d the steep trail on foot--mostly on one
foot--until I reached the vale of Typee.

I found myself in a loneliness indescribable and terrible. No sound
but that of a waterfall at a distance parted the somber silence. The
trail was through a thicket of ferns, trees, and wild flowers. The
perfume of _Hinano_, of the _vaovao_, with its delicate blue flowers,
and the _vaipuhao_, whose leaves are scented like violets, filled
the heavy air, and I passed acres of _kokou_, which looks like
tobacco, but has a yellow fruit of delicious odor. It was such a
garden as the prince who woke the _Sleeping Beauty_ penetrated to
reach the palace where she lay entranced, and something of the same
sense of dread magic lay upon it. Humanity was not so much absent as
gone, and a feeling of doom and death was in the motionless air,
which lay like a weight upon leaf and flower.

The thin, sharp buzzing of the _nonos_ was incessant. They had come
when man departed; there were none when Porter devastated the valley,
nor when Melville spent his happy months here thirty years later. One
must move briskly to escape them now, and I was pushing through the
bushes that strove to obliterate the trail when I came upon a native.

He was so old that he must have been a youth in the valley when it
was visited by the American-liner captain as a boy. He was quite
nude save for a ragged cincture, and his body had shrunk and puckered,
and his skin had folded and discolored until he looked as if life
had ebbed away from him and left him high and dry between the past
and the hereafter. A ragged chin beard, ashen in hue, hung below his
gaping, empty mouth. But there was a spirit in his bosom still, for
upon his head he wore a circle of bright flowers to supplement the
sparse locks.

His eyes were barely openable, and his face, indeed, his whole body,
was a coppery green, the soot of the candlenut, black itself, but
blue upon the flesh, having turned by age to a mottled and hideous
color. Only the striking patterns, where they branched from the
biceps to the chest, were plain.

That he had been one of the great of Nuka-hiva was certain; the fact
was stamped indelibly upon his person, and though worn and faded to
the ghastly green of old copper, it remained to proclaim his lineage
and his rank.

"_Kaoha te iki!_" said this ancient, as he stood in the path.

"_Kaoha e!_" I saluted him.

"_Puaka piki enata_" he said further, and pointed down the trail.

Wha