the other side, a broken incline, and to the
beach. Land-crabs scrambled for their holes, the sole inhabitants of
the spot once given to chants and prayers, burials, and the sacrifice
of humans to the never-satisfied gods. There was an acrid humor in the
name of the bay on which we looked, Popoti meaning cockroach. That
malodorous insect would be on this shore when the last Tahitian was
dead. It existed hundreds of millions of years before man, and had not
changed. It was one of the oldest forms of present life, better fitted
to survive than the breed of Plato, Shakespere, or Washington. Its
insect kind was the most dangerous enemy man had: the only form of
life he had not conquered, and would be crooning cradle-songs when
humanity, perhaps through its agency, or perhaps through the sun
growing cold, had passed from the earth. Not impossibly, insects
would render extinct all other beings, and then the cockroach could
proclaim that creation had its apotheosis in it.

The marae was the cathedral of the Tahitians. About it focused all the
ceremonies of the worship of divinity, of consecration of priests and
warriors to their gods and their chiefs. The oldest marae was that of
Opoa, on the island of Raiatea, the source of the religion of these
groups. It was built by Hiro, the first king of Raiatea, who, deified
after death, became the god of thieves. The Papara marae was made of
coral, but the quarried mountain rock was laid at the foundation, and
these ponderous, uneven stones being patched with coral, in time the
blocks had become tightly cemented together. A lime-kiln was along
the land side of this marae of Oberea, and for years had furnished
the cement, plaster, and whitewash of the district.

In the rear of the marae was the ossary where the bones of the
victims were thrown. In Manila I had viewed immense heaps of these
discarded skeletons of humans dragged from niches in a wall and
flung indiscriminately on the ground by the monks, who owned the Paco
cemetery, because the rent for the niches was past due. Tetuanui said
that in his grandfather's day there was a bad odor about the ossary, as
there was in Paco until the American Government abolished the iniquity.

The altar itself was called Fatarau. Here were laid the offerings of
fruit and meat, but human victims were not exposed on it. Their bodies
were thrown into the ossary after the ceremony was completed. The
altar was always bare except at these times, and no