and natural power that would have surprised and
helped Europe.

They needed no physical regeneration. They were better born into
health and purity--bloody as were some of their customs--than most
of us. Their bodies had not become a burden on the soul, but, light
and strong and unrestrained, were a part of it. They did not know
that they had bodies; they only leaped, danced, flung themselves in
and out of the sea, part of a large, happy, and harmonious universe.

If to that superb, almost perfect, physical base that nature had
given these Marquesans, to that sweetness simplicity, generosity,
and trust acknowledged by all who know them, there could have been
added a knowledge of the things we have learned; if by example and
kindness they could have been given rounded and informed intelligence,
what living there would have been in these islands!

All they needed was a brother who walked in the sunlight and showed
the way.

CHAPTER XVI

A savage dance, a drama of the sea, of danger and feasting; the rape
of the lettuce.

Drums were beating all the morning, thrilling the valley and
mountain-sides with their barbaric _boom-boom_. The savage beat of
them quickened the blood, stirring memories older than mankind,
waking wild and primitive instincts. Toho's eyes gleamed, and her
toes curled and uncurled like those of a cat, while she told me that
the afternoon would see an old dance, a drama of the sea, of war,
and feasting such as the islands had known before the whites came.

The air thrummed with the resonance of the drums. All morning I sat
alone on my _paepae_, hearing them beat. The sound carried one back
to the days when men first tied the skins of animals about hollow
tree-trunks and thumped them to call the naked tribes together under
the oaks of England. Those great drums beaten by the hands of
Haabunai and Song of the Nightingale made one want to be a savage,
to throw a spear, to dance in the moonlight.

Erase thirty years, and hear it in Atuona when the "long pig that
speaks" was being carried through the jungle to the dark High Place!
Then it was the thunder of the heavens, the voice of the old gods
hungry for the flesh of their enemies.

We who have become refined and diverse in our musical expression,
using a dozen or scores of instruments to interpret our subtle
emotions, cannot know the primitive and savage exaltation that
surges through the veins when the war-drum beats. To the Marquesans