The dance was a gambol of passion.  It was a free expression of uninhibited sex feeling.  The Hawaiian hula, the nautch, and minstrelsy combined.  So rapid was the movement, so fast the music, so strenuous the singing, and so actual the vision of the dancer, that she exhausted herself in a few minutes, and another took the turf.

A thousand years the Tahitians had had these upaupahuras.  Their national ballads, the achievements of the warrior, the fisherman, the woodsman, the canoe-builder, and the artist, had been orally recorded and impressed in this manner in the conclaves of the Arioi.  Dancing is for prose gesture what song is for the instinctive exclamation of feeling, and among primitive peoples they are usually separated; but those cultured Tahitians from time immemorial had these highly developed displays of both methods of manifesting acute sensations.  The Kamchadales of the Arctic—­curious the similarities of language and custom between these far Northerners and these far Southerners—­danced like these Tahitians, so that every muscle quivered at every moment.

The dancing in the bower was at intervals, as the desire moved the performers and bodily force allowed.  The himene went on continuously, varying with the inspiration of the dancer or the whim of the accordion-player.  They snatched this instrument from one another’s hands as the mood struck them, and among the natives, men and women alike had facility in its playing.  Pepe of Papara, and Tehau of Papeari, their eyes flashing, their bosoms rising and falling tumultuously, and their voices and bodies alternating in their expressions of passion, were joined by Temanu of Lovaina’s, the oblique-eyed girl whom they called a half-Chinese, but whose ancestral tree, she said, showed no celestial branch.  Temanu was tall, slender, serpent-like, her body flexuous and undulatory, responding to every quaver of the music.  Her uncorseted figure, with only a thin silken gown upon it, wreathed harmoniously in tortile oscillations, her long, black hair flying about her flushed face, and her soul afire with her thoughts and simulations.

Now entered the bower Mamoe of Moorea, a big girl of eighteen.  She was of the ancient chiefess type, as large as a man, perfectly modeled, a tawny Juno.  Her hair was in two plaits, wound with red peppers, and on her head a crown of tuberoses.  She wore a single garment, which outlined her figure, and her feet were bare.  She surveyed the company, and her glance fell on Landers.

She began to dance.  Her face, distinctly Semitic, as is not seldom the case in Polynesia, was fixed a little sternly at first; but as she continued, it began to glow.  She did not sing.  Her dance was the upaupa, the national dance of Tahiti, the same movement generally as that of Temanu, but without voice and more skilled.  One saw at once that she was the premiere danseuse of this isle, for all took their seats.  Her rhythmical swaying and