A table fifty feet or longer was made of bamboo, the top of twenty half sections of the rounded tubes, polished by nature, but slippery for bottles and glasses.  A bench ran on both sides, and underfoot was the deep-green vegetation that covers every foot of ground in Moorea except where repeated footfalls, wheels, or labor kills it, and which is the rich stamp of tropic fertility.

The barrels of beer were unheaded, the demi-johns from Bordeaux were uncorked, and from the opened bottles the sugary odor of Tahiti rum permeated the hot air.  The captain of the Potii Moorea and the hired steward began to set the table for the dejeuner and to prepare the food, some of which was being cooked a few feet away by the steward’s kin.  The guests disposed themselves at ease to wait for the call to meat, the bandsmen lit cigarettes and tuned their instruments or talked over their program, while they wetted their throats with the rum, as admonished by the “Himene Tatou Arearea.”

I strolled down the road along the shore of the lagoon.  Here was erected the first Christian church in this archipelago.  British Protestant missionaries, who had led a precarious life in Tahiti, and fled from it to Australia in fear of their lives, were induced to come here and establish a mission.  The King of Tahiti, Pomare, had fled to Moorea after a desperate struggle with opposing clans, and he welcomed the preachers as additions to his strength.  The high priest of the district, Patii, collected all the gods under his care, and they were burned, with a Bible in sight, to the exceeding fear of the native heathen, and the holy anger of the other native clergy, who felt as Moses did when he saw his disciples worshiping a golden calf.  On the very spot I stood had been the marae, or Tahitian temple, in which the images were housed, now a rude heap of stones.  A hundred years ago exactly this exchange of deities had been made.  Alas! it could not have been the true Christ who was brought to them, for they had flourished mightily under Oro, and they began almost at once to die.  Not peace, but a sword, a sword of horrors, of frightful ills, was brought them.

There was a little canoe under a noble cocoanut-tree on the shell-strewn and crab-haunted coral beach, the roots of the palm partly covered by the salt water, and partly by a tangle of lilac marine convolvulus.  I pushed the tiny craft into the brine, and paddled off on the still water of the shining lagoon.

No faintest agitation of the surface withheld a clear view of the marvelous growths upon the bottom.  I peered into a garden of white and vari-colored flowers of stone, of fans and vases and grotesque shapes, huge sponges and waving bushes and stunted trees.  Fish of a score of shapes and of all colors of the spectrum wove in and out the branches and caverns of this wondrous parterre.

Past the creamy reef the purple ocean glittered in the nooning sun, while the motionless waters of the lagoon were turquoise and bice near by and virescent in the distance.  Looking toward the shore, the edge of milky coral sand met the green matting of moss and grass, and then the eye marked the fields of sugar-cane, the forests of false coffee on which grew the vanilla-vines, the groves of cocoanuts, and then the fast-climbing ridges and the glorious ravines, the misty heights and the grim crags.