the edge of the tides, had crawled over many graves,
and its flowers, like morning-glories, hung their purple bells on
the humbler spots that no hand sought to clear.

Perhaps under these is the dust of the painter who, more than any
other man, made the Marquesas known to the world of Europe.

CHAPTER XV

Death of Aumia; funeral chant and burial customs; causes for the
death of a race.

On the _paepae_ of a poor cabin near my own lived two women, Aumia
and Taipi, in the last stages of consumption. Aumia had been, only a
few months earlier, the beauty of the island.

"She was one of the gayest," said Haabunai, "but the _pokoko_ has
taken her."

She was pitifully thin when I first saw her, lying all day on a heap
of mats, with Taipi beside her, both coughing, coughing. An epidemic
of colds had seized Atuona, brought, most probably, by the schooner
_Papeite_, for no other had arrived since the _Morning Star_.
Aumia coughed at night, her neighbor took it up, and then, like
laughter in a school, it became impossible to resist, and down to
the beach and up to the heights the valley echoed with the
distressing sounds. So, a breadfruit season ago, had Aumia coughed
for the first time, and the way she was going would be followed by
many of my neighbors.

I stopped every day to chat a moment with Aumia, and to bring her
the jam or marmalade she liked, and was too poor to buy from the
trader's store. She asked me this day if I had seen her grave. She
had heard I had visited the cemetery, and I must describe it to her.
It was the grave over which Le Moine and I had crouched from the
storm.

Aumia's husband and Haabunai, with Great Fern, had dug it and paved
it a couple of days ago, and her husband had given the others a pig
for their work, slaughtering it on the tomb of the Bishop of
Uranopolis. No thought of profanation had entered their minds; it
was convenient to lay the pig over the imposing monument, with a man
on either side holding the beast and the butcher free-handed. The
carcass had been denuded of hair in a pail of hot water and buried
underground with fire below and above him. When the meat was well
done, I had a portion of it, and Sister Serapoline, who had come in
her black nun's habit to console Aumia with the promises of the
church, ate with us, and accepted a haunch for the nun's house.

"Aumia is able to eat pig, and yet they have made her grave," I said.

"Oh, _c'est ca!_" replied the nun,