n the silence considered proper to the serious business of
eating, each dipped index and second finger into the bowl, and
neatly conveyed a portion of the sticky mass to his mouth, returning
the fingers to the bowl cleansed of the last particle. Little
children, beginning to eat _popoi_ ere they were fairly weaned, put
their whole hands into the dish, and often the lean and mangy curs
that dragged out a wretched dog's existence about the _paepaes_ were
not deprived of their turn.

If one accept the germ theory, one may find in the _popoi_ bowl a
cause for the rapid spread of epidemics since the whites brought
disease to the islands.

CHAPTER XII

A walk in the jungle; the old woman in the breadfruit tree; a night
in a native hut on the mountain.

Atuona Valley was dozing, as was its wont in the afternoons, when
the governor, accompanied by the guardian of the palace, each
carrying a shot-gun, invited me to go up the mountain to shoot
_kukus_ for dinner. The _kuku_ is a small green turtle-dove, very
common in the islands, and called also _u'u_ and _kukupa_. Under any
of these names the green-feathered morsel is excellent eating when
broiled or fried.

I did not take a gun, as, unless hunger demands it, I do not like to
kill. We started out together, climbing the trail in single file,
but the enthusiasm of the chase soon led my companions into the
deeper brush where the little doves lured them, and only the sharp
crack of an occasional shot wakening the echoes of the cliffs
disturbed my solitude.

The dark stillness of the deep valley, where the shadows of the
mountains fell upon groves of cocoanuts and miles of tangled bush,
recalled to me a canon in New York City, in the center of the world
of finance, gloomy even at noon, the sky-touching buildings darkening
the street and the spirits of the dwellers like mountains. There,
when at an unsual moment I had come from the artificially-lighted
cage of a thousand slaves to money-getting, and found the street for
a second deserted, no figure of animal or human in its sombre sweep,
I had the same sensation of solitude and awe as in this jungle.
Suddenly a multitude of people had debouched from many points, and
shattered the impression.

But here, in Atuona Valley, the hoot of the owl, the _kouku_, which
in Malay is the ghost-bird, the _burong-hantu_, seemed to deepen the
silence. Does not that word _hantu_, meaning in Malay an evil spirit,
have some obscure c