Now they were come, bringing back the copra dried and sacked.  Seven hundred francs they had received for a ton of it from Kriech, the German merchant of Taka-Uka, from whose own groves it had been stolen by the storms.

On the morrow, their canoes laden with his goods, they would sail homeward.  One day they had tarried to raft redwood planks of California from the schooner in the bay to the site of Kivi’s new house.  So that night in gratitude he would make merry for them.  There would be much to eat, and there would be kava in plenty.  He prayed that I would join them in this feast, which would bring back the good days of the kava-drinking, which were now almost forgotten.

[Illustration:  Kivi, the kava drinker with the hetairae of the valley]

[Illustration:  A pool in the jungle]

I rose gladly from the palm-shaded mat on which I had lain vainly hoping for a breath of coolness in the close heat of the day, and girded the red pareu more neatly about my loins.  Often I had heard of the kava-drinking days before the missionaries had insisted on outlawing that drink beloved of the natives.  The traders had added their power to the virtuous protests of the priests, for kava cost the islanders nothing, while rum, absinthe, and opium could be sold them for profit.  So kava-drinking had been suppressed, and after decades of knowing more powerful stimulants and narcotics, the natives had lost their taste for the gentler beverage of their forefathers.

The French law prohibited selling, exchanging, or giving to any Marquesan any alcoholic beverage.  But the law was a dead letter, for only with rum and wine could work be urged upon the Marquesans, and I failed to reprove them even in my mind for their love of drink.  One who has not seen a dying race cannot conceive of the prostration of spirit in which these people are perishing.  That they are courteous and hospitable—­and that to the white who has ruined them—­shows faintly their former joy in life and their abounding generosity.  Now that no hope is left them and their only future is death, one cannot blame them for seizing a few moment’s forgetfulness.

Some years earlier, in the first bitterness of hopeless subjugation, whole populations were given over to drunkenness.  In many valleys the chiefs lead in the making of the illicit namu enata, or cocoanut-brandy.  In the Philippines, where millions of gallons of cocoanut-brandy are made, it is called tuba, but usually its name is arrack throughout tropical Asia.  Fresh from the flower spathes of the cocoanut-tree, namu tastes like a very light, creamy beer or mead.  It is delicious and refreshing, and only slightly intoxicating.  Allowed to ferment and become sour, it is all gall.  Its drinking then is divided into two episodes—­swallowing and intoxication.  There is no interval.  “Forty-rod” whiskey is mild compared to it.