In Valley After Valley The
Last Inhabitant Has Passed And The Fertile Soil Has Relapsed To
Jungle.
In Melville's day the valley of Hapaa (spelled by him
"Happar") was peopled by a strong and warlike tribe.
A generation
later, it contained but two hundred persons. To-day it is an
untenanted, howling, tropical wilderness.
We climbed higher and higher in the valley, our unshod stallions
picking their steps on the disintegrating trail, which led in and
out through the abandoned pae-paes and insatiable jungle. The sight
of red mountain apples, the ohias, familiar to us from Hawaii,
caused a native to be sent climbing after them. And again he
climbed for cocoa-nuts. I have drunk the cocoanuts of Jamaica and
of Hawaii, but I never knew how delicious such draught could be till
I drank it here in the Marquesas. Occasionally we rode under wild
limes and oranges - great trees which had survived the wilderness
longer than the motes of humans who had cultivated them.
We rode through endless thickets of yellow-pollened cassi - if riding
it could be called; for those fragrant thickets were inhabited by
wasps. And such wasps! Great yellow fellows the size of small
canary birds, darting through the air with behind them drifting a
bunch of legs a couple of inches long. A stallion abruptly stands
on his forelegs and thrusts his hind legs skyward. He withdraws
them from the sky long enough to make one wild jump ahead, and then
returns them to their index position.
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