waves on the beach.
Marquesans feel that eating is serious business. The devil-fish and
crabs were the delicacies, and served as dessert. Blackened by the
fire, squid and crustacean were eaten without condiment, the
tentacles being devoured as one eats celery. I was soon satisfied,
and while they lingered over their food and smoked I strolled up the
valley a little way, still feeling the pressure of that severed arm.

Hana Hevane had its people one time. They vanished as from a hundred
other valleys, before the march of progress. The kindly green of the
jungle had hidden the marks of human habitations, where once they had
lived and loved and died.

Only the bones of _La Corse_, the schooner Jerome Capriata had
sailed many years, lay rotting under a grotesque and dark banian,
never more to feel the foot of man upon the deck or to toss upon the
sea. A consoling wave lapped the empty pintles and gave the decaying
craft a caress by the element whose mistress she so long had been.
Her mast was still stepped, but a hundred centipedes crawled over
the hull.

When I returned to the fire, the boatmen were talking. Ugh! Dried-up
Stream! his stomach full and smoke in his mouth, bethought himself
of a tale, an incident of this very spot. In a sardonic manner he
began:

"The men of this island, Tahuata, in the old days descended on
Fatu-hiva to hunt the man-meat. After the battle, they brought their
captives to Hana Hevane to rest, to build a fire and to eat one of
their catch. This they did, and departed again. But when they were in
their canoes, they found they had forgotten a girl whom they had
thrown on the sand, and they returned for her. The sea was rough,
and they had to stay here on the beach for the night.

"As was the custom, they erected a gibbet, two posts and a
horizontal bar, and on the bar they hung the living prisoners, with
a cord of _parau_ bark passed through the scalp and tied around the
hair. Their arms were tied behind them, and they swung in the breeze.

"In the night, when the Tahuata men slept from their gluttony, one
of them arose silently and unbound a prisoner who was his friend,
and told him to run to the mountains. He then lay down and slept,
and in the darkness this man who had been freed returned stealthily
in the darkness, and unloosed a girl, the same who had been
forgotten on the sand. In the morning the other captives were dead,
but those who escaped were months in the fastness of the hei