gleamed as a blot of blood on the green floor
of the hollow.

"_Vai piau!_" said Exploding Eggs. He made a sign of lifting water
in his hands, of tasting and spitting it out. The Stinking Springs
where Tufetu was slain!

They were in a fantastic gorge, through which ran a road blasted
from solid rock, stained brown and blue by the minerals in the water
that bubbled there and had carved the stone in eccentric patterns.
Bicarbonate of soda and sulphur thickened the heavy air and encrusted
the edges of the spring with yellow scum. A fitting scene for a
deadly battle, amid smells of sulphur and brimstone! But it was no
place in which to linger on a tropic day.

Taaoa Valley was narrow and deep, buried in perpetual gloom by the
shadows of the mountains. Perhaps thirty houses lined the banks of a
swift and rocky torrent. As we approached them we were met by a
sturdy Taaoan, bare save for the _pareu_ and handsomely tattooed.
His name, he said, was Strong in Battle, and I, a stranger, must see
first of all a tree of wonder that lay in the forest nearby.

Through brush and swamp we searched for it, past scores of ruined
_paepaes_, homes of the long-dead thousands. We found it at length,
a mighty tree felled to the earth and lying half-buried in vine and
shrub.

"This tree is older than our people," said Strong in Battle,
mournfully regarding its prostrate length. "No man ever remembered
its beginning. It was like a house upon a hill, so high and big. Our
forefathers worshipped their gods under it. The white men cut it to
make planks. That was fifty years ago, but the wood never dies.
There is no wood like it in the Marquesas. The wise men say that it
will endure till the last of our race is gone."

I felt the end of the great trunk, where the marks of the axe and
saw still showed, and struck it with my fist. The wood did indeed
seem hard as iron, though it seemed not to be petrified. So far as I
could ascertain from the fallen trunk, it was of a species I had
never seen.

"Twenty years ago I brought a man of Peretane (England) here to see
this tree, and he cut off a piece to take away. No white man has
looked on it since that time," said Strong in Battle. He brought an
axe from a man who was dubbing out a canoe from a breadfruit log,
and hacked away a chip for me.

We returned to the village and entered an enclosure in which a group
of women were squatting around a _popoi_ bowl.

"What does the _Menike_ seek?" they