How she held on was a mystery, for she seemed to lean out from a limb at a right angle, yet she had but a toe-hold upon it.  No part of her body but her feet touched the branch, nor had she any other support but that, yet she banged the staff about actively and sent more six-pounders down, so that I fled without further reflection.

The score of houses strung along the upper reaches of Atuona Valley were silent at this hour, and everywhere native houses were decaying, their falling walls and sunken roofs remembering the thousands who once had their homes here.  Occasionally in our own country we see houses untenanted and falling to ruin, bearing unmistakable evidences of death or desertion, and I have followed armies that devastated a countryside and slew its people or hunted them to the hills, but the first is a solitary case, and the second, though full of horror, has at least the element of activity, of moving and struggling life.  The rotting homes of the Marquesan people speak more eloquently of death than do sunken graves.

In these vales, which each held a thousand or several thousand when the blight of the white man came, the abandoned paepaes are solemn and shrouded witnesses of the death of a race.  The jungle runs over them, and only remnants remain of the houses that sat upon them.  Their owners have died, leaving no posterity to inhabit their homes; neighbors have removed their few chattels, and the wilderness has claimed its own.  In every valley these dark monuments to the benefits of civilization hide themselves in the thickets.

None treads the stones that held the houses of the dead.  They are tapu; about them flit the veinahae, the matiahae, and the etuahae, dread vampires and ghosts that have charge of the corpse and wait to seize the living.  Well have these ghoulish phantoms feasted; whole islands are theirs, and soon they will sit upon the paepae of the last Marquesan.

I reached the top of the gulch and paused to gaze at its extent.  The great hills rose sheer and rugged a mile away; the cocoanuts ceased at a lower level, and where I stood the precipices were a mass of wild trees, bushes, and creepers.  From black to lightest green the colors ran, from smoky crests and gloomy ravines to the stream singing its way a hundred feet below the trail.

A hundred varieties of flowers poured forth their perfume upon the lonely scene.  The frangipani, the red jasmine of delicious odor, and tropical gardenias, weighted the warm air with their heavy scents.

Beside the trail grew the hutu-tree with crimson-tasseled flowers among broad leaves, and fruit prickly and pear-shaped.  It is a fruit not to be eaten by man, but immemorally used by lazy fishermen to insure miraculous draughts.  Streams are dammed up and the pears thrown in.  Soon the fish become stupified and float upon the surface to the gaping nets of the poisoners.  They are not hurt in flavor or edibility.