It was barely daylight next morning when I awoke, a soft, delicious air stirring the breadfruit leaves.  I plunged into the river, and returning to my house was about to dress—­that is, to put on my pareu—­when a shriek arose from the forest.  It was sudden, sharp, and agonizing.

“Aumia mate i havaii” said Exploding Eggs, approaching to build the fire.  Literally he said, “Aumia is dead and gone below,” for the Marquesans locate the spirit world below the earth’s surface, as they do the soul below the belt.

The wailing was accompanied shortly by a sound of hammering on boards.

“The corpse goes into the coffin,” said Exploding Eggs.  The first nail had been driven but a moment after Aumia’s last breath.

All day the neighborhood was melancholy with the cries from the house.  All the lamentations were in a certain tone, as if struck from the same instrument by the hand of sorrow.  Each visitor to the house shrieked in the same manner, and all present accompanied her, so that for ten minutes after each new mourner arrived a chorus of loud wails and moans assailed my ears.  I had never known such a heart-rending exhibition of grief.

But the sorrow of these friends of Aumia was not genuine.  It could not be; it was too dramatic.  When they left the house the mourners laughed and lit cigarettes and pipes.  If no new visitor came they fell to chatting and smoking, but the sight of a fresh and unharrowed person started them off again in their mechanical, though nerve-racking, cry.

I had known Aumia well, and at noon, desiring to observe the proprieties, I stepped upon the paepae of her home.

“She loved the Menike!” shouted the old women in chorus, and they threw themselves upon me and smelt me and made as if I had been one of the dead’s husbands.  The followed me up the trail to my cabin and sat on my paepae wailing and shrieking.  It was some time before I realized that their poignant sorrow should force consolation from me.  There was not a moan as the rum went round.

I had puzzled at the exact repetition of their plaint.  Harrowing as it was, the sounds were almost like a recitation of the alphabet.  A woman who had adopted me as her nephew said they called it the “Ue haaneinei” That, literally, is “to make a weeping on the side.”  The etiquette of it was intricate and precise.  Each vowel was memorized with exactness.  It ran, as my adopted aunt repeated it over her shell of consolation, thus: 

“Ke ke ke ke ke ke ke ke ke! 
 A a a a a a a a a a a a a a! 
 E e e e e e e e e e e e e e e! 
 I i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i! 
 O o o o o o o o o o o o o o o! 
 U u u u u u u u u u u u u u u!”

To omit a vowel, to say too many, or to mix their order, would be disrespect to the spirit of the dead, and a reflection on the mourner.  Nine times the “ke,” fourteen “a’s,” fifteen “e’s,” eighteen “i’s” and fifteen “o’s” and “u’s.”