from the black basalt, and the ceaseless wash of the waves had cut the base of the precipices into paniho, or teeth, as the Marquesans say.
The Marquesans used to hold the mouth and nose of a dying man, in order to keep him in life by preventing his soul from escaping; the same custom is reported of the New Caledonians; and with the like intention the Bagobos of the Philippine Islands put rings of brass wire on the wrists or ankles of their sick.
I, at least, felt immeasurable relief, that quickly turned to exhilaration as we hoisted sail and drove at a glorious speed straight through the breakers to the welcoming beach of Atuona. The Marquesans at ten o'clock mass; a remarkable conversation about religions and Joan of Arc in which Great Fern gives his idea of the devil.
But the houses and the people were gone, and huge trees sank their roots through the platforms and towered over the under-running jungle. These foundations are called pae-paes the pi-pis of Melville, who spelled phonetically. The Marquesans of the present generation lack the energy to hoist and place such huge stones. Also, they lack incentive.
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