I reminded him of James Huneker’s words about Gauguin:  “He is yet for the majority, though he may be the Paint God of the Twentieth century.  Paint was his passion.  With all his realism, he was a symbolist, a master of decoration.”

Past the governor’s mansion, we turned sharply up the hill.  Apart from all other dwellings, on a knoll, stood a Marquesan house.  As we followed the steep trail past it, I called, “Kaoha!”

“I hea?” said a woman, “Karavario? Where do you go?  To Calvary?”

There was a sad astonishment in her tone, that we should make the arduous climb to the cemetery where no dead of ours lay interred.

A fairly broad trail wound about the hill, the trail over which the dead and the mourners go, and the way was through a vast cocoanut-orchard, the trees planted with absolute regularity lifting their waving fronds seventy or eighty feet above the earth.  There was no underbrush between the tall gray columns of the palms, only a twisted vegetation covered the ground, and the red volcanic soil of the trail, cutting through the green, was like a smear of blood.

The road was long and hot.  Halting near the summit, we looked upward, and I was struck with emotion as when in the courtyard I saw the group of the crucifixion.  A cross forty feet high, with a Christ nailed upon it, all snow-white, stood up against the deep blue sky.  It was like a note of organ music in the great gray cathedral of the palms.

Another forty minutes climbing brought us to the foot of the white symbol.  A half-acre within white-washed palings, like any country graveyard, lay on the summit of the mountain.

To find Gauguin’s grave we began at the entrance and searched row by row.  The graves were those of natives, mounds marked by small stones along the sides, with crosses of rusted iron filigree showing skulls and other symbols of death, and a name painted in white, mildewing away.  Farther on were tombs of stone and cement, primitive and massive, defying the elements.  Upon one was graven, “Ci Git Daniel Vaimai, Kata-Kita, 1867-1907.  R.I.P.”  The grave of a catechist, a native assistant to the priests.  Beneath another lay “August Jorss,” he who had ordered the Golden Bed in which I slept.  Most conspicuous of all was a mausoleum surrounded by a high, black, iron railing brought from France.  On this I climbed to read while perched on the points: 

“Ici repose Mg.  Illustrissime et Reverendissime Rog.  Jh.  Martin,” and much more in Latin and French.  It was the imposing grave of the Bishop of Uranopolis, vicar-apostolic to the Marquesas, predecessor to Bishop le Cadre, who had no pride and whom all called plain Father David.

Suddenly rain poured down upon us, and looking about to find a shelter we saw a straw penthouse over a new and empty grave lined with stones.  We huddled beneath it, our faces toward the sea, and while the heavy rain splashed above our heads and water rushed down the slope, we gazed in silence at the magnificent panorama below.