Babylon, Egypt, India, Malaysia, North America, Japan, and scattered Maoris from Hawaii to New Zealand all had religious ceremonies in which the gaining and showing of power over fire was a miracle seen and believed in by priests and laity.  Modern saints and quasi-scientists had claims to similar achievements.  Dr. Dozous said he saw Bernadette, the seeress of Lourdes, hold her hands in a flame for fifteen minutes without pain or mark, he timing the incident exactly by his watch.  Daniel Dunglas Home, the famous Scottish spiritist, was certified by Sir William Crookes and Andrew Lang to handle red-hot coals in his hands, and could convey to others the same immunity.  Lang tells of a friend of his, a clergyman, whose hand was badly blistered by a coal Home put in his palm, Home attributing the accident to the churchman’s unbelieving state of mind.  Crookes, the distinguished physicist, took into his laboratory handkerchiefs in which Home had wrapped live coals, and found them “unburned, unscorched, and not prepared to resist fire.”

The scene of the Umuti was an hour’s walk up the glen of Aataroa, which began at our swimming-place.  On Thursday Choti, T’yonni, and I accompanied Raiere to the place of the tii, where the preparations for the sorcery were beginning.  We went through a continuous forest of many kinds of trees, a vast, climbing coppice, in which all the riches of the Tahitian earth were mingled with growths from abroad.  Oranges and lemons, which had sprung decades before from seeds strewn carelessly, had become giant trees of their kinds; and the lianas and parasites, guava, lantana, and a hundred species of ferns and orchids, with myriad mosses, covered every foot of soil, or stretched upon the trunks and limbs, so that exquisite tapestries garlanded the trees and hung like green and gold draperies between them.  Mape-trees prevailed, immense, weirdly shaped, often appalling in their curious buttresses, their limbs writhing as if in torture, suggestive of the old fetishism that had endowed them with spirits which suffered and spoke.  Utterly uninhabited or forsaken, there was a bare trail through this wood, which, led by Raiere, we followed, wading the Aataroa River twice, and I arriving with my mind deeply impressed by the esoteric suggestiveness of the scene.

On a level spot, under five ponderous mape-trees, eight or ten men of Tautira and of Pueu and Afaahiti were completing the oven.  They had dug a pit twenty-five feet long, eighteen wide, and five deep, with straight sides.  It had been done with exactitude at the direction of the tahua, who was staying alone in a hut near by.  The earth from the pit formed a rampart about it, but was leveled to not more than a foot’s height.  At the bottom of the umu had been laid fagots of purau-and guava-wood, and on them huge trunks of the tropical chestnut, the mape.  On the trunks were laid basaltic rocks, or lumps of lava, boulders, and the stones about, as big as a man’s head.  The oven was completed for the lighting.