the water-snakes are the only serpentine animals in
Tahiti, his reasoning was sound. The lake lies high in the mountains,
at the very summit of the valley of Mataiea, and overlooks the
Great Valley of Papenoo, owned by Count Polonsky, the cultivated
Slav-Frenchman.

Tiura, the chief's oldest adopted son, arranged for the journey, and
led the four of us who made it. One was an Australian, a doctor of the
bush country of Queensland, in his thirties, very tall, and strong,
though thin. He was a guest of the chief, and had walked entirely
around Tahiti, barefooted, as had Mr. and Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson,
to the consternation of the conservative English residents of Tahiti,
who wanted them to live in Papeete and hold teas. Two pleasant native
youths went with us to carry our necessities.

One cannot make the trip in the wet season, usually, but we had had
a period of quite dry weather, and were nearing the end of the rainy
period. The beginning of the Valley of Vaihiria, the next to that of
Mataiea, was reached within an hour by the crooked road that leaves the
beach. The valley was very fertile, and its picturesqueness a foretaste
of the heights. The brook that ran through it murmured that it, too,
climbed to the mountains, and would be our music on the way. The
ascent was difficult and wearisome. We walked through long grass,
over great rocks, and pulled ourselves around huge trees. The birds,
so rare near the sea-shore, sang to us, and we saw many nests of fine
moss. The scenery was different from that of the Valley of Fautaua,
which I had climbed with Fragrance of the Jasmine, more rugged, and
less captivating, yet beautiful and inspiring. The enormous blocks
of basalt often poised upon a point alarmed us, and Tiura said that
many times they had crashed down into the abyss. We saw a score of
white cascades. It seemed:

A land of streams. Some like a downward smoke,
Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go;
And some through wavering lights and shadows broke,
Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below.

We arrived at a plateau after seven hours of hard toil, almost all
the time pursuing a rocky path: it was the crown of the mountain
and the borders of the lake. Though we had surmounted only thirteen
hundred feet of vertically, we had come by such steeps that we
could not wait an instant before throwing off our light garments
and plunging into the water. The lake occupied an extinct crater,
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