A glimpse of the dismal interior did not cheer me.  I locked the door with the great iron key, spread my mat, and blew out the lantern.  Soon from out the huge brick oven where for decades Lam Kai Oo had baked his bread there stole scratching, whispering forms that slid along the slippery floor and leaped about the seats where many long since dead had sat.  I lay quiet with a will to sleep, but the hair stirred on my scalp.

The darkness was incredible, burdensome, like a weight.  The sound of the wind and the rain in the breadfruit forest and the low roar of the torrent became only part of the silence in which those invisible presences crept and rustled.  Try as I would I could recall no good deed of mine to shine for me in that shrouded confine.  The Celtic vision of my forefathers, that strange mixture of the terrors of Druid and soggarth, danced on the creaking floor, and witch-lights gleamed on ceiling and timbers.  I thought to dissolve it all with a match, but whether all awake or partly asleep, I had no strength to reach it.

Then something clammily touched my face, and with a bound I had the lantern going.  No living thing moved in the circle of its rays.  My flesh crawled on my bones, and sitting upright on my mat I chanted aloud from the Bible in French with Tahitian parallels.  The glow of a pipe and the solace of tobacco aided the rhythm of the prophets in dispelling the ghosts of the gloom, but never shipwrecked mariner greeted the dawn with greater joy than I.

In its pale light I peered through the barred windows—­the windows of the Chinese the world over—­and saw four men who had set down a coffin to rest themselves and smoke a cigarette.  They sat on the rude box covered with a black cloth and passed the pandanus-wrapped tobacco about.  Naked, except for loin-cloths, their tawny skins gleaming wet in the gray light, rings of tattooing about their eyes, they made a strange picture against the jungle growth.

They were without fire for they had got into a deep place crossing the stream and had wet their matches.  I handed a box through the bars, and by reckless use of the few words of Marquesan I recalled, and bits of French they knew, helped out by scraps of Spanish one had gained from the Chilean murderer who milked the cows for the German trader, I learned that the corpse was that of a woman of sixty years, whose agonies had been soothed by the ritual of the Catholic church.  The bearers were taking her to Calvary cemetery on the hill.

Their cigarettes smoked, they rose and took up the long poles on which the coffin was swung.  Moving with the tread of panthers, firm, noiseless, and graceful, they disappeared into the forest and I was left alone with the morning sun and the glistening leaves of the rain-wet breadfruit-trees.

On the beach an hour later I met Gedge, who asked me with a quizzical eye how I had enjoyed my first night among the Kanakas.  I replied that I had seldom passed such a night, spoke glowingly of the forest and the stream, and said that I was still determined to remain behind when the schooner sailed.