“They are like the ancient Greeks,” said Le Moine, “with the grace of accustomed nudity and the poise of the barefooted.  You must not judge them by the present standards of Europe, but by the statues of Greece or Egypt.  M’a’mselle Theater there in the brook would have been renowned in the Golden Age of Pericles.  I must paint her before she is older.  They are good models, for they have no nerves and will sit all day in a pose, though they dislike standing, and must have their pipe or cigarette.  You have seen Vanquished Often, in my own valley of Vait-hua, whom I have painted so much.  Ah, there is beauty!  One will not find her like in all the world.  Paris knows nothing like her.”

Teata waved her hand at us from the brook, and flung her heavy hair backward over her shoulder as she went on with her task.  Looking back at her before the trail wound again into the forest, I saw that her features in repose were hard and semi-savage, the lines still beautiful, but cast in a severe and forbidding mold.

We climbed steadily, jumping from rock to rock and clinging to the bushes.  A mile up the valley we came suddenly upon a plateau, and saw before us the remains of an ancient Pekia, or High Place, a grim and grisly monument of the days of evil gods and man-eating.

This, in the old days, was the paepae tapu, or Forbidden Height, the abode of dark and terrible spirits.  Upon it once stood the temple and about it in the depths of night were enacted the rites of mystery, when the priests and elders fed on the “long pig that speaks,” when the drums beat till dawn and wild dances maddened the blood.

When it was built, no man can say.  Centuries have looked upon these black stones, grim as the ruins of Karnak, created by a mysterious genius, consecrated to something now gone out of the world forever.  For ages hidden in the gloom of the forest, it was swept and polished by hands long since dust; it was held in reverence and dread.  It was tapu, devoted to terrible deities, and none but the priests or the chiefs might approach it except on nights of ghastly feasting.

[Illustration:  The old cannibal of Taipi Valley]

[Illustration:  Enacting a human sacrifice of the Marquesans]

It stood in a grove of shadowy trees, which even at mid-afternoon cast a gloom upon the ponderous black rocks of the platform and the high seats where chiefs and wizards once sat devouring the corpses of their foes.  Above them writhed and twisted the distorted limbs of a huge banian-tree, and below, among the gnarled roots, there was a deep, dark pit.

We paused in a clear space of green turf delicately shaded by mango-trees walled in with ferns and grass and flowering bushes, and gazed into the gloom.  This was forbidden ground until the French came.  No road led to it then; only a narrow and dusky trail, guarded by demons of Po and trod by humans only in the whispering darkness of the jungle night, brought the warriors with the burdens of living meat to the place of the gods.  But the French, as if to mock the sacred things of the conquered, made two roads converge in this very spot, from which one wound its way over the mountains to Hanamenu and the other followed the river to an impasse in the hills.