“Mais, c’est vrai!” she said, musingly.  “The Tahitian woman will not endure that.  She is on a par with the man in seeking.  Without fear and without shame, and, attendez, Maru, without any more monogamy than you men.  I have told some of those suffrage ladies of London and of Washington that we are in advance of their most determined feminism.  They will come to it.  More women than men in Europe will bring it there.”

Her long, black lashes touched her cheeks.

“We are a little sleepy, n’est-ce pas?” she asked.  “B’en, we will have a taoto.”

She made herself a pillow of leaves with her pareu, and arranging her hair in two braids, she stretched herself out, with her face toward the sky, and a cool banana-leaf laid over it.  I copied her action, and lulled by the falling water, the rippling of the pool, and the drowsy rustling of the trees, I fell fast asleep, and dreamed of Eve and the lotus-eaters.

When I awoke, the princess was refreshing her face and hands in the water.

“A hio!  Look!” she said eagerly.  “O tane and O vahine!”

In the mist above the pool at the foot of the cascade a double rainbow gleamed brilliantly.  O tane is the man, which the Tahitians call the real arch, and O vahine, the woman, the reflected bow.  They appeared and disappeared with the movement of the tiny, fleecy clouds about the sun.  The air, as dewy as early morn in the braes o’ Maxwelton, was deliciously cool.

“If you have courage and strength left,” the princess said excitedly, “we will go to the fort of Fautaua, and I will show you where the last of my people perished fighting to drive out the French invader, and where the French officials fled with the treasure-box when they feared war with England not very long ago.”

She pointed up to the brim of the precipice, where the river launched itself into the air, to drop six hundred feet before it fed the stream below.  Sheer and menacing the black walls of the crevasse loomed, as if forbidding approach, but through a network of vines and bushes, over a path seldom used, we climbed, and after half a mile more of steeps, reached the fort.  Rugged was the way, and we aided each other more than once, but rejoiced at our effort when we surmounted the summit.

The view was indescribably grand.  One felt upon the roof of the island, though the farther heights of the valley culminated in a gigantic crag-wall, a saddle only a yard across, and wooded to the apex, and above that even towered Orohena, nearly a mile and a half high, and never reached by man despite many efforts.  Tropic birds, the bo’s’ns of the sailor, their bodies whitish gray, with their two long tail-feathers, had their haunt there, and piped above the trees.  The river was a fierce torrent, and leaped into a water-hewn lava basin, where it swirled and foamed before it rushed, singing, through a stone funnel to the border of the chasm, and sprang with a dull roar into the ether.