But No Sooner Had The Captain Sailed Away
Than The Whale-Boat Dropped To Pieces.
It was his fortune, some
time afterwards, to be wrecked, of all places, on that particular
island.
The Marquesan chief was ignorant of rebates and discounts;
but he had a primitive sense of equity and an equally primitive
conception of the economy of nature, and he balanced the account by
eating the man who had cheated him.
We started in the cool dawn for Typee, astride ferocious little
stallions that pawed and screamed and bit and fought one another
quite oblivious of the fragile humans on their backs and of the
slippery boulders, loose rocks, and yawning gorges. The way led up
an ancient road through a jungle of hau trees. On every side were
the vestiges of a one-time dense population. Wherever the eye could
penetrate the thick growth, glimpses were caught of stone walls and
of stone foundations, six to eight feet in height, built solidly
throughout, and many yards in width and depth. They formed great
stone platforms, upon which, at one time, there had been houses.
But the houses and the people were gone, and huge trees sank their
roots through the platforms and towered over the under-running
jungle. These foundations are called pae-paes - the pi-pis of
Melville, who spelled phonetically.
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.
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