At eight o’clock at night we were ready to depart.

The bell in the engine-room rang, the captain shouted orders from the bridge, the anchors were hoisted aboard.  The propeller began to turn.  The searchlight of the Saint Francois played upon the rocky stairway of Taha-Uka, penciled for a moment the dark line of the cliffs, swept the half circle into Atuona Inlet, and lingered on the white cross of Calvary where Gauguin lies.

The gentle rain in the shaft of light looked like quicksilver.  The smoke from the funnel mixed in the heavy air with the mist and the light, and formed a fantastic beam of vapor from the ship to the shore.  Up this stream of quivering, scintillating irradiation, as brilliant as flashing water in the sun, flew from the land thousands of gauze-winged insects, the great moths of the night, wondrous, shimmering bits of life, seeming all fire in the strange atmosphere.  Drawn from their homes in the dark groves by this marvelous illumination, they climbed higher and higher in the dazzling splendor until they reached its source, where they crumpled and died.  They seemed the souls of the island folk.

They pass mute, falling like the breadfruit in their dark groves.  Soon none will be left to tell their departed glories.  Their skulls perhaps shall speak to the stranger who comes a few decades hence, of a manly people, once magnificently perfect in body, masters of their seas, unexcelled in the record of humanity in beauty, vigor, and valor.

To-day, insignificant in numbers, unsung in history, they go to the abode of their dark spirits, calmly and without protest.  A race goes out in wretchedness, a race worth saving, a race superb in manhood when the whites came.  Nothing will remain of them but their ruined monuments, the relics of their temples and High Places, remnants of the mysterious past of one of the strangest people of time.

The Saint Francois surged past the Roberta, the old sea-wolf, worn and patched, but sturdy in the gleam of the searchlight.  Capriata, the old Corsican, stood on his deck watching us go.

I walked aft and took my last view of the Marquesas.  The tops of the mountains were jagged shadows against the sky, dark and mournful.  The arc-light swung to shine upon the mouth of the bay, and the Land of the War Fleet was blotted out in the black night.

Some day when deeper poverty falls on Asia or the fortunes of war give all the South Seas to the Samurai, these islands will again be peopled.  But never again will they know such beautiful children of nature, passionate and brave, as have been destroyed here.  They shall have passed as did the old Greeks, but they will have left no written record save the feeble and misunderstanding observations of a few alien visitors.

Apai!  Kaoha e!