However, the prospect intrigued my fancy, and finding a few days later that Ika Vaikoki, whose discerning parents had named him Ugh!  Dried-up Stream! was voyaging toward Vait-hua in a whaleboat, I offered him ten francs and two litres of rum to take me.  Remembering Neo’s suggestion, I took also two other bottles of rum.

While our whaleboat shot across the Bordelaise Channel pursued by a brisk breeze, Ugh! a wisp of a man of fifty, held the helm.  He was for all the world like a Malay pirate; I have seen his double steering a proa off the Borneo coast, slim, high-cheeked, with a sashful of saw-like knives.  Ugh! had no weapon, but his eye was a small flaming coal that made me thankful cannibalism is a thing of the past.  He had been carried through the surf to his perch upon the stern because one of his legs was useless for walking, but once he grasped the tiller, he was a seaman of skill.

The oarsmen wore turbans of pink, blue, and white muslin to protect their heads from the straight rays of the white sun.  Bright-colored pareus were about their loins, and several wore elastic sleeve-holders as ornaments on tawny arms and legs, while one, the son of Ugh! sported earrings, great hoops of gold that flashed in the sunshine.  With their dark skins, gleaming eyes, and white teeth, they were a brilliant picture against the dazzling blue of the sea.  Straight across the channel we steered for Hana Hevane, a little bay and valley guarded by sunken coral rocks over which the water foamed in white warning.  Two of the men leaped out into the waves and hunted on these rocks for squids, while we beached the boat on a shore uninhabited by any living creature but rats, lizards, and centipedes.  Several small octopi were soon brought in, and one of the men placed them on some boulders where the tide had left pools of water, and cleaned them of their poison.  He rubbed them on the stone exactly as a washerwoman handles a flannel garment, and out of them came a lather as though he had soaped them.  Suds, bubbles, and froth—­one would have said a laundress had been at work there.  He dipped them often in a pool of salt water, and not until they would yield no more suds did he give each a final rinsing and throw it on the fire made on the beach.  Suddenly a shout broke my absorption in this task.  The son of Ugh! with the gold earrings, waving his arms from amidst the surf on the reef, called to me to come and see a big feke.  As his companions were dancing about and yelling madly, I left the laundrying of the small sea-devils and splashed two hundred yards through the lagoon to the scene of excitement.  Four of the crew had attacked a giant devil-fish, which was hidden in a cave in the rocks.  From the gloom it darted out its long arms and tried to seize the strange creatures that menaced it.  The naked boatsmen, dancing just out of reach of the writhing tentacles, struck at them with long knives.  As they cut off pieces of the curling, groping gristle, I thought I heard a horrible groan from the cave, almost like the voice of a human in agony.  I stayed six feet away, for I had no knife and no relish for the game.