“Pah! Foolish white-skinned man, he come here with his mouldy skull full of worms so that he may teach us also to grow old, scraggy, and full of wretched wisdom. He hears not the voices of the gods murmuring in the children’s babblings.” Then that aged scribe had laid his wrinkled hand on my head, and in sonorous, melancholy tones had said: “O Papalagi, I say, your people looker beyond the mountains at the stars for the wisdom of the great waters when ’tis only to be heard in the sweet-toned shells that are scattered on the sunny shores of childhood.”
So spake Langi. And I, who knew that we are born in fullest possession of the divine faculties only that we may grow old and sad, had at once become a true disciple of that glorious old heathen. Indeed, I almost succeeded in realizing that the peoples of the civilized world were my humble attendants, and that O Le Langi, crammed with mythology and strange tales about sad old crabs, was a heathen Solomon arrayed in the splendour of the stars. Langi could stand on the mountain peaks of supreme “ignorance,” whisper into the ear of the universe, and, listening, hear those Truths that only murmur in some great speech of silence to the soul.
I know that the light of little Ramao’s eyes also filled my soul with some strange, intuitive wisdom. When the little fellow opened his eyes wide and said:
“Oh, listen, Papalagi, to the _O le mao_ bird as it sings to the light of the mountain stars,” I did not hear a night-bird singing to its mate in the banyan trees, but I heard a soft-feathered transmutation of a blue day of ages ago singing tenderly, sadly, to some memory of its birth in the rosy eternity of the east. Ramao’s presence in that hut, where I lay sick with fever, cast a poetic glamour over my existence. One evening he rushed into the hut, and, stooping down by my bed-mat, swiftly covered my shoulders with the tappa-rug. Then he turned to the doorway and gave a whistle, and softly called out:
“Essimao, come in and see wonderful white boy who play on magic wood.”