CHAPTER VI

Visit of Chief Seventh Man Who is So Angry He Wallows in the Mire; journey to Vait-hua on Tahuata island; fight with the devil-fish; story of a cannibal feast and the two who escaped.

"The Iron Fingers That Make Words," the Marquesans called my typewriter. Such a wonder had never before been beheld in the islands, and its fame spread far. From other valleys and even from distant islands the curious came in threes and fours. They watched the strange thing write their names and carefully carried away the bits of paper.

"Aue!" they cried as I showed them my speed, which would be a shame to a typist.

Chiefs especially were my visitors, thinking it proper to their estate and to mine that they should call upon me and invite me to their seats of government.

So it happened that one morning as I sat on my paepae eating a breakfast of roasted breadfruit prepared for me by Exploding Eggs, my naked skin enjoying the warmth of the sun and my ears filled with the bubbling laughter of the brook, I beheld two stately visitors approaching. Exploding Eggs named them to me as they came up the trail.

Both were leading chiefs of the islands. Katu, Piece of Tattooing, of Hekeani, led the way. His severe and dignified face was a dark blue in color. His eyes alone were free from imbedded indigo ink. They gleamed like white clouds in a blue sky, but their glance was mild and kindly. Sixty years of age, he still walked with upright grace, only the softened contours of his face betraying that he was well in his manhood when his valley was still given over to tribal warfares, orgies, and cannibalism.

Behind him came Neo Afitu Atrien, of Vait-hua, a stocky brown man with a lined face, stubby mustache, and brilliant, intelligent eyes. He mounted the steps, shook hands heartily, and poured out his informed soul in English.

"Johnny, I spik Ingrish. You Iris'man. You got 'O,' before name. I know you got tipwrite can make machine do pen. I know Panama Canal. How is Teddy and Gotali?"

I assured the chief that both Roosevelt and Goethals were well at last account, and he veered to other topics.

"Before time, come prenty whaleship my place," he said. "I know geograffy, mappee, grammal. I know Egyptee, Indee, all country; I know Bufflobillee. Before time, whaleship come America for take water and wood. Stay two, t'ree week. Every night sailor come ashore catchee girls take ship. Prenty rum, biskit, molassi, good American tobbacee. Now all finish. Whaleship no more. That is not good."

His name means The Seventh Man Who Is So Angry He Wallows In The Mire. "Neo" means all but the number, and for so short a word to be translated by so detailed a statement would indicate that there were many Marquesans whose anger tripped them. Else such a word had hardly been born.

I showed the chiefs the marvels of my typewriter, displayed to their respectful gaze the Golden Bed, and otherwise did the honors. As they departed, Neo said earnestly,

"You come see me you have my house. You like, you bring prenty rum, keep warm if rain."

"A wicked man," said Exploding Eggs in Marquesan when the trail lay empty before us. "One time he drink much rum, French gendarme go to arrest him, he bite--" With an eloquent gesture my valet indicated that Neo's teeth had removed in its entirety the nose of the valiant defender of morals. "No good go see him," he added with finality.

However, the prospect intrigued my fancy, and finding a few days later that Ika Vaikoki, whose discerning parents had named him Ugh! Dried-up Stream! was voyaging toward Vait-hua in a whaleboat, I offered him ten francs and two litres of rum to take me. Remembering Neo's suggestion, I took also two other bottles of rum.

While our whaleboat shot across the Bordelaise Channel pursued by a brisk breeze, Ugh! a wisp of a man of fifty, held the helm. He was for all the world like a Malay pirate; I have seen his double steering a proa off the Borneo coast, slim, high-cheeked, with a sashful of saw-like knives. Ugh! had no weapon, but his eye was a small flaming coal that made me thankful cannibalism is a thing of the past. He had been carried through the surf to his perch upon the stern because one of his legs was useless for walking, but once he grasped the tiller, he was a seaman of skill.

The oarsmen wore turbans of pink, blue, and white muslin to protect their heads from the straight rays of the white sun. Bright-colored pareus were about their loins, and several wore elastic sleeve-holders as ornaments on tawny arms and legs, while one, the son of Ugh! sported earrings, great hoops of gold that flashed in the sunshine. With their dark skins, gleaming eyes, and white teeth, they were a brilliant picture against the dazzling blue of the sea. Straight across the channel we steered for Hana Hevane, a little bay and valley guarded by sunken coral rocks over which the water foamed in white warning. Two of the men leaped out into the waves and hunted on these rocks for squids, while we beached the boat on a shore uninhabited by any living creature but rats, lizards, and centipedes. Several small octopi were soon brought in, and one of the men placed them on some boulders where the tide had left pools of water, and cleaned them of their poison. He rubbed them on the stone exactly as a washerwoman handles a flannel garment, and out of them came a lather as though he had soaped them. Suds, bubbles, and froth--one would have said a laundress had been at work there. He dipped them often in a pool of salt water, and not until they would yield no more suds did he give each a final rinsing and throw it on the fire made on the beach. Suddenly a shout broke my absorption in this task. The son of Ugh! with the gold earrings, waving his arms from amidst the surf on the reef, called to me to come and see a big feke. As his companions were dancing about and yelling madly, I left the laundrying of the small sea-devils and splashed two hundred yards through the lagoon to the scene of excitement. Four of the crew had attacked a giant devil-fish, which was hidden in a cave in the rocks. From the gloom it darted out its long arms and tried to seize the strange creatures that menaced it. The naked boatsmen, dancing just out of reach of the writhing tentacles, struck at them with long knives. As they cut off pieces of the curling, groping gristle, I thought I heard a horrible groan from the cave, almost like the voice of a human in agony. I stayed six feet away, for I had no knife and no relish for the game.

Four of the long arms had been severed at the ends when suddenly the octopus came out of his den to fight for his life. He was a reddish-purple globe of horrid flesh, horned all over, with a head not unlike an elephant's, but with large, demoniacal eyes, bitter, hating eyes that roved from one to another of us as if selecting his prey. Eight arms, some shorn of their suckers, stretched out ten feet toward us.

The Marquesans retreated precipitately, and I led them, laughing nervously, but not joyously. The son of Ugh! stopped first.

"Ta! Ta! Ta! Ta!" he cried. "Are we afraid of that ugly beast? I have killed many. Pakeka! We will eat him, too!"

He turned with the others and advanced toward the feke, shouting scornful names at him, threatening him with death and being eaten, warning him that the sooner he gave up, the quicker ended his agony. But the devilfish was not afraid. His courage shamed mine. I was behind the barrier of the boatsmen, but once in the throes of the fight a slimy arm passed between two of them and wound itself around my leg. I screamed out, for it was icy cold and sent a sickening weakness all through me, so that I could not have swum a dozen feet with it upon me. One of the natives cut it off, and still it clung to my bloodless skin until I plucked it away.

The son of Ugh! had two of the great arms about him at one time, but his companions hacked at them until he was free. Then, regardless of the struggles of the maimed devil, they closed in on him and stabbed his head and body until he died. During these last moments I was amazed and sickened to hear the octopus growling and moaning in its fury and suffering. His voice had a curious timbre. I once heard a man dying of hydrophobia make such sounds, half animal, half human.

"That feke would have killed and eaten any one of us," said the son of Ugh! "Not many are so big as he, but here in Hana Hevane, where seldom any one fished, they are the biggest in the world. They lie in these holes in the rocks and catch fish and crabs as they swim by. My cousin was taken by one while fishing, and was dragged down into the hidden caverns. He was last seen standing on a ledge, and the next day his bones were found picked clean. A shark is easier to fight than such a devil who has so many arms."

The boatsmen gathered up the remnants of the foe and brought them to the beach, where the elder Ugh! was tending the fire. Crabs were broiling upon it, and the pieces of the feke were flung beside them and the smaller octopi.

When they were cooked, a trough of popoi and one of feikai, or roasted breadfruit mixed with a cocoanut-milk sauce, were placed on the sand, and all squatted to dine. 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. I was soon satisfied, and while they lingered over their food and smoked I strolled up the valley a little way, still feeling the pressure of that severed arm.

Hana Hevane had its people one time. They vanished as from a hundred other valleys, before the march of progress. The kindly green of the jungle had hidden the marks of human habitations, where once they had lived and loved and died.

Only the bones of La Corse, the schooner Jerome Capriata had sailed many years, lay rotting under a grotesque and dark banian, never more to feel the foot of man upon the deck or to toss upon the sea. A consoling wave lapped the empty pintles and gave the decaying craft a caress by the element whose mistress she so long had been. Her mast was still stepped, but a hundred centipedes crawled over the hull.

When I returned to the fire, the boatmen were talking. Ugh! Dried-up Stream! his stomach full and smoke in his mouth, bethought himself of a tale, an incident of this very spot. In a sardonic manner he began:

"The men of this island, Tahuata, in the old days descended on Fatu-hiva to hunt the man-meat. After the battle, they brought their captives to Hana Hevane to rest, to build a fire and to eat one of their catch. This they did, and departed again. But when they were in their canoes, they found they had forgotten a girl whom they had thrown on the sand, and they returned for her. The sea was rough, and they had to stay here on the beach for the night.

"As was the custom, they erected a gibbet, two posts and a horizontal bar, and on the bar they hung the living prisoners, with a cord of parau bark passed through the scalp and tied around the hair. Their arms were tied behind them, and they swung in the breeze.

"In the night, when the Tahuata men slept from their gluttony, one of them arose silently and unbound a prisoner who was his friend, and told him to run to the mountains. He then lay down and slept, and in the darkness this man who had been freed returned stealthily in the darkness, and unloosed a girl, the same who had been forgotten on the sand. In the morning the other captives were dead, but those who escaped were months in the fastness of the heights, living on roots and on birds they snared. In the end they went to Motopu. They were well received, for the Tahuata warriors thought a god had aided them, and they and their children lived long there."

Ugh! smiled reminiscently as if his thoughts were returning from pleasant things, and clapped his hands as a signal for reembarking.

The bowls of food remaining were tied in baskets of leaves and hung in the banian tree to await the boatsmen's return for the night, the steersman was carried to his place, and the boat pushed through the surf.

A gaunt shark swam close to the reefs as we rowed out, a hungry, ill-looking monster. One of the bottles of rum the oarsmen had drunk on the way to Hana Hevane, the other was stored for their return, and to gain a third the son of Ugh! offered to go overboard and tie a rope to the shark's tail, which is the way natives often catch them. A shark was not worth a liter of rum, I said, being in no mind to risk the limbs of a man in such a sport. Besides, I had no more to give away. I could imagine the rage of Seventh Man Who Wallows should he learn of my wasting in such foolishness what would keep us both warm if it rained.

As we caught the wind a flock of koio came close to us in their search for fish. The black birds were like a cloud; there must have been fifty thousand of them, and flying over us they completely cut off the sunlight, like a dark storm. If they had taken a fancy to settle on us they must have smothered us under a feathered avalanche. Ugh! was startled and amazed that the birds should come so close, and all raised an uproar of voices and waved arms and oars in the air, to frighten them off. They passed, the sun shone upon us again, and in a sparkling sea we made our way past Iva Iva Iti and Iva Iva Nui, rounding a high green shore into the bay of Vait-hua.

The mountains above the valley loomed like castellated summits of Italy, so like huge stone fortresses that one might mistake them for such from the sea. The tiny settlement reaching from the beach half a mile up the glen was screened by its many trees.

The whaleboat slid up to a rocky ledge, and my luggage and I were put ashore. Exploding Eggs, who had insisted on accompanying me, took it into his charge, and with it balanced on his shoulders we sauntered along the road to the village where the French gendarme had lost his nose to the mad namu-drinker.