eyes gleamed with quick and alert intelligence.
Other stripes crossed the face from temple to chin, the lowest
joining the field of blue that stretched to his waist.

His beard, long, heavy, and snow-white, swept downward over the
indigo flesh and was gathered into a knot on his massive chest. It
was the beard of a prophet or a seer, and when Kahauiti rose to his
full height, six feet and a half, he was as majestic as a man in
diadem and royal robes. He had a giant form, like one of
Buonarroti's ancients, muscular and supple, graceful and erect.

When I was presented as a _Menike_ who loved the Marquesans and who,
having heard of Kahauiti, would drink of his fountain of
recollections, the old man looked at me intently. His eyes twinkled
and he opened his mouth in a broad smile, showing all his teeth,
sound and white. His smile was kindly, disarming, of a real
sweetness that conquered me immediately, so that, foolishly perhaps,
I would have trusted him if he had suggested a stroll in the jungle.

He took my extended hand, but did not shake it. So new is
handshaking and so foreign to their ideas of greeting, that they
merely touch fingers, with the pressure a rich man gives a poor
relation, or a king, a commoner. His affability was that of a
monarch to a courtier, but when he began to talk he soon became
simple and merry.

Motioning me to a seat on the mat before him, he squatted again in a
dignified manner, and resumed his task of plaiting a rope of _faufee_
bark, a rope an inch thick and perfectly made.

"Mouth of God, of the family of Sliced and Distributed and Man Whose
Entrails Were Roasted On A Stick, has told me of the slaying of
Tufetu, their ancestor," I ventured, to steer our bark of
conversation into the channel I sought.

At the names of the first three, Kahauiti smiled, but when Tufetu
was mentioned, he broke into a roar. I had evidently recalled proud
memories. On his haunches, he slid nearer to me.

"_Afu! Afu! Afu!_" he said, the sound that in his tongue means the
groan of the dying. "You came by the _Fatueki?_".

"I tasted the water and smelled the smell," I answered.

"It was there that Tufetu died," he observed. "I struck the blow,
and I ate his arm, his right arm, for he was brave and strong. That
was a war!"

"What caused that war?" I asked the merry cannibal.

"A woman, _haa teketeka_, an unfaithful woman, as always," replied
Kahauiti. "Do you have trouble over women in your island? Yes