I stopped every day to chat a moment with Aumia, and to bring her the jam or marmalade she liked, and was too poor to buy from the trader’s store.  She asked me this day if I had seen her grave.  She had heard I had visited the cemetery, and I must describe it to her.  It was the grave over which Le Moine and I had crouched from the storm.

Aumia’s husband and Haabunai, with Great Fern, had dug it and paved it a couple of days ago, and her husband had given the others a pig for their work, slaughtering it on the tomb of the Bishop of Uranopolis.  No thought of profanation had entered their minds; it was convenient to lay the pig over the imposing monument, with a man on either side holding the beast and the butcher free-handed.  The carcass had been denuded of hair in a pail of hot water and buried underground with fire below and above him.  When the meat was well done, I had a portion of it, and Sister Serapoline, who had come in her black nun’s habit to console Aumia with the promises of the church, ate with us, and accepted a haunch for the nun’s house.

“Aumia is able to eat pig, and yet they have made her grave,” I said.

“Oh, c’est ca!” replied the nun, holding the haunch carefully.  “That is the custom.  Always they used to dig them near the house, so that the sick person might see the grave, and in its digging the sick had much to say, and enjoyed it.  Now, grace a dieu! if Catholics, they are buried in consecrated ground where the body may rest serene until the trumpet sounds the final judgment.  Death is terrible, but these Marquesans make no more of it than of a journey to another island, and much less than of a voyage to Tahiti.  They die as peacefully as a good Catholic who is sure of his crown in Heaven.  And as they are children, only children, the wisest or the worst of them, the Good God will know how to count their sins.  It is those who scandalize them who shall pay dear, those wicked whites who have forsaken God, or who worship him in false temples.”

The coffin of Aumia was then beside the house, turned over so that rain might not make it unpresentable.  She had asked for it weeks before.  To the Marquesan his coffin is as important as, to us, the house the newly-married pair are to live in.  These people know that almost every foot of their land holds the bones or dust of a corpse, and this remnant of a race, overwhelmed by tragedy, can look on death only as a relief from the oppression of alien and unsympathetic white men.  They go to the land of the tupapaus as calmly as to sleep.

“I have never seen a Marquesan afraid to die,” said Sister Serapoline.  “I have been at the side of many in their last moments.  It is a terrible thing to die, but they have no fear at all.”