The Marquesans of the present generation lack the energy to hoist and place such huge stones.Also, they lack incentive.There are plenty of pae-paes to go around, with a few thousand unoccupied ones left over.Once or twice, as we ascended the valley, we saw magnificent pae-paes bearing on their general surface pitiful little straw huts, the proportions being similar to a voting booth perched on the broad foundation of the Pyramid of Cheops.For the Marquesans are perishing, and, to judge from conditions at Taiohae, the one thing that retards their destruction is the infusion of fresh blood.A pure Marquesan is a rarity.They seem to be all half-breeds and strange conglomerations of dozens of different races.Nineteen able labourers are all the trader at Taiohae can muster for the loading of copra on shipboard, and in their veins runs the blood of English, American, Dane, German, French, Corsican, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Hawaiian, Paumotan, Tahitian, and Easter Islander.There are more races than there are persons, but it is a wreckage of races at best.Life faints and stumbles and gasps itself away.In this warm, equable clime--a truly terrestrial paradise--where are never extremes of temperature and where the air is like balm, kept ever pure by the ozone-laden southeast trade, asthma, phthisis, and tuberculosis flourish as luxuriantly as the vegetation.Everywhere, from the few grass huts, arises the racking cough or exhausted groan of wasted lungs.Other horrible diseases prosper as well, but the most deadly of all are those that attack the lungs.There is a form of consumption called "galloping," which is especially dreaded.In two months' time it reduces the strongest man to a skeleton under a grave-cloth.In valley after valley the last inhabitant has passed and the fertile soil has relapsed to jungle.In Melville's day the valley of Hapaa (spelled by him "Happar") was peopled by a strong and warlike tribe.A generation later, it contained but two hundred persons.To-day it is an untenanted, howling, tropical wilderness.
We climbed higher and higher in the valley, our unshod stallions picking their steps on the disintegrating trail, which led in and out through the abandoned pae-paes and insatiable jungle.The sight of red mountain apples, the ohias, familiar to us from Hawaii, caused a native to be sent climbing after them.And again he climbed for cocoa-nuts.I have drunk the cocoanuts of Jamaica and of Hawaii, but I never knew how delicious such draught could be till I drank it here in the Marquesas.Occasionally we rode under wild limes and oranges--great trees which had survived the wilderness longer than the motes of humans who had cultivated them.
We rode through endless thickets of yellow-pollened cassi--if riding it could be called; for those fragrant thickets were inhabited by wasps.And such wasps! Great yellow fellows the size of small canary birds, darting through the air with behind them drifting a bunch of legs a couple of inches long.A stallion abruptly stands on his forelegs and thrusts his hind legs skyward.He withdraws them from the sky long enough to make one wild jump ahead, and then returns them to their index position.It is nothing.His thick hide has merely been punctured by a flaming lance of wasp virility.
Then a second and a third stallion, and all the stallions, begin to cavort on their forelegs over the precipitous landscape.Swat! Awhite-hot poniard penetrates my cheek.Swat again!! I am stabbed in the neck.I am bringing up the rear and getting more than my share.There is no retreat, and the plunging horses ahead, on a precarious trail, promise little safety.My horse overruns Charmian's horse, and that sensitive creature, fresh-stung at the psychological moment, planks one of his hoofs into my horse and the other hoof into me.I thank my stars that he is not steel-shod, and half-arise from the saddle at the impact of another flaming dagger.
I am certainly getting more than my share, and so is my poor horse, whose pain and panic are only exceeded by mine.
"Get out of the way! I'm coming!" I shout, frantically dashing my cap at the winged vipers around me.
On one side of the trail the landscape rises straight up.On the other side it sinks straight down.The only way to get out of my way is to keep on going.How that string of horses kept their feet is a miracle; but they dashed ahead, over-running one another, galloping, trotting, stumbling, jumping, scrambling, and kicking methodically skyward every time a wasp landed on them.After a while we drew breath and counted our injuries.And this happened not once, nor twice, but time after time.Strange to say, it never grew monotonous.I know that I, for one, came through each brush with the undiminished zest of a man flying from sudden death.No;the pilgrim from Taiohae to Typee will never suffer from ennui on the way.
