coffee-bushes, the vanilla being an
orchid, a parasite, that creeps over the upstanding plants, coffee,
or the vermillion-tree. Lermontoff said that it was a precarious
crop, a world luxury, the price of which fluctuated alarmingly. Yet
it was the most profitable in Tahiti, which produced half of all the
vanilla-beans in the world.

This man and woman made a deep impression upon me. They had seen
cities everywhere, had had position and fashion, and were, for their
advanced kind, at peace.

"We have no nerves here," said Mrs. Lermontoff. "Our neighbors are all
fishermen, and we are friends. We drink no wine, we want no tobacco. We
have health and nature; books and music supply our interests. Life
is placid, even sweet."

When I bade them good-by it was with regret. They had found a refuge,
and they had love, and yet they wanted to aid in the revolution they
believed in. I restrained myself from pointing out that Tolstoi,
at the last, forsook even his family to seek solitude and die.

Chapter XXI

A heathen temple--The great Marae of Oberea--I visit it with Rupert
Brooke and Chief Tetuanui--The Tahitian religion of old--The wisdom
of folly.

Reading one day from Captain Cook's Voyages about a heathen temple
not far from Mataiea which Cook had visited, I suggested to Brooke
that we go to it. None of the Tetuanui younger folk had seen it, but
Haamoura directed us to return toward Papara as far as the thirty-ninth
kilometer-stone, and to strike from that point towards the beach. Cook
had had a sincere friendship, if not a sweeter sentiment, for Oberea,
the high chiefess of the clan of Tevas at Papara, and whom at first
he thought queen of Tahiti. He described her as "forty years of age,
her figure large and tall, her skin white, and her eyes with great
expression." That handsome lady had led him a merry chase, her
complacent husband, Oamo, abetting her in the manner of Polynesia,
where women must have their fling. The temple Cook and his officers
inspected was the tribal church of the noble pair. The Voyages say:

The morai consisted of an enormous pile of stone work, raised in
the form of a pyramid with a flight of steps on each side, and was
nearly two hundred and seventy feet long, about one-third as wide,
and between forty and fifty feet high. As the Indians were totally
destitute of iron utensils to shape their stones, as well as mortar
to cement them when they had made them fit for use, a structure of
suc