ers and benches black with
reminiscences of twenty thousand tradings and Chinese meals. The
windows were but half a dozen bars, and the heavy vapors of a cruel
past hung about the sombre walls. Though opium had long been
contraband, its acrid odor permeated the worn furnishings. Here with
some misgivings I prepared to spend my second night in Hiva-oa.

I left the palace late, and found the shack by its location next the
river on the main road. Midnight had come, no creature stirred as I
opened the door. The few stars in the black velvet pall of the sky
seemed to ray out positive darkness, and the spirit of Po, the
Marquesan god of evil, breathed from the unseen, shuddering forest.
I tried to damn my mood, but found no profanity utterable. Rain
began to fall, and I pushed into the den.

A glimpse of the dismal interior did not cheer me. I locked the door
with the great iron key, spread my mat, and blew out the lantern.
Soon from out the huge brick oven where for decades Lam Kai Oo had
baked his bread there stole scratching, whispering forms that slid
along the slippery floor and leaped about the seats where many long
since dead had sat. I lay quiet with a will to sleep, but the hair
stirred on my scalp.

The darkness was incredible, burdensome, like a weight. The sound of
the wind and the rain in the breadfruit forest and the low roar of
the torrent became only part of the silence in which those invisible
presences crept and rustled. Try as I would I could recall no good
deed of mine to shine for me in that shrouded confine. The Celtic
vision of my forefathers, that strange mixture of the terrors of
Druid and soggarth, danced on the creaking floor, and witch-lights
gleamed on ceiling and timbers. I thought to dissolve it all with a
match, but whether all awake or partly asleep, I had no strength to
reach it.

Then something clammily touched my face, and with a bound I had the
lantern going. No living thing moved in the circle of its rays. My
flesh crawled on my bones, and sitting upright on my mat I chanted
aloud from the Bible in French with Tahitian parallels. The glow of
a pipe and the solace of tobacco aided the rhythm of the prophets in
dispelling the ghosts of the gloom, but never shipwrecked mariner
greeted the dawn with greater joy than I.

In its pale light I peered through the barred windows--the windows
of the Chinese the world over--and saw four men who had set down a
coffin to rest themselves and smok