tream, we came upon Teata (Miss Theater),
the acknowledged beauty of Atuona, waist-deep in a pool, washing her
gowns. She was a vision of loveliness, large-eyed, tawny, her hair a
dark cascade about her fair face and bare shoulders, the crystal
water lapping her slender thighs and curling into ripples about her,
the heavy jungle growth on the banks making an emerald background to
her beauty.

"They are like the ancient Greeks," said Le Moine, "with the grace
of accustomed nudity and the poise of the barefooted. You must not
judge them by the present standards of Europe, but by the statues of
Greece or Egypt. M'a'mselle Theater there in the brook would have
been renowned in the Golden Age of Pericles. I must paint her before
she is older. They are good models, for they have no nerves and will
sit all day in a pose, though they dislike standing, and must have
their pipe or cigarette. You have seen Vanquished Often, in my own
valley of Vait-hua, whom I have painted so much. Ah, there is beauty!
One will not find her like in all the world. Paris knows nothing
like her."

Teata waved her hand at us from the brook, and flung her heavy hair
backward over her shoulder as she went on with her task. Looking
back at her before the trail wound again into the forest, I saw that
her features in repose were hard and semi-savage, the lines still
beautiful, but cast in a severe and forbidding mold.

We climbed steadily, jumping from rock to rock and clinging to the
bushes. A mile up the valley we came suddenly upon a plateau, and
saw before us the remains of an ancient _Pekia_, or High Place, a
grim and grisly monument of the days of evil gods and man-eating.

This, in the old days, was the _paepae tapu_, or Forbidden Height,
the abode of dark and terrible spirits. Upon it once stood the
temple and about it in the depths of night were enacted the rites of
mystery, when the priests and elders fed on the "long pig that speaks,"
when the drums beat till dawn and wild dances maddened the blood.

When it was built, no man can say. Centuries have looked upon these
black stones, grim as the ruins of Karnak, created by a mysterious
genius, consecrated to something now gone out of the world forever.
For ages hidden in the gloom of the forest, it was swept and
polished by hands long since dust; it was held in reverence and dread.
It was _tapu_, devoted to terrible deities, and none but the priests
or the chiefs might approach it except on n