The road was beside the stream of Fautaua, and arching it were magnificent dark-green trees, like the locust-trees of Malta.  This avenue was in the middle of the island, and looking through the climbing bow of branches I saw Maiauo, the lofty needles of rock which rise black-green from the mountain plateau and form a tiara, Le Diademe, of the French.  A quarter of an hour’s stroll brought us to a natural basin into which the stream fell.  It was of it Louis Marie Julien Viaud, shortly after he had been christened Loti, wrote: 

The pool had numerous visitors every day; beautiful young women of Papeete spent the warm tropical days here, chatting, singing and sleeping, or even diving and swimming like agile gold fish.  They went here clad in their muslin tunics, and wore them moist upon their bodies while they slept, looking like the naiads of the past.

We were already warm from walking, and I, in my pareu and light coat of pongee silk, looked longingly at the water sparkling in the sun, but the princess took me by the hand and led me on.

“It were better to go directly up the valley and out of the heat,” she advised.  “We shall have many pools to bathe in.”

It was at the next that I took from my pocket “Rarahu, ou le mariage de Loti,” a thin, poorly printed book in pink paper covers that I had possessed since boyhood, and which I had read again on the ship coming to Tahiti.  The princess, like all reading Tahiti, knew it better than I, for it was the first novel in French with its scenes in that island, and for more than forty years had been talked about there.

“Here at this pool,” she said, with her finger on the page, “Loti surprised Rarahu one afternoon when for a red ribbon she let an old and hideous Chinese kiss her naked shoulder.  Mon dieu!  That French naval officer made a bruit about a poor little Tahitian girl!  We will talk about her when we are at dejeuner.”

Dejeuner!  My heart leaped.  Whence would the luncheon come?  Had this child of Tahiti arranged beforehand that she should be met by a jinn with sandwiches and cakes?  I dared not ask.

We pushed on, and passed many residences of natives.  They were almost all of European construction, board cottages, because the houses of native sort are forbidden within the municipal limits.  Beyond them we saw no houses.  The Tahitian families were cooking their breakfasts, brought from the market, on little fires outside their houses.  They all smiled, and called to us to partake with them.

“Ia ora na!  Haere mai amu!”

“Greeting!  Come eat with us!”

They looked happy in the sunshine, the smoke curling about them in milky wreaths, the men naked except for pareus, and the children quite as born.  Fragrance of the Jasmine answered all with pleasant badinage, and each must know whither we were bound.  They thought it not at all odd, apparently, that a princess of their race should be going to the waterfalls with a foreigner, and they beamed on me to assure me of their interest and understanding.