“She came down to this pool to bathe.  The pool itself was tapu save for those consecrated to the gods, yet this wretched pair crept through the lantana there on the bank, and watched her.  She stood on the rock above the pool and put off her pae, her cap of gauze, her long robe, and her pareu, all of finest tree-cloth, for in those days before the whites came our people were properly clothed.  All naked then in the sunlight, she lifted her arms toward the sky and laughed, and sat down on a rock to bathe her feet.

“Suddenly the lustful warriors sprang upon her, and stopping her cries with her own pae they swam with her into this cave.  Thought and breath had left her; she lay as one dead, and before they had attained their will they heard a sound of one approaching and singing on the rocks.  They had no time to kill her, as they had intended, that she might not bring death to them.  They left her and fled along the cliffs, barely escaping before the other man came.

“He had seen from the corner of his eye a sight of some one fleeing from the cave.  He was curious, and swam to it.  It was late in the day, for the priestess had come for the evening bath.  The sun had hidden himself behind Temetiu and the cave was dark.  The man came, then, stepping with care, and his feet found in the darkness a living body, warm and soft and perfumed with flowers.

“Then in the darkness, finding her very sweet, he yielded to the demon.  But when he brought her at last through the falling water to the evening light, he cried aloud.  He was the moa, the servant of the high priest, and this was his sister whom he loved.

“He screamed thrice, so that all the valley heard him, and then he flung her into the pool to drown.  The people saw him fleeing to the heights.  He never returned to them.  He became a moke, a sorcerer, who lived alone in the forest, dreaded by all.  He was heard shrieking in the night, and then the storms came.  His eyes were seen through the leaves on jungle trails, and he who saw died.

“Then the people gave the cave a name, the name of Enamoa, Behold the Servant of the Priest.  It was much larger then than now, as large as a grove.  But one night the people heard the noise of the falling of great rocks, and in the morning the cave was small as now.  The moke was never seen again.  He had brought down the walls of the cave upon himself, because it had seen his sin.”

Malicious Gossip, having finished her tale, slipped again beneath the green curtain of the waterfall.  When I had fought through the blinding, crashing waters and floated with aching lungs on the surface of the pool, she was donning her tunic on the rocks above it, and soon, with our clothes over our wet bodies, we strolled back to Atuona, Tahiapii smoking Kekela’s pipe.

[Illustration:  Interior of Island of Fatu-hiva, where the author walked over the mountains]