“Maru,” said the chief, when we sat on the mats at late supper after a return from the lagoon, “it is a pity you were not here when the Tahitians had their ’ar’ia and pahi, our large canoes for navigating on the moana faa aro, the landless sea.  The ’ar’ia was a double canoe, each seventy feet long, high in the stern, and lashed together, outrigger to outrigger.  A stout, broad platform was held firm between the canoes with many lashings of sennit, a strong, but yielding, framework on which was a small house of straw where the crew lived.  We had no nails, but we used wooden pegs and thousands of cocoanut-fiber ropes, so that everything, aloft and alow, was taut, but giving in the toss of the sea.

“The pahi was eighty feet long, broad in the middle, very carefully and neatly planked over inside, forming a rude bulkhead or inner casing, and had a lofty carved stem rising into one or two posts, terminating in a human form.  It was in these vessels that we made the long journeys from island to island, the migrations and the descents upon other Polynesian peoples in war.  Both the ’ar’ia and the pahi were propelled by a huge ’i’e, or mat sail of pandanus-leaves shaped like a leg of a fat hog.  In modern times these great canoes were built in Bora-Bora, the island the Hawaiians say they came from, and the name of which means ‘Land of the Big House Canoes.’  With a good wind we could sail a hundred and twenty miles a day in those vessels.  We would attend the fa’a-Rua, which we now call the ha’a-Piti, the wind that blows both ways, for we waited for the northeast or southwest trade-winds according to the direction we made for.”

The chief lifted his glass of wine, and chanted: 

    “Aue mouna, mouna o Havaii! 
    Havaii tupu ai te ahi veavea!”

    “Hail! mighty mountains, mountains of Havaii! 
    Havaii where the red, flaming fire shoots up high!”

Brooke had been to Lake Vaihiria, and suggested that I go.  The excursion had been long in my mind, for every time an eel was caught or served some one exclaimed, “Aue!  You should see the eels in Vaihiria.  But, be careful!”

The warning referred to the dangers of the climb, but also to a mysterious menace of tupapaus, or ghosts.  I had seen a canoe with the head of an eel carved in wood, and had heard often a hesitant reference to a legend of metempsychosis, of a human and eel transmigration.  The chief, after much persuasion, said that the clans of Mataiea had always believed they were descended directly from eels; that an eel of Lake Vaihiria had been the progenitor of all the people of the valley.  A vahine of another clan had been overcome by the eel’s sorcery, as Mother Eve by the serpent, which doubtless was an eel.

As the eel and the water-snakes are the only serpentine animals in Tahiti, his reasoning was sound.  The lake lies high in the mountains, at the very summit of the valley of Mataiea, and overlooks the Great Valley of Papenoo, owned by Count Polonsky, the cultivated Slav-Frenchman.