I found myself in a loneliness indescribable and terrible.  No sound but that of a waterfall at a distance parted the somber silence.  The trail was through a thicket of ferns, trees, and wild flowers.  The perfume of Hinano, of the vaovao, with its delicate blue flowers, and the vaipuhao, whose leaves are scented like violets, filled the heavy air, and I passed acres of kokou, which looks like tobacco, but has a yellow fruit of delicious odor.  It was such a garden as the prince who woke the Sleeping Beauty penetrated to reach the palace where she lay entranced, and something of the same sense of dread magic lay upon it.  Humanity was not so much absent as gone, and a feeling of doom and death was in the motionless air, which lay like a weight upon leaf and flower.

The thin, sharp buzzing of the nonos was incessant.  They had come when man departed; there were none when Porter devastated the valley, nor when Melville spent his happy months here thirty years later.  One must move briskly to escape them now, and I was pushing through the bushes that strove to obliterate the trail when I came upon a native.

He was so old that he must have been a youth in the valley when it was visited by the American-liner captain as a boy.  He was quite nude save for a ragged cincture, and his body had shrunk and puckered, and his skin had folded and discolored until he looked as if life had ebbed away from him and left him high and dry between the past and the hereafter.  A ragged chin beard, ashen in hue, hung below his gaping, empty mouth.  But there was a spirit in his bosom still, for upon his head he wore a circle of bright flowers to supplement the sparse locks.

His eyes were barely openable, and his face, indeed, his whole body, was a coppery green, the soot of the candlenut, black itself, but blue upon the flesh, having turned by age to a mottled and hideous color.  Only the striking patterns, where they branched from the biceps to the chest, were plain.

That he had been one of the great of Nuka-hiva was certain; the fact was stamped indelibly upon his person, and though worn and faded to the ghastly green of old copper, it remained to proclaim his lineage and his rank.

“Kaoha te iki!” said this ancient, as he stood in the path.

“Kaoha e!” I saluted him.

“Puaka piki enata” he said further, and pointed down the trail.

What could he mean? Puaka is pig, piki is to mount or climb, and enata is man.  A great white light beat about my brow.  “The pig men climb?” Could he mean Rozinante, the steed to whom T’yonny had entrusted me, and who had so basely deserted his trust over a cliff?

I hurried on incredulous, and, in a clearing where there were three or four horses, beheld the suicide grazing upon the luscious grass.  He had lost much cuticle, and the saddle was in shreds, but the puaka piki enata was evidently in fairly good health.