With the main course were served dried squid and porpoise, and fresh flying-fish and bonito and shrimp.  The feast was complete with mangoes, oranges, and pineapples, also bananas ripened in the expeditious way of the Marquesas.  They bury them in a deep hole lined with cracked candlenuts and grass and cover all with earth.  In several days—­and they know the right time to an hour—­the bananas are dug up, yellow and sweet.

[Illustration:  Sacred banyan tree at Oomoa]

[Illustration:  Elephantiasis of the legs]

Pae furnished a limited quantity of rum for the fete, and a cocoanut-shell filled with namu was passed about.  Every one was already enthusiastic, and after several drinks of the powerful sugar-distillation pipes were lit and palaver began.  I had to tell stories of my strange country, of the things called cities, large villages without a river through them, so big that they held tini tini tini tini mano mano mano mano people, with single houses in which more people worked than there were in all the islands.  Such a house might be higher than three or four cocoanut trees stood one on the other, and no one walked up-stairs, but rode in boxes lifted by ropes.

“How many men to a rope?” asked Pae.

The old men told me about their battles, much as at a reunion of the Grand Army of the Republic the veterans fight again the Civil war.  One man, whose tattooing striped his body like the blue bands of a convict’s suit, said that it was the custom on Fatu-hiva for the leader or chief on each side to challenge the enemy champion.

“Our army stood thirty or forty feet away from the other army,” said he, “and our chief stood still while the other threw his spear.  If it struck our chief, at once the warriors rushed into battle; if it missed, our chief had the right to go close to the other and thrust a spear through his heart.  The other stood firm and proud.  He smiled with scorn.  He looked on the spear when it was raised, and he did not tremble.  But sometimes he was saved by his courage, for our chief after looking at him with terrible eyes, said, ’O man of heart, go your way, and never dare again to fight such a great warrior as I!’

“That ended the war.  The other chief was ashamed, and led his men down to their own valley.  But if our chief had killed him, then there was war; at once we struck with the u’u and ran forward with our spears.  These battles gave many names to children, names remembering the death or wounding of the glorious deeds of the warriors.  To await calmly the spear of the other chief, the head raised, the eyes never winking, to look at the spear as at a welcome gift—­that was what our chiefs must do.  Death was not so terrible, but to leave one’s body in the hands of the foe, to be eaten, to know that one’s skull would be hung in a tree, and one’s bones made into tattoo needles or fish-hooks—! Toomanu!

“We are not the men we were.  We do not eat the ‘Long Pig’ any more, but we have not the courage, the skill, or the strength.  When the spears were thrown, and each man had but one, then the fight was with the u’u, hand to hand and eye to eye.  That was a fight of men!  The gun is the weapon of cowards.  It is the gun that fights, not the man.