“Our last fight we brought back four bodies.  Meat spoils quickly.  We had our feast right here where we sit now.”

Excited barking of the dogs announced the arrival of Grelet with several men.  They had rowed all the way to Oia and had sailed back, arriving by chance in time to share the abundance of our feast.  After the twelve-mile pull in the blazing sun and the toilsome journey back by night this feast was their reward, and all their pay.

Pae, reduced once more to sullen servitude, poured the rum, generous portions of it in cocoanut-shells, which the newcomers emptied as they ate, hastening soon to join the other guests on the broad veranda, where late at night a chant began.

Half a dozen men, tattooed from toes to waist and some to the roots of their hair, sat on a mat on the floor, all naked except for their pareus, the red and yellow of which shone in the light of the oil-lamps in brightening contrast to brown skins and dark blue ink.  One was far gone with fefe, his legs almost as large as those of an elephant.  He was a grotesque in hideous green.  The blue of the candlenut-ink, in bizzare designs upon body and legs, had turned a scaly greenish hue from age and kava excesses.  Revealed in the yellow light, he was like a ghastly bronze monstrosity that had known the weathering of a century.

He was the leader of the chant and, like all the others, had drunk plenty of Grelet’s rum.  The pipe was passing, and Grelet took his pull at it in the circle.  The chant was of the adventures of the day.  The hunters and specially Namu Ou Mio, the slayer of the three boars, told of the deed of prowess on the cliff-side, while the others sang of their journey and the sea.  Squatting on the mat, they bent and swayed in pantomime, telling the tales, lifting their voices in praises of their own deeds and of the virtues of Grelet.

That thrifty Swiss, in red breech-clout and spectacles, the lamplight shining on his bald head, sat in the midst of them, familiar by a score of years with their chants.  Pae filled the pipe and the bowls and joined in the chorus, while the Paumotan boys, in a shadowy recess, sipped their rum and rolled their eyes in astonished appreciation of the first joviality of their lives.  When the leader began the ancient cannibal chant, the song of war and of feasting at the High Place, the tattooed men forgot even the rum.  The nights of riot after return from the battle, the fighting qualities of their fathers, the cheer of the fires, the heat of the ovens, and the baking of the “Long Pig,” and the hours when the most beautiful girls danced naked to win the acclaim of the multitude and to honor their parents; all these they celebrated.  The leader gave the first line in a dramatic tone, and the others chanted the chorus.  Most of the verses they knew by rote, but there were improvisations that brought applause from all.