m they played in
infancy, or a woman whose favours they had shared--the whole body of
these sentiments is outraged. To consider it too closely is to
understand, if not to excuse, these fervours of self-righteous old
ship-captains, who would man their guns, and open fire in passing, on a
cannibal island.

And yet it was strange. There, upon the spot, as I stood under the high,
dripping vault of the forest, with the young priest on the one hand, in
his kilted gown, and the bright-eyed Marquesan schoolboy on the other,
the whole business appeared infinitely distant, and fallen in the cold
perspective and dry light of history. The bearing of the priest,
perhaps, affected me. He smiled; he jested with the boy, the heir both
of these feasters and their meat; he clapped his hands, and gave me a
stave of one of the old, ill-omened choruses. Centuries might have come
and gone since this slimy theatre was last in operation; and I beheld
the place with no more emotion than I might have felt in visiting
Stonehenge. In Hiva-oa, as I began to appreciate that the thing was
still living and latent about my footsteps, and that it was still within
the bounds of possibility that I might hear the cry of the trapped
victim, my historic attitude entirely failed, and I was sensible of some
repugnance for the natives. But here, too, the priests maintained their
jocular attitude: rallying the cannibals as upon an eccentricity rather
absurd than horrible; seeking, I should say, to shame them from the
practice by good-natured ridicule, as we shame a child from stealing
sugar. We may here recognise the temperate and sagacious mind of Bishop
Dordillon.

CHAPTER XII

THE STORY OF A PLANTATION

Taahauku, on the south-westerly coast of the island of Hiva-oa--Tahuku,
say the slovenly whites--may be called the port of Atuona. It is a
narrow and small anchorage, set between low cliffy points, and opening
above upon a woody valley: a little French fort, now disused and
deserted, overhangs the valley and the inlet. Atuona itself, at the head
of the next bay, is framed in a theatre of mountains, which dominate the
more immediate settling of Taahauku and give the salient character of
the scene. They are reckoned at no higher than four thousand feet; but
Tahiti with eight thousand, and Hawaii with fifteen, can offer no such
picture of abrupt, melancholy alps. In the morning, when the sun falls
directly on their front, they stand like a vast wall: