me wearing
it on one side and some on the other. What struck one immediately was
the erect carriage of the women. They were tall and as straight as
sunflower-stalks, walking with a swimming gait. They were graceful
even when old. Those dark women and men seemed to fit in perfectly
with the marvelous background of the cocoas, the bananas and the
brilliant foliage. The whites appeared sickly, uncouth, beside the
natives, and the white women, especially, faded and artificial.

The Noa-Noa was warped to the wharf, and I was within a few feet now
of the welcoming crowd and could discern every detail.

Those young women were well called les belles Tahitiennes. Their
skins were like pale-brown satin, but exceeding all their other charms
were their lustrous eyes. They were very large, liquid, melting, and
indescribably feminine--feminine in a way lost to Occidental women
save only the Andalusians and the Neapolitans. They were framed in
the longest, blackest, curly lashes, the lashes of dark Caucasian
children. They were the eyes of children of the sun, eyes that had
stirred disciplined seamen to desertion, eyes that had burned ships,
and created the mystery of the Bounty, eyes of enchantresses of the
days of Helen.

"Prenez-garde vous!" said Madame Aubert, the invalid,
in my ear.

Mixed now with the perfumes of the flowers was the odor of cocoanuts,
coming from the piles of copra on the dock, a sweetish, oily smell,
rich, powerful, and never in foreign lands to be inhaled without its
bringing vividly before one scenes of the tropics.

The gangway was let down. I was, after years of anticipation,
in Tahiti.

Chapter III

Description of Tahiti--A volcanic rock and coral reef--Beauty of
the Scenery--Papeete the center of the South Seas--Appearance of
the Tahitians.

Tahiti was a molten rock, fused in a subterranean furnace, and cast in
some frightful throe of the cooling sphere, high up above the surface
of the sea, the seething mass forming into mountains and valleys, the
valleys hemmed in except at their mouths by lofty barriers that stretch
from thundering central ridges to the slanting shelf of alluvial
soil which extends to the sand of the beach. It is a mass of volcanic
matter to which the air, the rain, and the passage of a million years
have given an all-covering verdure except upon the loftiest peaks,
have cut into strangely shaped cliffs, sloping hills, spacious vales,
and shadowy glens and dingles, and