e an American journal. After years of the newspaper
habit, reading and writing them, it had fallen away in Tahiti as
the prickly heat after a week at sea. Of what interest was it that
the divorce record was growing longer in New York, that Hinky Dink
had been reelected in Chicago, and that Los Angeles had doubled in
population. A dawn on the beach, a swim in the lagoon, the end of
the fish strike, were vastly more entertaining.

We passed the gorge of Fautaua, where Fragrance of the Jasmine and I
had had a charmed day. The pinnacles of the Diadem were black against
the eastern sky. Aorai, the tallest peak in sight, more than a mile
high, hid its head in a mass of snowy clouds.

Not far away was the mausoleum of the last king of the Society Islands,
Pomare the Fifth, with whose wide-awake widow, the queen, I had smoked
a cigarette a day ago. It was a pyramid of coral, a red funeral-urn
on top, and a red P on the facade. Pillars and roof were of the same
color, and a chain surrounded it. The tomb was rococo, glaring,
typical of the monuments in the South Seas where the aboriginal
structures of beauty or interest were destroyed by the missionaries
to please their Clapham Seminary god. Pomare, who had been the victim
of French political chicane, enjoyed now but one privilege. If his
spirit had senses, it heard the lapping of the waves upon the beach
of the lagoon across which his ancestor, the first Pomare, had come
from Moorea to be a king.

We left the Broom Road for Point Venus to see the monument to Captain
James Cook, the great mariner of these seas. The only lighthouse
on Tahiti is there. On that spot Cook and his astronomers had
observed the transit of Venus in 1769, and it was there the first
English missionaries landed from the ship Duff to convert the pagan
Tahitians. Cook has a pillar, with a plate of commemoration, in a
grove of purau-trees, cocoanuts, pandanus, and the red oleander;
Cook who is an immortal, and was loved by a queen here.

We left behind Paintua, Taunoa, Arahim, Arue and Haapape, and came
to a shore where no reef checked the waves in a yeasty line a mile or
less from the beach. The breakers roared and beat upon a black shore,
strangely different from the Tahitian strand that I had seen. For miles
a hundred feet of sable rocks, pebbles, some small and others as big as
a man's hand, lay between the receded tide and the road, and all along
huge islets of somber stone defended themselves as best