Mountains

CHAPTER XVIII
Aboard the Potii Ravarava

I was awaiting Hall's arrival in Tahiti, confident that sooner or later he would keep a vague rendezvous set months before. I knew that by this time he must have penetrated far into the sea of atolls, traveling in the leisurely manner of these latitudes, transferring from one schooner to the next and stopping over—for weeks at a time, perhaps—in the tranquil and lonely communities he had grown to love. Once or twice—when a dingy Paumotu schooner, deep laden with copra and crowded with pearl divers eager for a whirl of gayety in the island capital, crept into the pass—I had word of him, but there was no hint of return.

It was a month of calms: long days when the lagoon, unruffled by the faintest cat's-paw, shimmered in the blinding sunlight, while the sea outside seemed to slumber, stirring gently and drowsily along the reef. Once, at midday, a three-masted schooner with all sails furled and Diesel engines going, came in to waken the town with the hoarse clamor of her exhaust. An hour later I met her skipper on the street.

"Your friend Hall is homeward bound," he told me. "I spoke the Potii Ravarava, a bit of a thirty-ton native schooner, off Nukatavake, and he was aboard of her—she ought to be in some time this week."

The days passed in the rapid and dreamy fashion peculiar to the South Seas. From time to time I thought of Hall and his diminutive schooner drifting about becalmed among the coral islands, or perhaps only a score of miles off Tahiti, helpless to reach the sighted land. The Potii Ravarava was a full week overdue when the calm weather came to an end. The heat was intense that afternoon, and toward sunset towering masses of cloud began to pile up along the horizon to the north. The sky grew black; there was a tense hush in the air, vibrant with the far-off rumble of thunder. When I strolled out along the waterfront the people were gathering in anxious groups before their houses; I heard snatches of talk: "Have you noticed the glass? Things have an ugly look.... Hope it doesn't mean another cyclone.... The town will catch it if the sea begins to rise."

I had heard of the hurricane of 1906, when the sea rose and reached clean into the harbor, driving the population of Papeete to the hills. On Motu Uta, an islet in the bay, a white man was living with his Paumotuan wife. When the angry seas began to race in over the reef without a pause, sweeping the islet from end to end, the watchers ashore gave the pair up for lost. But the woman was a Low-Islander, and just before dawn, when the coconut palm in which she had taken refuge was swept away, she swam six hundred yards to shore and landed through a surf a sea otter would have hesitated to attempt. Next day they found the drowned and battered body of her husband drifting with dead pigs and horses and a litter of wreckage from the lower portions of the town.

Possibly Tahiti was in for another hurricane. When I glanced at my barometer after dinner, it was falling with ominous rapidity, and at bedtime the glass stood lower than I had seen it in the South Seas. In the small hours of the morning a servant came to waken me. There was a new sound in the air—the uproar of surf breaking on the inner shore of the lagoon.

"The sea is rising," said Tara; "the waves are breaking under the purau trees, and if you do not come quickly to help me our canoe will be washed away."

The stars were hidden by black clouds, and though scarcely a breath of air stirred, the level of the lagoon was four feet above its normal limit, and the sheltered water, usually so calm, was agitated by a heavy swell. Then the rain came—drumming a thunderous monotone on my tin roof—and after the rain the wind. At dawn, though a seventy-mile gale was blowing out of the northeast, it was obvious that all danger of a hurricane was past. At midday the glass began to rise and before dark the wind was falling away perceptibly.

More than once during the night I had thought of Hall out somewhere on the wild and lonely sea to the east. The Potii Ravarava was reputed an able little boat—with proper offing she would probably come through worse than this. But she had no engine, and if she had been caught in the Paumotu—the Dangerous Archipelago, where unknown currents and a maze of reefs make navigation ticklish in the best of weather—there was cause for anxiety.

The storm blew itself out in two days' time, and on the evening of the third day I was standing on the water front with a group of traders and schooner captains. They were speaking of the Potii Ravarava, by this time the object of mild misgivings, when one of the skippers gave a sudden shout.

"There she is now!" he announced and, looking up, I saw a deeply laden little schooner, with patched grayish sails, rounding the point of Fareute. Presently she turned into the wind, dropped anchor, and sent a boat ashore—a few moments later I was welcoming Hall—very thin, raggedly dressed, and brown as a Paumotuan. His eyes were smiling, but they had in them a look unmistakable when once seen—the expression of a hunger greater than most of us have known.

"Hello!" he said. "Come along to the hotel—it must be dinner time. By Jove! I feel as though I could eat a raw shark!"

When he had eaten two dinners complete—from soup to black coffee, and beginning with soup again—he lit a cigarette and told me the story of his return from the Low Islands.

"It was all right," he began, "until we left Hao. The palm tops were still in sight on the horizon when the breeze died away, and we drifted for seven whole days in a broiling, glassy calm. It was a curious experience, but one I would not care to repeat.

"You've seen the schooner—she's not much bigger than a sea-going canoe. There were four of us aboard—Miti the skipper, a Paumotuan and a seaman by instinct, though he knows nothing of latitude or longitude; two sailors, one of whom has a horrible case of elephantiasis; and myself. We had a tremendous load of copra for so small a boat; the hold was crammed with it and the cabin stuffed to the ceiling. Opposite the companionway they had left out a few bags at the top, giving a space two feet high and just wide enough for two men to sleep side by side in case of rain or bad weather. Our stove was merely a box of sand in which a fire could be lighted, set in a little box of a galley tacked to the forward deck. If we had had anything to cook, the galley might have been useful; but Miti had given away nearly all of the ship's provisions to his relatives on Hao. They gave him a feast while some copra was being loaded, and when the job was finished he gave a feast in return. The two sailors looked sour while they watched the people opening their biscuit and salmon and bully-beef, but, after all, the prevailing winds are fair, and normally the passage to Tahiti wouldn't take more than ten days. Miti overdid the giving-away business, however. When we took stock of our kaikai on the first day of the calm I found he had saved only half a tin of biscuit and a few cans of salmon. In addition to this, we had a parting gift of a sack of drinking nuts and a couple of dozen ripe nuts some one was sending to Tahiti for seed. I had grown fed up on the sort of water these schooners carry—stale, and full of wriggling young mosquitoes—and by great good fortune I had a three-gallon demijohn, sent by Tino, of the Winship, which I filled with fresh rain water at Hao.

"My demijohn lasted precisely a day and a half. All hands drank out of it, but I did not complain of their lavishness—there was supposed to be a barrel of water somewhere below. Those were thirsty days. We rigged up an awning with part of an old mainsail; I spent most of my time lying in the hot shade, reading the one book I had with me—Froissart's Chronicles of England, France, and Spain. The days seemed interminable.... The starlight paled; the sun rose to glare down hour after hour on the face of a motionless and empty sea, and set at last on a horizon void of clouds. Sometimes I dozed; sometimes I watched the reflections of the bowsprit. It was painted gray, with a bright-red tip—and, seen in the faintly heaving water, it looked like a long, gray snake spitting fire as it writhed in graceful undulations. The sufferer from elephantiasis turned out to be an extraordinary man; it was not worth while to keep watches during the calm, and, as there was no work of any importance, he retired to the stifling cubby-hole among the copra sacks and slept—slept from dawn to darkness and from dark to dawn again. Now and then, at long intervals, he appeared on deck; once I went aft for a look at him, lying naked except for a pareu—mouth open and swollen limbs sprawled on the uneven surface of the copra. Miti and Teriaa showed a different side of native character. The schooner belonged to the captain, and keeping her trim gave him the same delight a man feels in buying pretty clothes for his mistress. The young sailor was Miti's nephew, and the pair of them worked tirelessly in the sun, scraping her rail and topsides in preparation for a fresh coat of paint. It was strange, when I was deep in Froissart's sieges and battles and stories of court life, to glance up from my book and see the vacant rim of the horizon, the silhouette of the foremast against a hot blue sky, and the two Kanakas endlessly at work—scrape, scrape, scrape; an exchange of low-toned remarks; a chuckle as they heard the gentle snores of the sleeping man below.

"Nearly every day our hopes were raised by deceitful cat's-paws, heralded by far-off streaks of blue. Some died before they reached us; others, after a preliminary rustle and flutter, filled our sails and set the schooner to moving gently on her course ... only to die away and leave the sea glassy as before.

"On the second day the sharks began to gather in their uncanny fashion, as they always do about a vessel becalmed or in distress. I spent hours watching them—ugly blots in the clear blue water, waiting with a grim and hopeful patience for some happening which would provide them with a meal. They circled about the schooner in deliberate zigzags, or lay motionless in the shadow of her side, attended always by their odd little striped pilot fish. I learned to recognize one ponderous old gray shark; he had a brace of pilot fish, one swimming on each side of his head—and he wasn't afraid of us in the least. Sometimes he lay for an hour within a yard of the vessel's side; I could see the texture of his rough skin and the almost imperceptible motion of fins and tail. I can understand now the hatred sharks inspire in men who follow the sea—it wasn't long before I decided to try to kill the big, insolent brute. We hadn't as much as a hook and line on board, but finally, with a file and the point of a rusty boat hook, I improvised a makeshift sort of spear. Armed with this, I waited by the rail until my victim came in range, and then lunged down with all my strength. The spear glanced off his tough hide; he swam away in a leisurely manner, turned, and a moment later was again beneath me. This time I struck him fair on the back, but it was like trying to kill an elephant with a penknife. I think the point of my boat hook punctured him, but he only circled off again and returned to give me another chance. In the end I gave up and left him in possession of the field.

"The nights, when the air had cooled and the stars were blazing overhead, were so beautiful that one hated to fall asleep. Reflection made sky and sea alike—dark backgrounds for the myriad lights of the constellations. Lying on deck while the others slept, I used to regret that I had not learned something of astronomy—the average native sailor knows more about the stars than I. Orion I knew; the Pleiades, which the natives, with a rather pretty fancy, call Matariki, the Little Eyes; and the Scorpion, believed in heathen times to be the great fish hook of Maui, flung into the sky by the god, when he had finished pulling up islands from the bottom of the Pacific. Each night I watched the rising of the Southern Cross, and low down in the south I saw the Magellanic clouds, streamers of star dust, like vapor impalpable and remote. In spite of my companions, sleeping quietly on deck, those nights gave me a sense of overwhelming loneliness: the languid air; the solitary ship, immobile on the face of a lifeless sea; the immense expanse of the universe, ablaze with the light of distant suns....

"When our water gave out I began to prefer the nights to the days. My demijohn, as I told you, lasted only a day and a half. After that we used the drinking nuts, and not until the last of them was gone did anyone think of investigating the water cask. There was consternation when we discovered that it contained only three or four inches of rusty water—either it leaked or the skipper was remarkably careless. Hoping all the time for a breeze or a squall of rain, we began on the half sack of ripe nuts—thin, sharp stuff for drinking, but the lot of them went in a day. Then we went on rations, dealt out from the barrel with a soup spoon. Finally the barrel was dry, and we went two days with nothing of any kind to drink. It was no joke—if you've ever had a real thirst, you'll know what I mean. The natives stood it wonderfully well; Miti did not once complain, though he remarked to me that when he got ashore he was planning to "drink too much coconut"! The victim of feefee continued his slumberous routine—I wondered if he were dreaming of rustling palms and shaded, gurgling rivulets. It was my first experience of thirst; odd what an utter animal one becomes at such a time. Waking and sleeping, my head was filled with dreams of water, brooks, rivers, lakes of cool, fresh water, in which to bury one's face and drink. I dreamed of lochs and highland burns in Scotland; of the gorge of Fautaua on Tahiti, where only a few months before I had stood in the mist, listening to the roar of the cataract.

"Well, it wasn't much fun—another day or two might have been unendurable. We had one comfort, at any rate—if you're thirsty enough, you don't worry about eating. By the time we had finished the salmon and biscuit we had ceased to bother about food. On the last night of the calm none of us slept, unless it was the sailor in his den among the copra sacks. At dawn Miti touched my shoulder and pointed to the south, where the paling stars were obscured by banks of cloud. An hour later the rain water was streaming out of the scuppers and spouting off one end of our awning into the barrel, hastily recoopered in case of leaks. When the squall passed and the sun shone down on a dark-blue leaping sea we were running before a fine breeze from the southeast.

"Now that our thirst was satisfied and we had plenty of water in reserve we discovered suddenly that we were starving. Miti prowled about below and came on deck with a package of rice, stowed away during some previous voyage. It was a valuable find, for we had nothing else to eat. There was copra, of course, which the natives will eat in a pinch, but the rancid smell of the stuff was too much for me. The wind held, and finally a day came when the skipper announced that we ought to raise Tahiti soon. About midday his nephew, who was perched in the shrouds, sang out that he had sighted land. I had a look and saw on the horizon a flat blur, like the palm tops of a distant atoll. As we drew near the land rose higher and higher out of the sea—it was Makatea, and we were more than a hundred miles north of our course. No meal I have ever eaten tasted so good as the dinner Miti's relatives gave us that night!

"We got away next morning, with a liberal stock of provisions and an additional passenger for Tahiti—a philosophic pig, who traveled lashed under one of the seats of the ship's boat. For three hours we ran before a fresh northwesterly breeze, but about nine o'clock the wind dropped and soon the sails were hanging limp in a dead calm. I began to suspect that the man with the swollen legs was a Jonah of the first order. This time, however, the calm was soon over; heavy greenish-black clouds were drifting down on us from the north; the sunlight gave place to an evil violet gloom. Miti and his two men sprang into a sudden activity; they battened down the forward hatch, put extra lashings on the boat, double-reefed the foresail, and got in everything else. Then, in the breathless calm, a downpour of rain began to lash the sea with a strange, murmuring sound. I thought of an ominous old verse:

"It was a disagreeable moment. Even the pig felt it, for when the sailors moved him to a place in the bow of the dory he refrained from the usual shrill protest. One detail sticks in my memory—when the skipper had taken his place at the wheel he gave a sudden order; the man with the swollen legs shuffled hastily to where the boat was lashed down and pulled out the plug from its bottom. Then came the wind.

"It swept down on us from the north-northeast, from the quarter in which hurricanes begin—and the first furious gust was a mild sample of what was to come. When Miti got her laid to, heading at a slight angle into the seas, I realized the splendid qualities of the little Potii Ravarava. No small vessel could have kept her decks dry in the sea that made up within an hour. The captain never left the wheel, and I doubt if there's a finer helmsman in the South Seas, but before noon the galley—with our entire supply of food—was swept clean overboard, and time after time the lashed-down boat was filled. The pig had worked himself free except for one hind leg, tied to a bottom board with a rough strip of hibiscus bark, and as the water drained out slowly through the unplugged hole astern the agitated surface would be broken by his snout, emitting sputtering screams. He lived through it, by the way.

"All of us, I believe, thought that we were in for a hurricane. Every hour the violence of the wind increased; it was a gale from the north-northeast—the wind called by the ancient Polynesians the Terrible Maoake. It seemed to rush at us in paroxysms of fury, tearing off the entire crests of waves and hurling solid water about as though it were spray. The forward hatch leaked badly; when I think of that storm my memory is filled with a nightmare of endless pumping.

"A day and a night passed, and dawn found us riding a mountainous sea, but the wind was abating and our decks were dry. The victim of elephantiasis had been taking spells with me at the pump. He is a man, that fellow, in spite of his loathsome infirmity. The pump began to suck up bubbles and froth. Miti's eyes are sharp.

"'Enough pumping,' he shouted. 'Go and sleep, you two!'

"We obeyed the order with alacrity. Sleeping on deck was out of the question; without an instant of hesitation I crawled in among the copra sacks beside my repulsive companion. When I awoke it was evening and we were running, with a heavy following wind. Miti was still at the helm; red eyed from want of sleep, but whirling the spokes dexterously as each big sea passed beneath us and gazing ahead for the first glimpse of Tahiti. The clouds broke just before dark, and we had a glimpse of the high ridges of Taiarapu, dead ahead. We got sail on her at that, and stood off to the northwest, past the Bay of Taravao and the sunken reefs of Hitiaa. Toward morning we raised Point Venus Light, but the wind failed in the lee of the island, and it took us all day to reach Papeete harbor."

Hall finished his story in the dark. The last of the diners had gone long since, and, save for ourselves, the broad veranda was empty.

"What are your plans?" I asked. "Our year in the South Seas is up. Where are you going now?"

"I have no plans," he said, "except that I doubt if I shall ever go north again. I may be wrong, but I believe I've had enough of civilization to last me the rest of my life. We are happy here. Why should we leave the islands?"

I fancy the South Seas have claimed the pair of us.

THE END