ool enough at that hour to give the surface
nerves the slight shock I craved, but warmed as I lay in the limpid
water and watched the light sweeping past the reef in the swift way
of the tropics.

I danced upon the beach and pursued the land crabs to their burrows. I
hoped to see one wrench off a leg to prove what I had been told--that
if one in its movement to the salt water through the tall grass beyond
the sand, touched any filth, it clawed off the polluted leg, and that
a crab had been seen thus to deprive itself of all its eight limbs,
and after a bath to hobble back to its hole with the aid of its claws,
to remain until it had grown a complement of supports. I wondered
why it did not content itself with washing instead of mutilation. To
the biblical expounder it was an apt illustration of "cutting off an
offending member," as recommended in the Book.

At the house the family were preparing their first meal, and I
shared it with them--oranges, bananas, coffee, and rolls. The last,
with the New Zealand tinned butter, came from the Chinese store. We
sat on mats, and we drank from small bowls. The coffee was sweetened
with their own brown sugar, and the juice of nearly ripe cocoanuts,
grated and pressed, made a delicious substitute for cream. Over the
breakfast we talked, Tetuanui and Haamoura answering my questions
and taking me along the path of my inquiry into far fields of
former customs and ancient lore. They were, as their forefathers,
gifted in oral tradition, with retentive memories for their own past
and for the facts and legends of the racial history. We who have
for thousands of years put in writing our records cannot grasp the
fullness of the system by which the old Polynesian chiefs and priests,
totally without letters, or even ideographs, except in Easter Island,
kept the archives of the tribe and nation by frequent repetition of
memorized annals. So we got Homer's Odyssey, and the Song of Solomon.

What Tahiti was like before the white? That was to me a subject of
intense interest, now that I was fully aware of the situation after a
hundred and fifty years of exploitation, seventy-five years of French
domination, and thirty years of colonialism. The nature of the people
was little changed. The Tahitian was still naif, hospitable, gentle,
indolent except as to needs, valuing friendship above all things,
accepting the evangelism of many warring Christian sects as a tumult
among jealous gods and priests