I bethought me of the letter Princess Noanoa Tiare had given me to the chief of Mataiea, and with a bag I departed for that village at daybreak, after taofe tau for four sous at Shin Bung Lung’s Fare Tamaaraa.  The diligence was open at the sides and roofed with an awning, and was drawn by two mules, with bells on their collars.

On the stage I paid twenty centimes a kilometre, or six and a half cents a mile.  It carried the mail, passengers, and freight.  In every district there was a mailbox on the fence of the chefferie, the chief’s office, and on the trees alongside the road at regular intervals, and the driver took mails from people who hailed him.  Arriving at a chefferie, the stage halted, the district mutoi, or native policeman-postman, appeared leisurely, opened the locked box on the diligence, looked at ease over the contents, took out what he liked, and put back the remainder, with the postings of the chefferie.

A glance at the map of Tahiti shows it shaped like a Samoan fan, or, roughly, like a lady’s hand mirror.  It is really two islands, joined by the mile-wide isthmus of Taravao.  The larger island is Poroiunu or Tahiti-nui (big Tahiti), and the smaller Taiarapu, or Tahiti-iti (little Tahiti).  Tahiti-nui is almost round; and Tahitiiti, oval.  Both are volcanic, distinct in formation.  They are united by a sedimentary piece of land long after they were raised from the ocean’s bed.

Mataiea is twenty-seven miles from Papeete, and well on toward the isthmus.

Most of our passengers were Chinese, and I realized the Asiaticizing of Tahiti.  They were store-keepers, small farmers, or laborers.  The Broom Road lay most of the way along the beach, back of the fringe of cocoanut and pandanus-trees, and between the homes and plantations of Tahitians and foreigners.  I saw all the fruits of the islands in matchless profusion, intermingled with magnificent ferns, the dazzling bougainvillea, the brilliant flamboyant-tree, and a thousand creepers and plants.  Every few minutes the road rushed to the water’s-edge, and the glowing main, with its flashing reef, and the shadowy outlines of Moorea, a score of miles away, appeared and fled.  Past villages, churches, schools, and villas, the shops of the Chinese merchants, the sheds for drying copra, rows of vanilla-vines, beaches with canoes drawn up and nets drying on sticks, men and women lolling on mats upon the eternal green carpet of the earth, girls waving hands to us, superb men, naked save for pareus, with torsos, brown, satiny, and muscled like Greek gladiators, women bathing in streams, their forms glistening, their breasts bare; and constant to the scene, dominating it, the lofty, snakelike cocoanuts and their brothers of less height and greater girth.