Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (818 page)

So long as I stayed upon that isle these thoughts were constant.  I lay down to sleep, and woke again with an unblunted sense of my surroundings.  I was never weary of calling up the image of that narrow causeway, on which I had my dwelling, lying coiled like a serpent, tail to mouth, in the outrageous ocean, and I was never weary of passing - a mere quarter-deck parade - from the one side to the other, from the shady, habitable shores of the lagoon to the blinding desert and uproarious breakers of the opposite beach.  The sense of insecurity in such a thread of residence is more than fanciful.  Hurricanes and tidal waves over-leap these humble obstacles; Oceanus remembers his strength, and, where houses stood and palms flourished, shakes his white beard again over the barren coral.  Fakarava itself has suffered; the trees immediately beyond my house were all of recent replantation; and Anaa is only now recovered from a heavier stroke.  I knew one who was then dwelling in the isle.  He told me that he and two ship captains walked to the sea beach.  There for a while they viewed the oncoming breakers, till one of the captains clapped suddenly his hand before his eyes and cried aloud that he could endure no longer to behold them.  This was in the afternoon; in the dark hours of the night the sea burst upon the island like a flood; the settlement was razed all but the church and presbytery; and, when day returned, the survivors saw themselves clinging in an abattis of uprooted coco-palms and ruined houses.

Danger is but a small consideration.  But men are more nicely sensible of a discomfort; and the atoll is a discomfortable home.  There are some, and these probably ancient, where a deep soil has formed and the most valuable fruit-trees prosper.  I have walked in one, with equal admiration and surprise, through a forest of huge breadfruits, eating bananas and stumbling among taro as I went.  This was in the atoll of Namorik in the Marshall group, and stands alone in my experience.  To give the opposite extreme, which is yet far more near the average, I will describe the soil and productions of Fakarava.  The surface of that narrow strip is for the more part of broken coral lime-stone, like volcanic clinkers, and excruciating to the naked foot; in some atolls, I believe, not in Fakarava, it gives a fine metallic ring when struck.  Here and there you come upon a bank of sand, exceeding fine and white, and these parts are the least productive.  The plants (such as they are) spring from and love the broken coral, whence they grow with that wonderful verdancy that makes the beauty of the atoll from the sea.  The coco-palm in particular luxuriates in that stern
solum
, striking down his roots to the brackish, percolated water, and bearing his green head in the wind with every evidence of health and pleasure.  And yet even the coco-palm must be helped in infancy with some extraneous nutriment, and through much of the low archipelago there is planted with each nut a piece of ship’s biscuit and a rusty nail.  The pandanus comes next in importance, being also a food tree; and he, too, does bravely.  A green bush called
miki
runs everywhere; occasionally a purao is seen; and there are several useless weeds.  According to M. Cuzent, the whole number of plants on an atoll such as Fakarava will scarce exceed, even if it reaches to, one score.  Not a blade of grass appears; not a grain of humus, save when a sack or two has been imported to make the semblance of a garden; such gardens as bloom in cities on the window-sill.  Insect life is sometimes dense; a cloud o’ mosquitoes, and, what is far worse, a plague of flies blackening our food, has sometimes driven us from a meal on Apemama; and even in Fakarava the mosquitoes were a pest.  The land crab may be seen scuttling to his hole, and at night the rats besiege the houses and the artificial gardens.  The crab is good eating; possibly so is the rat; I have not tried.  Pandanus fruit is made, in the Gilberts, into an agreeable sweetmeat, such as a man may trifle with at the end of a long dinner; for a substantial meal I have no use for it.  The rest of the food-supply, in a destitute atoll such as Fakarava, can be summed up in the favourite jest of the archipelago - cocoa-nut beefsteak.  Cocoa-nut green, cocoa-nut ripe, cocoa-nut germinated; cocoa-nut to eat and cocoa-nut to drink; cocoa-nut raw and cooked, cocoa-nut hot and cold - such is the bill of fare.  And some of the entrées are no doubt delicious.  The germinated nut, cooked in the shell and eaten with a spoon, forms a good pudding; cocoa-nut milk - the expressed juice of a ripe nut, not the water of a green one - goes well in coffee, and is a valuable adjunct in cookery through the South Seas; and cocoa-nut salad, if you be a millionaire, and can afford to eat the value of a field of corn for your dessert, is a dish to be remembered with affection.  But when all is done there is a sameness, and the Israelites of the low islands murmur at their manna.

The reader may think I have forgot the sea.  The two beaches do certainly abound in life, and they are strangely different.  In the lagoon the water shallows slowly on a bottom of the fine slimy sand, dotted with clumps of growing coral.  Then comes a strip of tidal beach on which the ripples lap.  In the coral clumps the great holy-water clam
(Tridacna
) grows plentifully; a little deeper lie the beds of the pearl-oyster and sail the resplendent fish that charmed us at our entrance; and these are all more or less vigorously coloured.  But the other shells are white like lime, or faintly tinted with a little pink, the palest possible display; many of them dead besides, and badly rolled.  On the ocean side, on the mounds of the steep beach, over all the width of the reef right out to where the surf is bursting, in every cranny, under every scattered fragment of the coral, an incredible plenty of marine life displays the most wonderful variety and brilliancy of hues.  The reef itself has no passage of colour but is imitated by some shell.  Purple and red and white, and green and yellow, pied and striped and clouded, the living shells wear in every combination the livery of the dead reef - if the reef be dead - so that the eye is continually baffled and the collector continually deceived.  I have taken shells for stones and stones for shells, the one as often as the other.  A prevailing character of the coral is to be dotted with small spots of red, and it is wonderful how many varieties of shell have adopted the same fashion and donned the disguise of the red spot.  A shell I had found in plenty in the Marquesas I found here also unchanged in all things else, but there were the red spots.  A lively little crab wore the same markings.  The case of the hermit or soldier crab was more conclusive, being the result of conscious choice.  This nasty little wrecker, scavenger, and squatter has learned the value of a spotted house; so it be of the right colour he will choose the smallest shard, tuck himself in a mere corner of a broken whorl, and go about the world half naked; but I never found him in this imperfect armour unless it was marked with the red spot.

Some two hundred yards distant is the beach of the lagoon.  Collect the shells from each, set them side by side, and you would suppose they came from different hemispheres; the one so pale, the other so brilliant; the one prevalently white, the other of a score of hues, and infected with the scarlet spot like a disease.  This seems the more strange, since the hermit crabs pass and repass the island, and I have met them by the Residency well, which is about central, journeying either way.  Without doubt many of the shells in the lagoon are dead.  But why are they dead?  Without doubt the living shells have a very different background set for imitation.  But why are these so different?  We are only on the threshold of the mysteries.

Either beach, I have said, abounds with life.  On the sea-side and in certain atolls this profusion of vitality is even shocking: the rock under foot is mined with it.  I have broken off - notably in Funafuti and Arorai - great lumps of ancient weathered rock that rang under my blows like iron, and the fracture has been full of pendent worms as long as my hand, as thick as a child’s finger, of a slightly pinkish white, and set as close as three or even four to the square inch.  Even in the lagoon, where certain shell-fish seem to sicken, others (it is notorious) prosper exceedingly and make the riches of these islands.  Fish, too, abound; the lagoon is a closed fish-pond, such as might rejoice the fancy of an abbot; sharks swarm there, and chiefly round the passages, to feast upon this plenty, and you would suppose that man had only to prepare his angle.  Alas! it is not so.  Of these painted fish that came in hordes about the entering
Casco
, some bore poisonous spines, and others were poisonous if eaten.  The stranger must refrain, or take his chance of painful and dangerous sickness.  The native, on his own isle, is a safe guide; transplant him to the next, and he is helpless as yourself.  For it is a question both of time and place.  A fish caught in a lagoon may be deadly; the same fish caught the same day at sea, and only a few hundred yards without the passage, will be wholesome eating: in a neighbouring isle perhaps the case will be reversed; and perhaps a fortnight later you shall be able to eat of them indifferently from within and from without.  According to the natives, these bewildering vicissitudes are ruled by the movement of the heavenly bodies.  The beautiful planet Venus plays a great part in all island tales and customs; and among other functions, some of them more awful, she regulates the season of good fish.  With Venus in one phase, as we had her, certain fish were poisonous in the lagoon: with Venus in another, the same fish was harmless and a valued article of diet.  White men explain these changes by the phases of the coral.

It adds a last touch of horror to the thought of this precarious annular gangway in the sea, that even what there is of it is not of honest rock, but organic, part alive, part putrescent; even the clean sea and the bright fish about it poisoned, the most stubborn boulder burrowed in by worms, the lightest dust venomous as an apothecary’s drugs.

CHAPTER III - A HOUSE TO LET IN A LOW ISLAND

Never populous, it was yet by a chapter of accidents that I found the island so deserted that no sound of human life diversified the hours; that we walked in that trim public garden of a town, among closed houses, without even a lodging-bill in a window to prove some tenancy in the back quarters; and, when we visited the Government bungalow, that Mr. Donat, acting Vice-Resident, greeted us alone, and entertained us with cocoa-nut punches in the Sessions Hall and seat of judgment of that widespread archipelago, our glasses standing arrayed with summonses and census returns.  The unpopularity of a late Vice-Resident had begun the movement of exodus, his native employés resigning court appointments and retiring each to his own coco-patch in the remoter districts of the isle.  Upon the back of that, the Governor in Papeete issued a decree: All land in the Paumotus must be defined and registered by a certain date.  Now, the folk of the archipelago are half nomadic; a man can scarce be said to belong to a particular atoll; he belongs to several, perhaps holds a stake and counts cousinship in half a score; and the inhabitants of Rotoava in particular, man, woman, and child, and from the gendarme to the Mormon prophet and the schoolmaster, owned - I was going to say land - owned at least coral blocks and growing coco-palms in some adjacent isle.  Thither - from the gendarme to the babe in arms, the pastor followed by his flock, the schoolmaster carrying along with him his scholars, and the scholars with their books and slates - they had taken ship some two days previous to our arrival, and were all now engaged disputing boundaries.  Fancy overhears the shrillness of their disputation mingle with the surf and scatter sea-fowl.  It was admirable to observe the completeness of their flight, like that of hibernating birds; nothing left but empty houses, like old nests to be reoccupied in spring; and even the harmless necessary dominie borne with them in their transmigration.  Fifty odd set out, and only seven, I was informed, remained.  But when I made a feast on board the
Casco
, more than seven, and nearer seven times seven, appeared to be my guests.  Whence they appeared, how they were summoned, whither they vanished when the feast was eaten, I have no guess.  In view of Low Island tales, and that awful frequentation which makes men avoid the seaward beaches of an atoll, some two score of those that ate with us may have returned, for the occasion, from the kingdom of the dead.

It was this solitude that put it in our minds to hire a house, and become, for the time being, indwellers of the isle - a practice I have ever since, when it was possible, adhered to.  Mr. Donat placed us, with that intent, under the convoy of one Taniera Mahinui, who combined the incongruous characters of catechist and convict.  The reader may smile, but I affirm he was well qualified for either part.  For that of convict, first of all, by a good substantial felony, such as in all lands casts the perpetrator in chains and dungeons.  Taniera was a man of birth - the chief a while ago, as he loved to tell, of a district in Anaa of 800 souls.  In an evil hour it occurred to the authorities in Papeete to charge the chiefs with the collection of the taxes.  It is a question if much were collected; it is certain that nothing was handed on; and Taniera, who had distinguished himself by a visit to Papeete and some high living in restaurants, was chosen for the scapegoat.  The reader must understand that not Taniera but the authorities in Papeete were first in fault.  The charge imposed was disproportioned.  I have not yet heard of any Polynesian capable of such a burden; honest and upright Hawaiians - one in particular, who was admired even by the whites as an inflexible magistrate - have stumbled in the narrow path of the trustee.  And Taniera, when the pinch came, scorned to denounce accomplices; others had shared the spoil, he bore the penalty alone.  He was condemned in five years.  The period, when I had the pleasure of his friendship, was not yet expired; he still drew prison rations, the sole and not unwelcome reminder of his chains, and, I believe, looked forward to the date of his enfranchisement with mere alarm.  For he had no sense of shame in the position; complained of nothing but the defective table of his place of exile; regretted nothing but the fowls and eggs and fish of his own more favoured island.  And as for his parishioners, they did not think one hair the less of him.  A schoolboy, mulcted in ten thousand lines of Greek and dwelling sequestered in the dormitories, enjoys unabated consideration from his fellows.  So with Taniera: a marked man, not a dishonoured; having fallen under the lash of the unthinkable gods; a Job, perhaps, or say a Taniera in the den of lions.  Songs are likely made and sung about this saintly Robin Hood.  On the other hand, he was even highly qualified for his office in the Church; being by nature a grave, considerate, and kindly man; his face rugged and serious, his smile bright; the master of several trades, a builder both of boats and houses; endowed with a fine pulpit voice; endowed besides with such a gift of eloquence that at the grave of the late chief of Fakarava he set all the assistants weeping.  I never met a man of a mind more ecclesiastical; he loved to dispute and to inform himself of doctrine and the history of sects; and when I showed him the cuts in a volume of Chambers’s
Encyclopaedia
- except for one of an ape - reserved his whole enthusiasm for cardinals’ hats, censers, candlesticks, and cathedrals.  Methought when he looked upon the cardinal’s hat a voice said low in his ear: ‘Your foot is on the ladder.’