Charles Warren Stoddard

“ We are to cross the lava southward where it is frescoed with a wilderness of palm-trees: for when the mountain came down to the sea, flowing red-hot, but cooling almost instantly, it mowed down the forests of palms, and the trunks were not consumed, but lay half buried in the cooling lava, and now you can mark every delicate fibre of the bark in the lava, as firm as granite.
Still farther south lies the green slope that was so soon to be shaken to its foundations. I wonder if we could discover any of the peculiar loveliness that bewitched us the evening we crossed it in silence. ”

“ No sea is too broad to be compassed by an ambitious Kanack, who scents a festival from afar.
Along the crescent shores of the bay, the canoes were heaped, tier upon tier. It was as though a whole South Sea navy had been stranded, for the town was crowded with canoe-boys and all manner of natives, in gala dress. The incessant rolling of drums, the piping of bamboo-flutes, and the choruses of wandering singers began early in the dawn of the 14th August, and were expected to continue, uninterruptedly, to the evening of the 16th. Taboo regarded it all with singular indifference. ”

“ Fair weather and foul; sunlight, moonlight, and starlight; moments of confidence; oaths of eternal fidelity; plans for the future long enough to crowd a century uncomfortably; relapses, rows, recoveries; then, after many days, the water subsided, and we saw land at last.
Land, God bless it! Long, low coral reefs, with a strip of garden glorifying them; rocks towering out of the sea, palm-crowned, foam-fringed; wreaths of verdure cast upon the bosom of the ocean, forever fragrant in their imperishable beauty; and, beyond and above them all, gorgeous and glorious Tahiti. ”

“ I happened to know something about the place, and marked every inch of the scorching soil as we floated past groves of rose-wood, sandal-wood, and a hundred sorts of new and strange trees, looking dark and velvety in the distance; past strips of beach that shone like brass, while beyond them the cocoa-palms that towered above the low, brown huts of the natives seemed to reel and nod in the intense meridian heat. A moist cloud, far up the mountain, hung above a serene and sacred haunt, and under its shelter was hidden a deep valley, whose secret has been carried to the ends of the earth ”

“ Great was the astonishment of the Islanders, who looked upon him as one possessed of the Evil Spirit, and special sacrifices were offered in his behalf; but the gods were inexorable; and, after several days upon the solitary sea, a shadow, a mote, drifted toward the valley,—a canoe, with a famishing and delirious voyager, that was presently tossed and broken in the surges; then, a dark body glistened for a moment, wet with spray, and sank forever, while the shining coral reef was stained with the blood of the first-born. ”

“ They scarcely knew the thin, drawn face, with the slender, wiry fingers locked over it, but they recognized the death-stroke with prophetic instinct, and, crouching at the foot of the bed, rocked their dusky bodies to and fro, to and fro, wailing the death-wail for Zebra.
Then I longed for wings to fly away with my savage brood,—away, over seas and mountains, till the palms waved again their phantom crests in the mellow starlight, and the sea moaned upon the reef, and the rivulet leaped from crag to crag through silence and shadow: where death seemed but a grateful sleep ”

“ In the smoke of the sacrifice ascends the prayer of your race. As the incense fadeth and is scattered upon the winds of heaven, so shall your people separate, nevermore to assemble among the nations. So perish your superstitions, your necromancies, your ancient arts of war, and the unwritten epics of your kings.
Alas, Kána-aná! As the foam of the sea you love, as the fragrance of the flower you worship, shall your precious body be wasted, and your untrammelled soul pass to the realms of your fathers. ”

“ I watch the mountains, cleft with green, fern-cushioned chasms, where an occasional stream silently distills. Far up on a sun-swept ledge a white, scattering drift, looking like a rose-garden after a high wind, I know to be a flock of goats feeding. But the wind-dried and sunburnt grass under foot, the intangible dust that pervades the air, the rain-cloud in the distance, trailing its banners of crape in the sea as it bears down upon us,—these are what fret me a little, and make life a burden for the time being ”

“ The long, curving beach glistened and sparkled in the moonlight. The sea, within the reef, was like a tideless river, from whose pellucid depths, where the coral spread its wilderness of branches, an unearthly radiance was reflected. A fleet of slender canoes floated to and fro upon the water, and beyond them the creaming reef flashed like a girdle of silver, belting us in from all the world.
The crowning luxury of savage life is the multitudinous bondsman who anticipates your every wish, and makes you blush at your own poverty of invention by his suggestions of unimagined joys. ”

“ Père Fidelis was paler than ever; he caught his breath as though [257] there wasn't much of it, and the little there was wouldn't last long; Père Amabilis wiped his spectacles and looked utterly forsaken; the natives stood about in awkward, silent groups, coming forward, one by one, to shake hands, and then falling back like so many automatons. Somehow, genuine grief is never graceful: it forgets to pose itself; its muscles are perfectly slack and unreliable.
The sea looked gray and forbidding as it shook its shaggy breakers under the cliff: life was dismal enough. ”

“ Off there in the Pacific, under the vertical sun, all shadow is held at a premium. There are stationary caravans of cocoa-trees, that seem to be looking for their desert-home,—weird, slender trees, with tattered plumes, and a hopeless air about them, as though they were born to sorrow, but meant to make the best of it. Still, these fine old palms cast a thin shadow, about the size and shape of a colossal spider, and there is no comfort in trying to sit in it. Of course, there are other trees with more foliage, and vines that run riot and blossom themselves to death ”

“ Thanks for this shelter. My pillow saturated with cocoa-nut oil—ah, what savage dreams may have disturbed these sleepers! No matter. Will get a wink of sleep before daybreak. Sleep, at last,—how refreshing art thou!
Hello! the coffee-pot in a blaze again; the Nude smoking his peace-pipe; children eating and making merry. Daybreak? No; midnight, perchance,—darkness without, darkness once more (by request) within. "Come again, bright dream." Horror! the house shaken as by an earthquake,—gnashing of teeth distinctly audible; the mule undoubtedly eating up the side of the grass hut! ”

“ In leaving the leper village, I had concluded to say nothing to Joe, other than the usual "aloha" at night, when I could ride off, in the darkness, and, sleeping at the foot of the cliff, ascend it in the first light of morning, and get well on my journey before the heat of the day. We took a last walk by the rocks on the shore; heard the sea breathing its long breath under the hollow cones of lava, with a noise like a giant leper in his asthmatic agony. ”

“ I shall never meet the sea when it is bluest without thinking of one who is its child and master. I shall never see mangoes and bananas without thinking of him who is their brother, born and brought up with them. I shall never smell cassia, or clove, or jessamine, but a thought of Kána-aná will be borne upon their breath. A flying skiff, land in the far distance rising slowly, drifting sea-grasses, a clear voice burdened with melody,—all belong to him, and are a part of him. ”

“ He knew a spot where the oyster yawned in profusion, a secret cave for shelter, a forest garden of fruits, a never-failing spring, etc. Thither we would fly and domesticate ourselves. The long, curved point of land soon hid the inner waters from view. We rose and sank on the swell between the great reef and the outer rim of the island, while the sun glowed fiercely overhead and the reef howled in our ears. Still on we skimmed, the water hissing along the smooth sides of the canoe, that trembled at every fierce stroke of Hua Manu's industrious paddle. ”

“ Once the heavens were opened to us. Through the rent in the clouds we saw a great shoulder of the cliff above us, bathed in moonlight. A thousand grotesque shadows played over the face of it. Pictures came and went,—a palimpsest of mysteries. Gargoyles leered at us from under the threatening brows of the bluff; and a white spectre, shining like a star, stood on the uppermost peak, voiceless and motionless,—some living creature lost in admiration of the moon. Then the sky fell on us, and we were routed to our solitary cave.
There is a solitude of the sea that swallows up hope ”

“ For here is the philosophy of mammon left to itself: when you get to be an old native, it is your business to die; if you don't know your business, you are left to find it out: what are you good for but to bury?
Let us slip over the smooth bay, for we must look into one of these caverns. Cross in this canoe, so narrow that we cannot get into it at all, but balance ourself on its rim and hold our breath for fear of upsetting. These odd-looking out-riggers are honest enough in theory, but treacherous in practice; and a shark has his eye on us back yonder. ”

“ A round head topped his chubby shoulders, and was shaven from the neck to the crown, with a matted forelock of the blackness of darkness falling to the eyes and keeping the sun out of them. One ear was enlivened with a crescent of beaten gold, which decoration, having been won at "pitch and toss," will probably never again, in the course of human events, meet with its proper mate. On the whole, he looked just a little bit like a fan-tail pigeon with its wings plucked.
At this point my crew suddenly rose in the bows of the canoe, making several outlandish flourishes with his broad paddle. ”

“ You never find this sort of waterfall in the common way. No one can exactly point it out to you; but you must search for it yourself, and listen for its voice,—and usually listen in vain,—till, suddenly, you come upon it in a moment, almost as if by accident; and its whole quivering length glitters and glistens with jewels, where it hangs, like a necklace, on the bosom of a great cliff. It is the only visible chain that binds earth to heaven ”

“ A horse stood at pasture, with his head down, his back to the wind, and his tail glued to his side,—a picture of sublime resignation. A high mound, with a sandstone sepulchre built in the face of it, cut off half of the very red sunset, while a cactus-hedge, starred with pale pink blossoms, ran up a low hill, and made silhouette pictures against the sky.
I turned to watch a large butterfly, blown over in the late gale,—stranded, as it were, at the church-porch, and too far gone to set sail again; a white sea-bird wheeled over me in big circles, and screamed faintly ”

“ We used to lie by the hour—Kána-aná and I—watching a strip of sand on which a wild poppy was nodding in the wind. This poppy seemed to me typical of their life in the quiet valley. Living only to occupy so much space in the universe, it buds, blossoms, goes to seed, dies, and is forgotten.
These natives do not even distinguish the memory of their great dead, if they ever had any. It was the legend of some mythical god that Kána-aná told me, and of which I could not understand a twentieth part ”

“ The night-wind was laden with music, and sweet with the odors of ginger and cassia; the spume of the reef was pale as the milk of the cocoa-nuts, and the blazing embers on shore glowed like old sacrificial fires.
Then I heard a voice crying out of the shadow,—an ancient and eloquent voice,—saying: "Behold my fated race! Our days are numbered. Long have we feasted in the rich presence of a revealed deity. ”