South Sea Yarns

In the great bure of Raiyawa there was a story-telling. The lying-places filled three sides of the house—mats spread upon grass four feet wide,—and between each lying-place was a narrow strip of bare earth sprinkled with wood-ashes, on which three logs, nose to nose, were smouldering. A thin curl of blue smoke wreathed upwards from each to the conical roof, where they met and filtered through the blackened thatch; so that from outside the bure looked like a disembowelled haystack smouldering, ready to burst into flame. On the fourth side was a low doorway, stopped with a thick fringe of dried rushes, through which ever and anon a grey-headed elder burst head-foremost, after coughing and spitting outside to announce his arrival. Beside the doorway was a solitary couch, the seat of honour, to which the foreigner, footsore and weary with his tramp across the mountains, was directed, having in his turn dived trustingly through the rushes like the rest. The couches were filling, and the elders were settling down in twos to rest, slinging their legs over the fender-bar that lay conveniently on its forked supports, and turning to the grateful glow that part of his anatomy that man delights to roast—for the 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 the rush-screen, through which the dull twilight showed white. “Beat!” he cried; and the rest beat the reed walls with their open palms, and the house was filled with the angry hum of a myriad mosquitoes, that flew into the smoke and out towards the king-post, and then, seeing the twilight and the fresh air, sailed in a compact string through the opening, so that in three minutes there was not one of them left. Thereafter one might sleep in peace without slapping the back and the bare 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 darkness Bongi began and told of the mountain-paths—how the foreigner would rest before the hill was climbed, gasping like a fish, and asked many foolish questions of the old time and the present; and of the courts, how Bitukau had had his hair cropped, having been taken in sin and judged; and of how the foreigner had given him strange meats to eat that were enclosed in iron, having first broken the iron and cooked the meats on a fire.