Let others secretly make incisions in the flower of the cocoanut and hang calabashes to catch the juice, said he.  Or let them crook the hinges of the knee that rum might follow fawning on the whites.  Not he!  The drink of his fathers, the drink of his youth, was good enough for him!  Agilely he caught aside a leafy branch overhanging the trail, and in the flecks of sunshine and shade his naked, strong brown limbs were like the smooth stems of an aged manzanita tree.

He had not the scaly skin or the bloodshot eyes of the kava debauchee, whose excesses paint upon their victim their own vivid signs.  I remembered a figure caught by the rays of my flashlight one might on a dark trail—­a withered creature whose whole face and body had turned a dull green, and at the memory of that grisly phantom I shuddered.  But Broken Plate, on the trail ahead, called back to us that he had found a goodly bush, and without more words we clambered to it.

The kava, a variety of the pepper-plant, grows to more than six feet in height, and the specimen we had found thrust above our heads its many jointed branches rustling with large, flat leaves.  The decoction, Kivi explained, comes from the root, and we set to work to dig it.

It was huge, like a gigantic yam, and after we had torn it from the stubborn soil it taxed the strength and agility of two of us to carry it to the paepae of Broken Plate, where the feast was to be.  A dozen older women, skilled in grating the breadfruit for popoi making, awaited us there, squatting in a ring on the low platform.  The root, well washed in the river, was laid on the stones, and the women attacked it with cowry-shells, scraping it into particles like slaw.  It was of the hardness of ginger, and filled a large tanoa, or wooden trough of ironwood.

The scraping had hardly well begun, while Broken Plate and I rested from our labors, smoking pandanus-leaf cigarettes in the shade, when up the road came half a dozen of the most beautiful young girls of the village, clothed in all their finery.

Teata, with all the arrogance of the acclaimed beauty, walked first, wearing a tight-fitting gown with insertions of fishnet, evidently copied from some stray fashion-book.  She wore it as her only garment, and through the wide meshes of the novel lace appeared her skin, of the tint of the fresh-cooked breadfruit.  She passed us with a coquettish toss of her shapely head and took her place among her envious companions.

They sat on mats around the iron-wood trough and chewed the grated root, which, after thorough mastication, they spat out into banana-leaf cups.  This chewing of the Aram-root is the very being of kava as a beverage, for it is a ferment in the saliva that separates alkaloid and sugar and liberates the narcotic principle.  Only the healthiest and loveliest of the girls are chosen to munch the root, that delectable and honored privilege being refused to those whose teeth are not perfect and upon whose cheeks the roses do not bloom.