shadowy figures, the light of candlenut torches fell on
tattooed faces and gleaming eyes. When the hunchback moved from the
tree of death, feigning to carry a platter, first to the great seats
of the chiefs, then to the wide platform below, the flesh crawled on
my bones.

"_Ai!_ They dance! _Ai! Ai! Ai!_ They danced, and they loved! All
night the drums beat. The drums! The drums! The drums!" He flung his
twisted body on the green and laughed madly, till the old banian
itself answered him. For a moment he writhed in a silence even more
ghastly than his laughter, then lay still.

"_Au!_" he said, turning over on his back. "My grandfather believed
this Pekia to be the abode of demons." He paused. "As for me, I
believe in none of them, or in any other gods." And he blew out his
breath contemptuously.

Le Moine surveyed the scene critically.

"What a picture at night, with torches flickering, and the
seats filled with men in red _pareus_! _Mais, c'est terrible!_"

He got off a hundred feet and squinted through a roll of paper.

"I wish I could paint it," he said. "It must be a big canvas, and
all dark but the torches and a few faces. _Mon dieu!_ Magnificent!"

Is cannibalism in the Marquesas a thing of the past? Do those grim
warriors who survive the new regime ever relapse? Who can say? It is
not probable, for the population of the valleys is so small and the
movements of the people so limited that absence is quickly detected.
Yet every once in awhile some one is missing.

"_Haa mate_. He has leaped into the sea. He was _paopao_. Life was
too long."

Or, if the disappearance was in crossing from one valley to another,
it is said that a rock or a fall of earth had swept the absent one
over a cliff. These are reasonable explanations, yet there persist
whispers of foul appetitites craving gratification and of old rites
revived by the _moke_, the hermits who hide in the mountains.

Two such dissappearances had occurred during my brief stay in Atuona,
and I had made little of the whispers. But now, with the hideous
laughter of the hunchback still ringing in my ears, they slipped
darkly through my mind, and I never felt the sunshine sweeter or
tasted the mountain air with more delight than when we left that
unholy place and were out on the trail again.

Our destination was a waterfall, with a pool in which we might bathe,
and after leaving the _Pekia_ we followed the stream, climbing
higher and higher from the sea.