ights of ghastly feasting.

[Illustration: The old cannibal of Taipi Valley]

[Illustration: Enacting a human sacrifice of the Marquesans]

It stood in a grove of shadowy trees, which even at mid-afternoon
cast a gloom upon the ponderous black rocks of the platform and the
high seats where chiefs and wizards once sat devouring the corpses
of their foes. Above them writhed and twisted the distorted limbs of
a huge banian-tree, and below, among the gnarled roots, there was a
deep, dark pit.

We paused in a clear space of green turf delicately shaded by
mango-trees walled in with ferns and grass and flowering bushes, and
gazed into the gloom. This was forbidden ground until the French came.
No road led to it then; only a narrow and dusky trail, guarded by
demons of Po and trod by humans only in the whispering darkness of
the jungle night, brought the warriors with the burdens of living
meat to the place of the gods. But the French, as if to mock the
sacred things of the conquered, made two roads converge in this very
spot, from which one wound its way over the mountains to Hanamenu
and the other followed the river to an _impasse_ in the hills.

"My forefathers and mothers ate their fill of 'long pig' here and
danced away the night," said Hot Tears, the hunchback, as he lighted
a cigarette and sat upon the stone pulpit that once had been a
wizard's. His heavy face, crushed down upon his crooked chest, showed
not the slightest trace of fear; a pale imp danced in each of his
narrowed eyes as he looked up at me.

"That banian-tree, my grandfather said, held the _toua_, the cord of
cocoanut fiber that held the living meat suspended above the baking
pit. There, you see, among the roots--that was the oven, above which
the prisoners hung. Here stood the great drums, and the servants of
the priests beat them, till the darkness was filled with sound and
all the valleys heard.

"_Aue!_" The hunchback leaped to the edge of the pit. He raised his
thin arms in the air, and I seemed to see, amidst the contorted
limbs of the aged banian, fifty feet above, the quivering bodies
swaying. "The _toua_ breaks! They fall. Here on the rocks. They are
killed with blows of the _u'u_, thus! And thus the meat is cut, and
wrapped in the _meika aa_. Light the fire! Pile in the wood! It
roasts!"

His ghoulish laughter rose in the dark stillness of the jungle, and
the hair stirred on my scalp. To my vision the high black seats were
filled with