Above the small blue-walled house the rocky peak of Temetiu rose steeply, four thousand feet into the air, its lower reaches clothed in jungle-vines, and trees, its summit dark green under a clear sky, but black when the sun was hidden.  Most of the hours of the day it was but a dim shadow above a belt of white clouds, but up to its mysterious heights a broken ridge climbed sheer from the valley, and upon it browsed the wild boar and the crag-loving goat.

Beside the house the river brawled through a greenwood of bread-fruit-, cocoanut-, vi-apple-, mango- and lime-trees.  The tropical heat distilled from their leaves a drowsy woodland odor which filled the two small whitewashed rooms, and the shadows of the trees, falling through the wide unglassed windows, made a sun-flecked pattern on the black stone floor.  This was the House of Lepers, now rechristened the House of the Golden Bed, which was to be my home through the unknown days before me.

The next day I watched the Morning Star lift her sails and move slowly out of the Bay of Traitors into the open sea, with less regret than I have ever felt in that moment of wistfulness which attends the departure of a sailing-ship.  Exploding Eggs, at my side, read correctly my returning eyes.  “Kaoha!” he said, with a wide smile of welcome, and with him and Vai, my next-door neighbor, I returned gladly to my paepae.

Vai, or in English, Water, was a youth of twenty years, a dandy; on ordinary occasions naked, except for the pareu about his loins, but on Sundays or when courting rejoicing in the gayest of Europeanized clothes.  He lived near me in a small house on the river-bank with his mother and sister.  All were of a long line of chiefs, and all marvelously large and handsome.

The mother, Titihuti, would have been beloved of the ancient artists who might have drawn her for an Amazon.  I have never seen another woman of such superb carriage.  Her hair was blood-red, her brow lofty, and an indescribable air of majesty and pride spoke eloquently of her descent from fathers and mothers of power.  She had wonderful legs, statuesque in mold, and tattooed from ankles to thigh in most amazing patterns.  To a Marquesan of her generation the tattooed legs of a shapely woman were the highest reach of art.

Titihuti was very proud of her legs.  Though she was devout Catholic and well aware of the contempt of the church for such vanities, religion could not entirely efface her pride.  During the first few days she passed and repassed my cabin in her walks about her household duties, lifting her tunic each day a little higher.  Her vanity would no doubt have continued this gradual course, but that one day I came upon her in the river entirely nude.  Her gratification was unconcealed; naively she displayed the innumerable whirls and arabesques of her adornment for my compliments, and thereafter she wore only a pareu when at home, entirely dropping alien standards of modesty and her gown.