Soon the demijohn of rum had been emptied into the glasses passing from hand to hand in the garden; Haabunai and Song of the Nightingale again evoked the thrumming beat of the great drums, and the dance began.  This was a tragedy of the sea, a pantomine of danger and conflict and celebration.  For centuries past the ancestors of these dancers had played it on the Forbidden Height.  Even the language in which they chanted was archaic to this generation, its words and their meanings forgotten.

The women sat upon the grass in a row, and first, in dumb show, they lifted and carried from its house to the beach a long canoe.  The straining muscles of their arms, the sway of their bodies, imitated the raising of the great boat, and the walking with its weight, the launching, the waiting for the breakers and the undertow that would enable them to pass the surf line, and then the paddling in rough water.

Meantime at a distance the men chanted in chorus, giving rhythmic time to the motions of the dancers and telling in the long-disused words the story of the drama.  And the drums beat till their rolling thunder resounded far up the valley.

After the canoe was moving swiftly through the water the women rested.  It seemed to me that the low continued chant of the men expressed a longing for freedom, for a return to nature, and a melancholy comment on the days of power and liberty gone forever.  Though no person present understood the ancient language of the song, there was no need of words to interpret the exact meaning of the dance.  Though no word had been uttered, the motions of the women would have clearly told the tale.

When they began again, the sea grew more agitated.  Now the wail of the men reproduced the sound of waves beating on the canoe, and the whistling of the wind.  The canoe was tossed high by the pounding sea; it slid dizzily down into the troughs of waves and rocked as the oarsmen fought to hold it steady.  The squall had grown into a gale, roaring upon them while they tried to hold it steady.  The canoe began to fill with water, it sank deeper and deeper, and in another moment the boatsmen were flung into the ocean.  There they struggled with the great seas; they swam; they regained the canoe; they righted it, climbed into it.  The storm subsided, the seas went down.

Again the women rested, their arms and bodies shining with perspiration.  All this time they had remained immobile from the waist downward; their naked legs folded under them like those of statues.  The chant of the men was quieter now, expressing a memory of the old gaiety now crushed by the inhibitions of the whites, by ridicule of island legends, and by the stern denunciations of priests and preachers.  Yet it was full of suggestion of days gone by and the people who had once sailed the seas among these islands.

Again the dancers raised their arms, and the canoe sailed over sunny waters.  At length it touched at an isle, it was carried through the breakers to a resting place on the sand.  Its oarsmen rejoiced, they danced a dance of thanksgiving to their gods, and wreathed the ti leaves in their hair.