CHAPTER XI

Filling the popoi pits in the season of the breadfruit; legend of the mei; the secret festival in a hidden valley.

On the road to the beach one morning I came upon Great Fern, my landlord. Garbed in brilliant yellow pareu, he bore on his shoulders an immense kooka, or basket of cocoanut fiber, filled with quite two hundred pounds of breadfruit. The superb muscles stood out on his perfect body, wet with perspiration as though he had come from the river.

"Kaoha, Great Fern!" I said. "Where do you go with the mei?"

"It is Meinui, the season of the breadfruit," he replied. "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. Though the skies had been kind for several years, not a day passing without a gentle downpour, there had been in the past dry periods when even the hardiest vegetation all but perished. So it came about that the Marquesan was obliged to improvise a method of keeping breadfruit for a long time, and becoming habituated to sour food he learned to like it, as many Americans relish ill-smelling cheese and fish and meat, or drink with pleasure absinthe, bitters, and other gagging beverages.

In this season of plenteous breadfruit, therefore, Great Fern had opened his popoi pit, and was replenishing its supply. A half-dozen who ate from it were helping him. Only the enthusiasm of the traveler for a strange sight held me within radius of its odor.

It was sunk in the earth, four feet deep and perhaps five in diameter, and was only a dozen years old, which made it a comparatively small and recently acquired household possession in the eyes of my savage friends. Mouth of God and Malicious Gossip owned a popoi pit dug by his grandfather, who was eaten by the men of Taaoa, and near the house of Vaikehu, a descendant of the only Marquesan queen, there was a uuama tehito, or ancient hole, the origin of which was lost in the dimness of centuries. It was fifty feet long and said to be even deeper, though no living Marquesan had ever tasted its stores, or never would unless dire famine compelled. It was tapu to the memory of the dead.

All over the valley the filling of the pits for reserve against need was in progress. Up and down the trails the men were hastening, bearing the kookas filled with the ripe fruit, large as Edam cheeses and pitted on the surface like a golf-ball. A breadfruit weighs from two to eight pounds, and giants like Great Fern or Haabuani carried in the kookas two or three hundred pounds for miles on the steep and rocky trails.

In the banana-groves or among thickets of ti the women were gathering leaves for lining and covering the pits, while around the center of interest naked children ran about, hindering and thinking they were helping, after the manner of children in all lands when future feasts are in preparation.

There was a time when each grove of breadfruit had its owners, who guarded it for their own use, and even each tree had its allotted proprietor, or perhaps several. Density of population everywhere causes each mouthful of food to be counted. I have known in Ceylon an English judge who was called upon to decide the legal ownership of one 2520th part of ten cocoanut-trees. But my friends who were filling the popoi pits now might gather from any tree they pleased. There was plenty of breadfruit now that there were few people.

Great Fern was culling from a grove on the mountain-side above my house. Taking his stand beneath one of the stately trees whose freakish branches and large, glossy, dark-green leaves spread perhaps ninety feet above his head, he reached the nearer boughs with an omei, a very long stick with a forked end to which was attached a small net of cocoanut fiber. Deftly twisting a fruit from its stem by a dexterous jerk of the cleft tip, he caught it in the net, and lowered it to the kooka on the ground by his side.

When the best of the fruit within reach was gathered, he climbed the tree, carrying the omei. Each brown toe clasped the boughs like a finger, nimble and independent of its fellows through long use in grasping limbs and rocks. This is remarkable of the Marquesans; each toe in the old and industrious is often separated a half inch from the others, and I have seen the big toe opposed from the other four like a thumb. My neighbors picked up small things easily with their toes, and bent them back out of sight, like a fist, when squatting.

Gripping a branch firmly with these hand-like feet, Great Fern wielded the omei, bringing down other breadfruit one by one, taking great care not to bruise them. The cocoanut one may throw eighty feet, with a twisting motion that lands it upon one end so that it does not break. But the mei is delicate, and spoils if roughly handled.

Working in this fashion, Great Fern and his neighbors carried down to the popoi pit perhaps four hundred breadfruit daily, piling them there to be prepared by the women. Apporo and her companions busied themselves in piercing each fruit with a sharp stick and spreading them on the ground to ferment over night.

In the morning, squatted on their haunches and chanting as they worked, the women scraped the rind from the fermented mei with cowry shells, and grated the fruit into the pit which they had lined with banana leaves. From time to time they stood in the pit and tramped down the mass of pulp, or thumped it with wooden clubs.

For two weeks or more the work continued. In the ancient days much ceremoniousness attended this provision against future famine, but to-day in Atuona only one rule was observed, that forbidding sexual intercourse by those engaged in filling the pits.

"To break that tapu," said Great Fern, "would mean sickness and disaster. Any one who ate such popoi would vomit. The forbidden food cannot be retained by the stomach."

To vomit during the fortnight occupied in the task of conserving the breadfruit brought grave suspicion that the unfortunate had broken the tapu. When their own savage laws governed them, that unhappy person often died from fear of discovery and the wrath of the gods. To guard against such a fate those who were not strong and well took no part in the task.

This curious connection between sex and the preparation of food applied in many other cases. A woman making oil from dried cocoanuts was tapu as to sexual relations for four or five days, and believed that if did she sin, her labor would produce no oil. A man cooking in an oven at night obeyed the same tapu. I do not know, and was unable to discover, the origin of these prohibitions. Like many of our own customs, it has been lost in the mist of ages.

A Tahitian legend of the origin of the breadfruit recounts that in ancient times the people subsisted on araea, red earth. A couple had a sickly son, their only child, who day by day slowly grew weaker on the diet of earth, until the father begged the gods to accept him as an offering and let him become food for the boy. From the darkness of the temple the gods at last spoke to him, granting his prayer. He returned to his wife and prepared for death, instructing her to bury his head, heart and stomach at different spots in the forest.

"When you shall hear in the night a sound like that of a leaf, then of a flower, afterward of an unripe fruit, and then of a ripe, round fruit falling on the ground, know that it is I who am become food for our son," he said, and died.

She obeyed him, and on the second night she heard the sounds. In the morning she and her son found a huge and wonderful tree where the stomach had been buried. The Tahitians believe that the cocoanut, chestnut, and yam miraculously grew from other parts of a man's corpse.

Breadfruit, according to Percy Smith, was brought into these islands from Java by the ancestors of the Polynesians, who left India several centuries before Christ. They had come to Indonesia rice-eaters, but there found the breadfruit, "which they took with them in their great migration into these Pacific islands two centuries and more after the beginning of this era."

Smith finds in the Tahitian legend proof of this contention. In the Polynesian language araea, the "red earth" of the tale, is the same as vari, and in Indonesia there were the words fare or pare, in Malay padi or peri, and in Malagasy vari, all meaning rice. A Rarotongan legend relates that in Hawaiki two new fruits were found, and the vari discarded. These fruits were the breadfruit and the horse-chestnut, neither of which is a native of Polynesia.

I related these stories of the mei to Great Fern, who replied: "Aue! It may be. The old gods were great, and all the world is a wonder. As for me, I am a Christian. The breadfruit ripens, and I fill the popoi pit."

Great Fern was my friend, and, as he said, a Christian, yet I fear that he did not tell me all he knew of the ancient customs. There was an innocence too innocent in his manner when he spoke of them, like that of a child who would like one to believe that the cat ate the jam. And on the night when the popoi pits were filled, pressed down and running over, when they had been covered with banana leaves and weighed with heavy stones, and the season's task was finished, something occurred that filled my mind with many vague surmises.

I had been awakened at midnight by the crashing fall of a cocoanut on the iron roof above my head. Often during the rainy nights I was startled by this sound of the incessantly falling nuts, that banged and rattled like round shot over my head. But on this night, as I composed myself to slumber again, my drowsy ears were uneasy with another thing, less a sound than an almost noiseless, thrumming vibration, faint, but disturbing.

I sat up in my Golden Bed, and listened. Exploding Eggs was gone from his mat. The little house was silent and empty. Straining my ears I heard it unmistakably through the rustling noises of the forest and the dripping of rain from the eaves. It was the far, dim, almost inaudible beating of a drum.

Old tales stirred my hair as I stood on my paepae listening to it. At times I thought it a fancy, again I heard it and knew that I heard it. At last, wrapping a pareu about me, I went down my trail to the valley road. The sound was drowned here by the splashing chuckle of the stream, but as I stood undecided in the pool of darkness beneath a dripping banana I saw a dark figure slip silently past me, going up toward the High Place. It was followed by another, moving through the night like a denser shadow. I went back to my cabin, scouted my urgent desire to shut and barricade the door, and went to bed. After a long time I slept.

When I awoke next morning Exploding Eggs was preparing my breakfast as usual, the sunlight streamed over breadfruit and palm, and the night seemed a dream. But there were rumors in the village of a strange dance held by the inhabitants of Nuka-hiva, on another island, in celebration of the harvest of the mei. Weird observances were hinted, rites participated in only by men who danced stark naked, praising the old gods.

This was a custom of the old days, said Great Fern, with those too-innocent eyes opened artlessly upon me. It has ever been the ceremony of Thanks-giving to the ancient gods, for a bountiful harvest, a propitiation, and a begging of their continued favor. As for him, he was a Christian. Such rites were held no more in Atuona.

I asked no more questions. Thanks-giving to an omnipotent ruler for the fruits of the harvest season is almost universal. We have put in a proclamation and in church services and the slaughter of turkeys what these children do in dancing, as did Saul of old.

The season's task completed, Great Fern and Apporo sat back well content, having provided excellently for the future. Certain of their neighbors, however, filled with ambition and spurred on by the fact that there was plenty of mei for all with no suspicion of greediness incurred by excessive possessions, continued to work until they had filled three pits. These men were regarded with admiration and some envy, having gained great honor. "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. The intrusion of insects and lizards was not considered to injure the flavor.

I often sat on her paepae and watched her prepare the day's dinner. Putting the rancid mass of ma into a long wooden trough hollowed out from a tree-trunk, she added water and mixed it into a paste of the consistency of custard. This paste she wrapped in purua leaves and set to bake in a native oven of rocks that stood near the pit.

Apporo smoked cigarettes while it baked, perhaps to measure the time. Marquesans mark off the minutes by cigarettes, saying, "I will do so-and-so in three cigarettes," or, "It is two cigarettes from my house to his."

When the cigarettes were consumed, or when her housewifely instinct told Apporo that the dish was properly cooked, back it went into the trough again, and was mashed with the keatukipopoi, the Phallic pounder of stone known to all primitive peoples. A pahake, or wooden bowl about eighteen inches in diameter, received it next, and the last step of the process followed.

Taking a fistful of the mass, Apporo placed it in another pahake, and kneaded it for a long time with her fingers, using oil from crushed cocoanuts as a lubricant. And at last, proudly smiling, she set before me a dish of popoi kaoi, the very best popoi that can possibly be made.

It is a dish to set before a sorcerer. I would as lief eat bill-poster's paste a year old. It tastes like a sour, acid custard. Yet white men learn to eat it, even to yearn for it. Captain Capriata, of the schooner Roberta, which occasionally made port in Atuona Bay, could digest little else. Give him a bowl of popoi and a stewed or roasted cat, and his Corsican heart warmed to the giver.

As bread or meat are to us, so was popoi to my tawny friends. They ate it every day, sometimes three or four times a day, and consumed enormous quantities at a squatting. As the peasant of certain districts of Europe depends on black bread and cheese, the poor Irish on potatoes or stirabout, the Scotch on oatmeal, so the Marquesan satisfies himself with popoi, and likes it really better than anything else.

Many times, when unable to evade the hospitality of my neighbors, I squatted with them about the brimming pahake set on their paepae, and dipped a finger with them, though they marveled at my lack of appetite. In the silence considered proper to the serious business of eating, each dipped index and second finger into the bowl, and neatly conveyed a portion of the sticky mass to his mouth, returning the fingers to the bowl cleansed of the last particle. Little children, beginning to eat popoi ere they were fairly weaned, put their whole hands into the dish, and often the lean and mangy curs that dragged out a wretched dog's existence about the paepaes were not deprived of their turn.

If one accept the germ theory, one may find in the popoi bowl a cause for the rapid spread of epidemics since the whites brought disease to the islands.