a moment. When I opened them, my
friends of our village were placing the prepared carcasses of pigs on
the banana-trunks, with yams, ti-roots and taro. All these were covered
with hibiscus and breadfruit leaves and the earth of the rampart, which
was heaped on to retain the heat, and steam the meat and vegetables.

I examined the feet and legs of Raiere and the two girls I had come
with, and even the delicate hairs of their calves had not been singed
by their fiery promenade.

Meanwhile all disposed themselves at ease. The solemnity of the Umuti
fell from them. Accordions, mouth-organs, and jews'-harps began to
play, and fragments of chants and himenes to sound. Laughter and
banter filled the forest as they squatted or lay down to wait for
the feast. I did not stay. The Umuti had put me out of humor for
fun and food. I lit my flambeau and plodded through the mape-wood
in a brown study, in my ears the fading strains of the arearea,
and in my brain a feeling of oneness with the eerie presences of
the silent wilderness. I was with Meshack, Shadrach, and Abednego
in their glorious trial in Nebuchadnezzar's barbaric court. I was
among the tepees of the Red Indians of North America when they leaped
unscathed through the roaring blaze of the sacred fire, and trod the
burning stones and embers in their dances before the Great Spirit.

The Umuti was not all new to me. Long ago, when I lived in Hawaii,
Papa Ita had come there from Tahiti. His umu was in the devastated
area of Chinatown, a district of Honolulu destroyed by a conflagration
purposely begun to erase two blocks of houses in which bubonic plague
recurred, and which, unchecked, caused a loss of millions of dollars.

The pit was elliptical, nine feet deep, and about twenty-four feet
long. Wood was piled in it, and rocks from the dismantled Kaumakapili
church. The fire burned until the stones became red and then white,
and they, too, were turned with long poles to make the heat even. I
inspected the heating process several times. At the hour advertised in
the American and native papers, in an enclosure built for the occasion,
with seats about the pit, the mystery was enacted. The setting was
superb, the flaming furnace of heathenism in the shadow of the lonely
ruin of the Christian edifice. Papa Ita appeared garbed in white tapa,
with a wonderful head-dress of the sacred ti-leaves and a belt of the
same. The spectators were of all nations, including many Hawaiians. The