“We will rest here a few minutes, and you may bathe,” said my lovely guide.  “I have not been to Fautaua vaimato for several years, but I never forget the way.  I will make a basket, and here we will gather some fruit for our dejeuner for fear there might not be plenty at the waterfalls.”

I took off my tennis-shoes, hung my silk coat on a limb, and plunged into the pool.  Never but in the tropics does the human being fully enjoy the dash into cool water.  There it is a tingling pleasure.  I dived time and again, and then sat in the small glitter of sunlight to dry and to watch Noanoa Tiare make the basket.  She said she had a wide choice there, as the leaves of the banana, cocoanut, bamboo, pandanus, or aihere would serve.  She had selected the aihere, the common weed, and out of its leaves she deftly fashioned a basket a foot long and wide and deep.

Although she had been in Paris and London and in New York, knew how to play Beethoven and Grieg and Saint-Saens, had had gowns made by Paquin, and her portrait in the salon, she was at home in this glade as a Tahitian girl a hundred years ago.  The airs of the avenue de l’Opera in Paris, and, too, of the rue de Rivoli in Papeete, were rarefied in this simple spot to the impulses and experiences of her childhood in the groves and on the beaches of her beloved island.

When I had on my coat, we gathered limes, bananas, oranges, and a wild pineapple that grew near by in a tangle of coffee and vanilla, and the graceful acalypha.  The yellow tecoma, a choice exotic in America, shed its seeds upon the sow thistle, a salad, and the ape or wild taro.  The great leaves of the ape are like our elephant’s ear plant, and the roots, as big as war-clubs, are tubers that take the place of potatoes here.  In Hawaii, crushed and fermented, and called poi, they were ever the main food.  The juice of the leaf stings one’s skin.

The princess removed her shoes and stockings, and I carried them over my shoulder.  We deflected from the rivulet to the cliff above it, and there forced our way along the mountain-side, feeling almost by instinct the trail hidden by the mass of creepers and plants.

It was a real jungle.  Man had once dwelt there when his numbers in this island were many times greater.  Then every foot of ground from the precipices to the sea was cleared for the breadfruit, the taro, the cocoanut, and other life-giving growths, which sowed themselves and asked no cultivation.  Now, except for the faint trail, I was on primeval ground, from all appearances.

The canon grew narrower and darker.  The undefined path lay inches deep in water, and the levels were shallow swamp.  Nature was in vast luxuriance, in a revel of aloofness from human beings, casting its wealth of blazing colors and surprising shapes upon every side.  We slid down the edge of the hill to the burn, where the massive boulders and shattered rocks were camouflaged by the painting of moss and lichen, the ginger, turmeric, caladium, and dracaena, and by the overhanging palms covered with the rich bird’s-nest ferns.