But here, in Atuona Valley, the hoot of the owl, the kouku, which in Malay is the ghost-bird, the burong-hantu, seemed to deepen the silence.  Does not that word hantu, meaning in Malay an evil spirit, have some obscure connection with our American negro “hant,” a goblin or ghost?  Certainly the bird’s long and dismal “Hoo-oo-oo” wailing through the shuddering forest evoked dim and chilling memories of tales told by candlelight when I was a child in Maryland.

Here on the lower levels I was still among the cocoanut-groves.  The trail passed through acres of them, their tall gray columns rising like cathedral arches eighty feet above a green mat of creeping vines.  Again it dipped into the woods, where one or two palms struggled upward from a clutching jungle.  Everywhere I saw the nuts tied by their natural stems in clumps of forty or fifty and fastened to limbs which had been cut and lashed between trees.  These had been gathered by climbers and left thus to be collected for drying into copra.

Constantly the ripe nuts not yet gathered fell about me.  These heavy missiles, many six or seven pounds in weight, fell from heights of fifty to one hundred feet and struck the earth with a dull sound.  The roads and trails were littered with them.  They fall every hour of the day in the tropics, yet I have never seen any one hurt by them.  Narrow escapes I had myself, and I have heard of one or two who were severely injured or even killed by them, but the accidents are entirely out of proportion to the shots fired by the trees.  One becomes an expert at dodging, and an instinct draws one’s eyes to the branch about to shed a mei, or the palm intending to launch a cocoanut.

As I made my way up the trail, pausing now and then to look about me, I came upon an old woman leaning feebly on a tall staff.  Although it was the hour of afternoon sleep, she was abroad for some reason, and I stopped to say “Kaoha,” to her.  A figure of wretchedness she was, bent almost double, her withered, decrepit limbs clad in a ragged pareu and her lean arms clutching the stick that bore her weight.  She was so aged that she appeared unable to hear my greeting, and replied only mutteringly, while her bleary eyes gleamed up at me between fallen lids.

Such miserable age appealed to pity, but as she appeared to wish no aid, I left her leaning on her staff, and moved farther along the trail, stopping again to gaze at the shadowed valley below while I mused on the centuries it had seen and the brief moment of a man’s life.  Standing thus, I was like to lose my own, for suddenly I heard a whirr like that of a shrapnel shell on its murderous errand, and at my feet fell a projectile.

I saw that it was a breadfruit and that I was under the greatest tree of that variety I had ever seen, a hundred feet high and spreading like a giant oak.  In the topmost branches was the tottering beldame I had saluted, and in both her hands the staff, a dozen feet long.  She was threshing the fruit from the tree with astounding energy and agility, her scanty rags blown by the wind, and her emaciated, naked figure in its arboreal surroundings like that of an aged ape.