I was close to beginning this letter with a little fun at your expense; you would have been mystified—perhaps convinced that my haunted friends of Ahu Ahu were just a bit uncanny. It is really a pity not to do it! I should have begun with a vivid glimpse of a séance; the quiet moonlight outside, seen through an open door; the glimmer of a turned-down lamp in the house, revealing the rapt sightless face of the medium; the summoning of old Rakamoana from her sleeping place in the marae; the unnatural voice proclaiming the coming of the spirit.
Then I would have told how a message from the visitor was announced—for the strange white man vouched for by the mother of Apakura. "I see an island," the ghostly voice might have gone on—"a little land surrounding a great lagoon. It is Nukuhina, in the far-off Sea of Atolls. A schooner lies at anchor in the calm water off the settlement; she does not move, for the lagoon is very still. A boat is putting off for shore, and in the stern sits a dear friend of the white man—a slender man, who gazes eagerly toward the shore with dark eyes like the eyes of our people. A crowd is gathered on the beach; the girls carry gifts 231 of necklaces and wreaths; and in the village the old women are preparing a feast. The man in the boat believes that this welcome is for the captain of the schooner, not knowing that this people was once a race of warriors, and that they are gathered to give him welcome—the first soldier from the army of France to visit their island since the war. The keel of the boat grates on the sand; a score of men seize her to pull her up; the women crowd about the stranger (Aué! They are good to look upon these girls of Nukuhina!), to throw their necklaces over his head and crown him with wreaths of flowers and shell. His face grows red; the old men smile; the girls laugh aloud. One, bolder than the rest, runs at him suddenly, puts her arms about him, and kisses him after the fashion of the white man. His face grows redder still; at that, the old men, too, laugh aloud. One after another, pushing and pulling to be first, the girls scramble to kiss him; he is overwhelmed, suffocated, and now his face is like fire, but he is not angry, for he smiles."
Well, what do you think of Ahu Ahu magic? I really ought to refrain from telling you the truth, which—like the stuff of most spirit messages—is simple, unexpected, and disillusioning. When we got to Avarua I found S— there, over from Tahiti to buy cattle; before his departure the Alouette had turned up from the Paumotus, bringing word of your reception on Nukuhina.
I fancy you haven\'t had much time, in your progress through the Low Archipelago, for the pursuits of a landsman, so I\'ll give you an idea of how I\'ve frittered away the days on Rarotonga.
232
Soon after our arrival there was a great stir over the coming of a shipload of parliamentary visitors from New Zealand, making a tour of the Cook Islands; a feast of welcome was to be given in Avarua, scores of pigs and hundreds of chickens were set aside for fattening, and the dancers of each village were to be seen rehearsing in the evenings. We drove to Avarua on the appointed day and found the government boat already anchored in the roadstead off the town—an anchorage dreaded by skippers, for unless the anchor strikes exactly on the summit of a sharp submerged peak, it will slide clean off soundings. Long before we reached the settlement the air had been vibrant with the sound of drums, the visitors were coming ashore, the dancing was in full swing.
The performance, of course, was a perfectly sophisticated one—like Papeete, Avarua is a small ocean metropolis, the capital of a group—but it interested me to see that the people, in spite of the efforts of the missionaries to make them ashamed of everything pertaining to heathen days, were not entirely without pride in the past. Each village was represented by a corps of dancers, men and women equally divided, and had its own drums and drummers, who furnished the sole music of the dance. The drums are of three varieties. The smallest are merely hollow sticks—six inches in diameter and a yard long—open on one side, and producing a loud, resonant click when struck with a bit of wood. There are others of medium size, standing on short legs and beaten with the hand, but the huge oldtime drums, suspended from the limbs of trees, interested me most of all. Imagine a five-foot section of the trunk of a big Barringtonia, carefully 233 hollowed out and smoothed, with the skins of wild goats stretched over the ends, and sides decorated with outlandish painting.
The big drums are struck with the heel of the hand—with such furious energy that the drummer streams perspiration and is soon exhausted. The deep pulsing sound of them carries for miles in still air; sometimes at night, when there was dancing in the villages, I have heard it far and near, rising, falling, throbbing, from Arorangi, from Titikaveka, and from Ngatangiia, whence the ancients set out on their thousand-league voyages to the south.
I wish I could make you feel, as I have felt, the quality of this savage drumming. Monotonous and rhythmic sound, reduced almost to its simplest form, it is the ancestor of all music, toward which, perhaps, our modern dance music is a reversion. There is syncopation in it when the big drum halts at irregular intervals, and the time is carried by the clicking of hollow wood; but it is solemn and ominous—anything but the meretricious syncopation of ragtime. One feels in it an appeal to the primitive emotions, at once vague and charged with meaning; fear and madness are there, with cruelty, lust, triumph, and a savage melancholy.
Except in the case of the contingent from Manihiki—an atoll far off to the north—there was little variation in the dances, for which one can only say that they showed evidence of careful drilling. The women performed a variety of the dance common to all branches of their race—basically the same whether called hula, hura, or ura—but their motions were awkward and stiff, without the abandon and graceful movements of the arms to be seen in Hawaii or the Society Islands. 234 The men, who carried long staves like spears, were freer in their motions, leaping, thrusting out their arms, and clattering their sticks in unison.
The costumes—unfortunately for the eye of a sensitive spectator—were slipped on over the wearer\'s best European clothes; a concession to the missionary point of view; but the beauty of some of the kilts, tunics and headdresses, and the trouble evidently taken in braiding them, showed that the Rarotongans have not wholly forgotten the past.
The dance was followed by speeches, and the speeches by a feast—all very conventional and uninteresting. I wonder if you are heartily fed up on baked pig. One needs a dash of Island blood to appreciate it after the twentieth time! Any other sort of meat would be welcome here where bully beef and pork are the staples. The need of a change of diet drives one to the lagoon; fishing becomes a practical as well as a sporting proposition.
During the proper phases of the moon we lead a most irregular life, for the hours from 3 to 5 a.m. are often the ones most profitable to spend on the reef, and the evenings are occupied with a search for hermit crabs. You have probably made the acquaintance of the hermit crab, but in case you have been too busy to give him the notice he deserves, I\'ll venture to dwell for a bit on his eccentricities. It was not a pure love of natural history that turned my attention to him; I have been obliged to study him—at least superficially—by the fact that he is the dainty preferred by all the fish of this lagoon, and his capture, therefore, an indispensable preliminary to every fishing expedition.
There must be several varieties of hermit crab—I 235 have counted three already: the ordinary small brown one called kakara, the huge red one found in deep water, and the black, hairy kind, whose pounded-up body is mixed with grated coconut to extract the oil. This latter is called unga; in the old days the lowest class of Rarotonga society was known by the same name—meaning, I suppose, that all of their property could be carried on their backs. The common variety is a good deal like the robber crab in habits; the natives go so far as to say that it is the same creature, in different stages of its existence. I doubt this theory, for while there are plenty of the little kakara on the volcanic islands, the robber crab is very rare; he lives on the atolls, and to my mind it is incredible that he should journey from island to island, through leagues of deep sea. Like his formidable relative, the kakara spends most of his time ashore, frequenting the bush along the water\'s edge, where he lies hidden throughout the day in a hole or under a pile of leaves. His first duty of the evening is a trip to salt water, for he seems to need a thorough wetting once in each twenty-four hours. After his bath he heads back for the bush to begin his nightly search for food—nearly any kind of edible refuse—a dead fish on the beach, the fallen fruit of a pandanus, a coconut, opened by rat or flying fox, and containing a few shreds of meat.
The size of the kakara can be judged from his shell, which may be as small as a thimble or as large as an orange. The creature inside is marvelously adapted to the life he leads. His soft and muscular body curls into the spiral of the shell and is securely anchored by a twist of the tail. The fore-end of the crab, which protrudes from the shell when he is in motion, reminds 236 one of a tiny lobster; the same stalk eyes, the same legs, the same strong claws. When alarmed he snaps back into his mobile fortress, and you perceive that legs and claws fold into a flat armored barrier, sealing up perfectly the entrance of the shell. Sit still and watch him; presently the claws unfold cautiously and he emerges little by little, feelers waving and eyes peering about in a ludicrously apprehensive manner. Finally he gathers courage and starts off for the bush at his curious rolling gait.
One might suppose the hermit crab the least social of living things, but in reality he is gregarious and seems to enjoy the company of his friends. They wander in little bands; very often one finds two or three small ones perched on the back of a larger comrade and enjoying an effortless trip across the beach to the lagoon. One afternoon I came upon three of them traveling in single file; the last member of the party—a frail little chap—crunched under the heel of my boot before I saw him. I stopped a moment in regret and saw that the two other crabs were also stopping—warned, by I know not what obscure sense, that all was not well with their friend. They drew together as they halted, and went through a hasty and obviously anxious exchange of ideas—face to face, with feelers waving nervously. One was reminded irresistibly of a pair of fussy little old gentlemen, halted in the street to decide which should do an unpleasant errand. At length one of the two settled himself to wait, while the other faced about and shambled off briskly to the rear. A few seconds brought him to what was left of his unfortunate comrade; his eyes seemed to start from his head as he felt over the crushed wreck. A moment 237 later he turned and hastened back even faster than he had come. His arrival had an air of palpitating excitement; I fancied I felt transmitted to me a tiny thrill of horror at the news about to be communicated. This time the four antenn? fairly vibrated—I imagined the conversation going on an inch above the ground.
"My God!" announced the bearer of ill tidings, breathlessly. "Poor Bill is dead!"
"Bill dead!" exclaimed the other, shocked in spite of his incredulity; "but no, you must be wrong—what could have killed him?"
"I don\'t know; he\'s dead all the same—crushed and mangled—it upset me fearfully."
"Come, come—you\'ve been seeing things; he must have taken a short cut to the beach."
"I tell you he\'s dead; come and have a look if you don\'t believe me." So off they went together for a look at the corpse, and I left them to mourn their friend—perhaps to eat him.
If you want to see a curious sight get a hermit crab some day and pick up half a dozen empty shells of the size to fit him. Lay the shells on the sand in a circle a few inches across, extract the crab without hurting him from his house, and set him down naked among the empty shells. To get him out, by the way, is not so easy as it sounds, but you can do it by taking hold of his claws and maintaining a steady, gentle pull; in time the muscles of his tail will tire and his grip relax. You will be amused when you see his first attempts to walk without his shell, which weighs three or four times as much as the tenant; it is precisely as a man might act, set down on some planet where gravity is weaker than on our earth. Naked, helpless, and worried—très, 238 très inquiet—the crab makes a dash for one of the shells, gives it a hasty inspection with his feelers, finds something not quite right, and hobbles off to the next one. Perhaps this suits him. He faces about, in goes his tail to take a grip on the whorls, he snaps in and out a few times as if trying the strategic possibilities of the new quarters, and next moment you will see him ambling off blissfully toward the bush.
The chase of the hermit crab is tame sport, no doubt, but not entirely without interest. One evening we set out just after dark, bucket and torch in hand—not the old South Sea torch of coconut leaf, but the modern tube of galvanized iron, filled with kerosene and plugged with burlap, which acts as a wick. The high beach is best at this hour, for one\'s quarry is beginning to emerge from the bush for the evening dip, and those that have passed will leave spoor in the soft coral sand. Here is the track of a small one, winding toward the water in eccentric curves and zigzags; follow it and you find him, motionless in the torchlight, hoping to escape notice. He goes into the pail with a clang—you can hear his feet scratching vainly at the smooth sides. There were not many about on this stretch of beach; they are uncertain in their habits and seem to be great wanderers. Here is the track of a monster, broad and corrugated like the trail of a miniature Whippet Tank; the spoor leads to the lagoon—no signs of him at the water\'s edge—he has doubled back. Lift up that rotten coconut frond ... an unga, black, hairy, armed with a vicious pair of claws; you can hear him raging in the pail, a noise halfway between a whine and a growl—a crab with a voice!
239 A stroll of an hour or two along the beach usually procures enough bait for a day\'s fishing, and one turns inland to follow the road home. Sometimes, when the new moon has set behind the Avarua peaks and thick darkness settles over the bush—when the surf murmurs almost inaudibly in a stillness broken by the plunge of a fish in the lagoon, or the grating screech of a flying-fox, quarreling with his mates in the palm tops—one is not sorry when the lights of the plantation begin to glimmer through the trees.
We went to bed early that evening, for we had to be up long before daylight to catch the first of the flood tide, but these island nights are not meant for sleep—I was soon up again, to spend a couple of hours alone on the veranda. The feel of the air was like a caress; neither hot nor cold, and perfumed with the scents of strange flowers—waxen Tiaré Tahiti, sweet and heady frangipani, languorous Queen of the Night. In the mango tree behind the house a mynah twittered—a drowsy overture to one of their abrupt nocturnal choruses. They are quaint birds, the mynahs; introduced to the Islands many years ago, they have increased amazingly in this friendly environment, where they live in a state of half-domesticated familiarity with mankind. One sees them everywhere, hopping fearlessly about the streets of villages, fluttering to the table to finish the bread crumbs left after a meal, perched on the backs of cattle in the coconut groves. They are intensely gregarious, gathering in large flocks at sunset to roost in some thick-foliaged tree—orange, mango, or alligator pear. From time to time during the night, with an abruptness and perfect unison that make one suspect the presence of a feathered 240 leader of the orchestra, the two or three hundred members of the colony burst into deafening song—a chorus which lasts perhaps twenty seconds, and stops as suddenly as it began.
At last I knocked the ashes out of my pipe and turned in; at intervals, before sleep came, I heard the far-off thud of a ripe coconut, or the faint slither and crash of an old frond, falling from a palm. We were awakened at three o\'clock by the cook\'s announcement that coffee was ready; it is a pleasure to live where dressing is only a matter of slipping on a fresh singlet and hitching the pareu tight about one\'s waist. Each man carried a pair of old shoes, for even the leathery feet of a native must be protected before he ventures on the live coral. Half a dozen plantation boys followed us to the beach, a............