After that song Waylao hurried away. She was off to the native festival. There was something special on that night. As we sat in the grog shanty we could hear the drums beating the stars in with unusual vigour. A great heathen carnival was in progress, some mystical rite that commemorated the wonders of the heathen deity Pulutu.
I believe that dance was the last great primeval orgy indulged in by the Marquesan race, for gradually the officials condemned the old rites, till hardly one was left on the Government programme of the great “Permissible.”
[Illustration: FOREST SCENE, MARQUESAS GROUP]
Pious whites said it was disgraceful that people should be heard laughing and dancing in the moonlight, and so the Marquesan race died out, sat silent round their camp-fires, and one by one crept into the grave—out of deep gloom into deeper silence.
Some of those heathen dances were a bit grotesque, I must admit. They reminded one vividly of a London or Paris music hall performance, with vast mirrors on the roof and stage walls, the ballet girls, terra-cotta coloured, whirling against a background of moonlit coco-palms and distant starlit mountains.
But to return to the dance in question. Grimes and I determined to attend that festival, in fact had been invited by the old high chief from Anahao. As we left the grog shanty, Grimes was still ruminating over Waylao’s beauty, and the charm of her voice. We did not know it then, but she too must have been tramping on through the forest, ahead of us, making her way to the festival. I suppose she was really off to meet her Indian lover, Abduh, whose wretched skull, well polished, with the brains scooped out, would have made a fitting spittoon for the grog shanty by Tai-o-hae.
As we passed over the westward slopes, Father O’Leary was tugging at his bell-rope, calling his children to prayer.
The night sky was crowded with stars. The very winds were scented with the odours of romance as whiffs crept from the orange groves and the over-ripe _fies_ (bananas). It was a beautiful spot we had to cross ere we reached the native festival. As we passed along the mossy tracks we heard the island nightingales singing. High over the giant bread-fruit trees we could hear the whir of migrating, long-necked cranes, looking like whitened skeletons of dead men rushing beneath the moon. We heard the rattlings of the bones, then came their leader’s wild, crazy cry as they faded seaward. Sometimes, like a flock of frightened gnomes or dusky fairies, a group of surprised native children bobbed their shaggy heads out of the ferns of the forest floor, and vanished in the shadows, for we were approaching the natural stockade of a half-pagan, tiny city. Shadows in a hurry seemed dodging about. We heard the faint booming of drums and the weird wails of barbarian flutes and screaming bamboo fifes.