ransported from this Tahitian
temple to the pyramids on the sands of Egypt. Forty centuries later
I could trace the same aspiration for community with deity and for
immortality of monument which had sweated a hundred thousand men
for twenty years to rear the lofty pile of Gizeh. In Borobodo, in the
jungle of Java, I had seen, as near Cairo, the proudest trophy, temple,
and tomb of king and priest humbled in the dust by the changing soul
of man in his fight to throw off the shackles of the past.

This marae had not been a place of cannibalism, as the Paepae Tapu
of the Marquesas Islands. The Tahitians had no record of ever having
eaten humans. They replied to the first whites who asked them if they
ate people:

"Do you?"

Yet when a human sacrifice was made, the presiding chief was offered
the left eye of the victim, and at least feigned to eat it. Was this
a remnant of a forgotten cannibalistic habit, or a protest of the
Tahitians and Hawaiians against the custom as not being Polynesian, but
a concession to a fashion adopted in fighting the Fijian anthropopogi?

The people of Huahine, an island near Tahiti, had a supreme god named
Tane, who might be touched only by one human being, a man selected for
that purpose. He was the sole bachelor on the island, being forbidden
to marry. Whenever the priests wanted Tane moved to a shrine, this
chap, te amo atua (the god-bearer) had to pack him on his back. The
idol was a heavy block of wood, and when his bearer wearied, it had
to appear that the god wanted to rest, for a god-bearer could not be
tired. The missionaries burned Tane with glee, after a battle between
the Christian converts and the heathen reactionaries. The progressives
won, and convinced the enemy that Tane was a wretched puppet of the
priests, so that they dragged the god from his lofty house, and kicked
him on to his funeral pyre. "There was great rejoicing in heaven that
day," says a pious English commentator.

The Polynesians had very fixed ideas upon the origin of the universe
and of man. In Hawaii, Taaroa made man out of red earth, araea,
and breathed into his nostrils. He made woman from man's bones, and
called her ivi (pronounced eve-y). At the hill of Kauwiki, on the
eastern point of the island of Maui, Hawaii, the heaven was so near
the earth that it could be reached by the thrust of a strong spear,
and is to-day called lani haahaa.

The Marquesans said that in the beginning there was no light,
li