“My forefathers and mothers ate their fill of ‘long pig’ here and danced away the night,” said Hot Tears, the hunchback, as he lighted a cigarette and sat upon the stone pulpit that once had been a wizard’s.  His heavy face, crushed down upon his crooked chest, showed not the slightest trace of fear; a pale imp danced in each of his narrowed eyes as he looked up at me.

“That banian-tree, my grandfather said, held the toua, the cord of cocoanut fiber that held the living meat suspended above the baking pit.  There, you see, among the roots—­that was the oven, above which the prisoners hung.  Here stood the great drums, and the servants of the priests beat them, till the darkness was filled with sound and all the valleys heard.

“Aue!” The hunchback leaped to the edge of the pit.  He raised his thin arms in the air, and I seemed to see, amidst the contorted limbs of the aged banian, fifty feet above, the quivering bodies swaying.  “The toua breaks!  They fall.  Here on the rocks.  They are killed with blows of the u’u, thus!  And thus the meat is cut, and wrapped in the meika aa.  Light the fire!  Pile in the wood!  It roasts!”

His ghoulish laughter rose in the dark stillness of the jungle, and the hair stirred on my scalp.  To my vision the high black seats were filled with shadowy figures, the light of candlenut torches fell on tattooed faces and gleaming eyes.  When the hunchback moved from the tree of death, feigning to carry a platter, first to the great seats of the chiefs, then to the wide platform below, the flesh crawled on my bones.

“Ai! They dance! Ai!  Ai!  Ai! They danced, and they loved!  All night the drums beat.  The drums!  The drums!  The drums!” He flung his twisted body on the green and laughed madly, till the old banian itself answered him.  For a moment he writhed in a silence even more ghastly than his laughter, then lay still.

“Au!” he said, turning over on his back.  “My grandfather believed this Pekia to be the abode of demons.”  He paused.  “As for me, I believe in none of them, or in any other gods.”  And he blew out his breath contemptuously.

Le Moine surveyed the scene critically.

“What a picture at night, with torches flickering, and the seats filled with men in red pareus! Mais, c’est terrible!”

He got off a hundred feet and squinted through a roll of paper.

“I wish I could paint it,” he said.  “It must be a big canvas, and all dark but the torches and a few faces. Mon dieu! Magnificent!”

Is cannibalism in the Marquesas a thing of the past?  Do those grim warriors who survive the new regime ever relapse?  Who can say?  It is not probable, for the population of the valleys is so small and the movements of the people so limited that absence is quickly detected.  Yet every once in awhile some one is missing.

“Haa mate.  He has leaped into the sea.  He was paopao.  Life was too long.”