half inch or more of
hard skin and had begun to devour his flesh. With blasphemous and
blood-chilling yells he bounded on deck, where he sat treating the
wounds and cursing unrestrainedly for some time before joining Pere
Olivier and me in democratic slumber on the bare boards. Several
weeks later his feet had not recovered from their envenomed sores.

When eight bells sounded the hour of four, I got upon my feet and in
the mellow dawn saw a panorama of peak and precipice, dark and
threatening, the coast of Fatu-hiva and the entrance to Oomoa Bay,
the southernmost island of the Marquesas, and the harbor in which
the first white men who saw the islands anchored over three hundred
years ago.

Those Spaniards, on whose ships the cross was seen in cabin and
forecastle, on gun and halberd, murdered many Marquesans at Oomoa to
glut their taste for blood. The standard of death the white flew
then has never been lowered. Oomoa and Hanavave, the adjacent bay
and village, were resorts for whalers, who brought a plague of ills
that reduced the population of Fatu-hiva from many thousands to less
than three hundred. Consumption was first brought to the islands by
one of these whalers, and made such alarming inroads on the people
of Hanavave that most of the remainder forsook their homes and
crossed to the island of Tahuata, to escape the devil the white man
had let loose among them.

We sailed on very slowly after the mountains had robbed us of the
breeze, and when daylight succeeded the false dawn, we dropped our
mud hooks a thousand feet from the beach. On it we could see a
little wooden church and two dwellings, dwarfed to miniature by the
grim pinnacles of rock, crude replicas of the towers of the Alhambra,
slender minarets beside the giant cliffs, which were clothed with
creeping plants in places and in places bare as the sides of a
living volcano.

The fantastic and majestic assemblage of rock shapes on the shores
of Fatu-hiva appeared as if some Herculean sculptor with disordered
brain and mighty hand had labored to reproduce the fearful chimeras
of his dreams.

The priest and I, with the supercargo, went ashore in a boat at six
o'clock, and reached a beach as smooth and inviting as that of Atuona.
A canoe was waiting for Pere Olivier; he climbed into it at once,
his black wet robe clinging to him, and called "_Adios!_" as his men
paddled rapidly for Hanavave, where he was to say mass and hear
confessions.

Lee and