He stood by the open flap of the tent, a black silhouette of man and gun.  When I had clutched my own rifle and reached his side I saw in the moonlight a score of huge white beasts, some tangled in a snarling heap over the remains of our supper, others crouching on their haunches in a ring, facing us.  One of them sprang as Le Brunnec fired, and its hot breath fanned my face before my own finger pressed the trigger.

The two wounded brutes struggled on the ground until a second shot finished them, and the rest made off to a little distance, where Le Brunnec kept them with an occasional shot while I brought up the terrified ponies, snorting and plunging.  More wood thrown on the coals spread a circle of firelight about us, and Le Brunnec and I took turns in standing guard until morning, while the white dogs sat like sheeted ghosts around us and made the night hideous with howls.  One or the other of us must have dozed, for during the night the beasts dragged away the two dead and picked their bones.

These, Le Brunnec said, were the sons and daughters of dogs once friendly to humanity, and like the wild cats we had seen, they bore mute testimony to the numbers of people who once lived on this plateau.

When dawn came the mountain rats were scurrying about the meadows, but the dogs had gone afar, leaving only the two heaps of bones and the wreckage of all outside the tent to tell of their foray.  The sun flooded the mesa, disclosing myriad fern-fronds and mosses and colored petals waving in the light breeze as Le Brunnec and I went down to the stream to bathe.

Alas!  I lolled there on the bank, thinking to gaze my fill at all this loveliness, and sat upon the puke, a feathery plant exquisite to the eye, but a veritable bunch of gadflies for pricking meanness.  It is a sensitive shrub, retreating at man’s approach, its petioles folding from sight, but with all its modesty it left me a stinging reminder that I had failed to respect its privacy.

At noon we came to the hill that rises from the plateau, and found at its base a cistern, the sole token we had seen of the domain of man, except the dogs and cats that had returned to the primitive.  It was a basin cut in the solid rock, and doubtless had been the water supply of the tribes that dwelt here hemmed in by enemies.  There was about it the vague semblance of an altar, and in the brush near it we saw the black remains of a mighty paepae like that giant Marai of Papara in Tahiti, which itself seemed kin to the great pyramid temple of Borobodo in Java.  Melancholy memorials these of man, who is so like the gods, but who passes like a leaf in the wind.

Lolling in the stream that overflowed the edge of the ancient cistern, we discussed our plans.  Le Brunnec was convinced that the eva, which we had found in considerable numbers, was a rubber-tree.  He said that rubber was obtained from many trees, vines, roots, and plants, and that the sap of the eva, when dried and treated, had all the necessary bouncing qualities.  We were to estimate the number of eva trees on the plateau and size up the value of the land for a plantation.  Thus we might turn into gold that poison tree whose reddish-purple, alluring fruit has given so many Marquesans escape from life’s bitterness, whose juice wounded or mutilated warriors drank to avoid pain or contempt.