Strange-looking mountain men are here, dressed in shirt and kilt of cotton cloth, patterned in flowers and leaves as big as soup-plates. The former garment is a concession to Papeete--outside the town, the “pareo” or kilt alone forms the Tahitian full-dress suit. These men have come in to sell the “fei,” or wild banana, which is only found on the highest and most perilous of the mountain precipices. To get it, the Tahitian must climb where not even a goat would venture to go, and make his way back, having secured the fruit, carrying a bunch that is a heavy load, even on level ground. Many are the lives that have been lost gathering the “fei,” but the Tahitian, like all islanders, is something of a fatalist, and the death of one fruit gatherer never stops another from going a-hunting in the very same place next day.
There is something about the same “fei” that is worth noting. It is one of the standing dishes of the islands--a cooking banana, large, and well-flavoured when baked, but not so attractive on the whole as many of the other kinds. The Tahitian, however, ascribes to this variety a certain magic property, not unlike that of the fabled lotus. If you eat of the “fei,” he says, especially if you eat freely of it, you will fall under the spell. For ever, in its working, it binds you to Tahiti. You may go away, and without any intention of returning, say goodbye to the islands, and place many thousand miles of land and sea between yourself and sweet Tahiti, saying to yourself that you and Papeëte have no more to do with one another for ever.... Yet by-and-by--some day, one knows not when; it may be soon, or it may be late, but it will surely come--you will return to Tahiti. The spell of the fei will work, and draw you back again.
So the natives said, and I thought the fancy a pretty one, and wondered whether it had really any connection with the lotus myth, and then forgot all about it.
That is three years ago, and since those days I have travelled the whole world over, leaving Tahiti behind as one leaves a station passed long ago on a railway journey, upon a line that one never expects to traverse again. As I write, the snows of winter Britain lie thick outside my window, and a sea of Arctic coldness breaks in freezing green and grey upon a desolate shore. Nothing on earth seems farther away than-the warm blue waves, and flowers that never fade, and shining coral sands of Tahiti. But... there is a steamer running southward before long, and a great sunny city on the other side of the world where the island boats lie waiting at the quays. And one of those island boats, in a month or two, will carry a passenger back to Tahiti--a passenger who ate of the fei three years ago, and went away for ever, but on whom the spell of the magic fruit has worked--after all.