“What I do?” he asked, as if I held the answer.  “Nobody to help me work there.  I cannot make copra alone.  Even here they bring men from other place do work.  Marquesan die too fast.”

If T’yonny revered his father’s countrymen, his horse did not.  These island horses are unhappy-looking skates, though good climbers and sliders.

“You don’t need person go with you,” said the son of the former living picture.  “That horsey know.  You stay by him.”

The saddle must have been strange to the horsey, for uneasiness communicated itself from him to me as we set out, an uneasiness augmented to me by the incessant vicious pricks of the ever-present nonos.

The way led ever higher above the emerald bay of Tai-o-hae set in the jade of the forest, and valley after valley opened below as the trail edged upward on the face of sheer cliffs or crossed the little plateaus of their summits.  Hapaa lay bathed in a purple mist that hid from me the mute tokens of depopulation; Hapaa that had given Porter its thousands of naked warriors, and that now was devoid of human beings.

Dipping slightly downward again, the trail lay on the rim of a deep declivity, a sunless gulf in which the tree-tops fell away in rank below rank into dim depths of mistiness.  There was no sign of human passing on the vine-grown trail, a vague track through a melancholy wilderness that seemed to breathe death and decay.  A spirit of gloom seemed to rise from the shadowed declivity, from the silence of the mournful wood and the damp darkness of the leaf-hidden earth.

I had given myself over to musing upon the past, but suddenly in the narrowest part of the trail the beast I rode turned and took my canvas-covered toes in his yellow teeth.  A vague momentary flash of horror came over me.  Did I bestride a metempsychosized man-eater, a revenant from the bloody days of Nuka-hiva?  In those wicked eyes I saw reflected the tales of transmigatory vengeance, from the wolf of Little Red Riding Hood to the ass that one becomes who kills a Brahman.  I gave vent at the same second to a shriek of anguish and struck the animal upon the nose, the tenderest part of his anatomy within reach.  He released my foot, whirled, cavorted, and, as I seized a tree fern on the bank, went heels over head over the cliff.

T’yonny had said to “stay by horsey,” but he could not have foreseen the road he would take.  I was sorry for him as I heard the reverberations of his crashing fall.  No living thing could escape death in such a drop, for though the cliff down which he had disappeared was not absolutely perpendicular, it was nearly so.  Peering over it, I could not see his corpse, for fern and tree-top hid all below.  At least, I thought, he had surcease of all ills now.  And so I descended the steep trail on foot—­mostly on one foot—­until I reached the vale of Typee.