For awhile I was disposed to credit her with a sudden affection for me, but soon resolved her query into the French “Qu’est-ce que c’est que ca?  What is that?”

She was Apporo, wife of Puhei, Great Fern, she said, and she owned a house in which her father, a Chinaman, had recently died.  This house she earnestly desired to give me in exchange for the golden bed, and we struck a bargain.  I was to live in the house of Apporo and, on departing, to leave her the bed.  Great Fern, her husband, was called to seal the compact.  He was a giant in stature, dark skinned, with a serene countenance and crisp hair.  They agreed to clean the house thoroughly and to give me possession at once.

They were really mad to have the bed, in all its shiny golden beauty, and once the arrangement was made they could hardly give over examining it, crawling beneath it, smoothing the mattress and fingering the springs.  They shook it, poked it, patted it, and finally Apporo, filled with feminine pride, arrogated to herself the sole privilege of bouncing upon it.

Lam Kai Oo wailed his loss of a tenant.

“You savee thlat house belong lep’,” he argued earnestly.  “My sto’e littee dirty, but I fixum.  You go thlat lep’ house, bimeby flinger dlop, toe dlop, nose he go.”  He grimaced frightfully, and indicated in pantomime the ravages of leprosy upon the human form.

His appeal was in vain.  The Golden Bed, upraised on the shoulders of four stalwart chiefs, began its triumphal progress up the valley road.  Behind it officiously walked Exploding Eggs, puffed up with importance, regarded on all sides with respect as Tueni Oki Kiki, Keeper of the Golden Bed, but jostled for position by Apporo, envied of women.  Behind them up the rough road hastened the rest of the village, eager to see the installation of the marvel in its new quarters, and I followed the barbaric procession leisurely.

My new residence was a mile from the beach, and off the main thoroughfare, though this mattered little.  The roads built decades ago by the French are so ruined and neglected that not a thousand feet of them remain in all the islands.  No wheel supports a vehicle, not even a wheelbarrow.  Trails thread the valleys and climb the hills, and traffic is by horse and human.

My Golden Bed, lurching precariously in the narrow path, led me through tangled jungle growth to the first sight of my new home, a small house painted bright blue and roofed with corrugated iron.  Set in the midst of the forest, it was raised from the ground on a paepae, a great platform made of basalt stones, black, smooth and big, the very flesh of the Marquesas Islands.  Every house built by a native since their time began has been set on a paepae, and mine had been erected in days beyond the memory of any living man.  It was fifty feet broad and as long, raised eight feet from the earth, which was reached by worn steps.