“While the men were digging the oven and lining it.”
SOUTH SEA YARNS
BY
BASIL THOMSON
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCXCIV
All Rights reserved
TO
MY WIFE
In the great bure of Raiyawa there was a story-telling. Thelying-places filled three sides of the house—mats spread upon grassfour feet wide,—and between each lying-place was a narrow strip ofbare earth sprinkled with wood-ashes, on which three logs, nose tonose, were smouldering. A thin curl of blue smoke wreathed upwardsfrom each to the conical roof, where they met and filtered throughthe blackened thatch; so that from outside the bure looked like adisembowelled haystack smouldering, ready to burst into flame. Onthe fourth side was a low doorway, stopped with a thick fringe ofdried rushes, through which ever and anon a grey-headed elder bursthead-foremost, after coughing and spitting outside to announce hisarrival. Beside the doorway[Pg viii] was a solitary couch, the seat of honour,to which the foreigner, footsore and weary with his tramp across themountains, was directed, having in his turn dived trustingly throughthe rushes like the rest. The couches were filling, and the elders weresettling down in twos to rest, slinging their legs over the fender-barthat lay conveniently on its forked supports, and turning to thegrateful glow that part of his anatomy that man delights to roast—forthe night was falling, and a chilly mist was rising from the river.Then one of them rose and made with his hand a tiny aperture in therush-screen, through which the dull twilight showed white. “Beat!” hecried; and the rest beat the reed walls with their open palms, andthe house was filled with the angry hum of a myriad mosquitoes, thatflew into the smoke and out towards the king-post, and then, seeingthe twilight and the fresh air, sailed in a compact string throughthe opening, so that in three minutes there was not one of them left.Thereafter one might sleep in peace without slapping the back and thebare thighs, for the rushes brushed them from the body of each incomer,and their furious hum outside was impotent to hurt.
At length every place was filled, and from the [Pg ix]darkness Bongi beganand told of the mountain-paths—how the foreigner would rest before thehill was climbed, gasping like a fish, and asked many foolish questionsof the old time and the present; and of the courts, how Bitukau hadhad his hair cropped, having been taken in sin and judged; and of howthe foreigner had given him strange meats to eat that were enclosed iniron, having first broken the iron and cooked the meats on a fire.
“Yes,” s