Emerging from the forest bread-fruits, we sighted the native village. All was a-bustle in that now dead Babylon of the South Seas. By the little groups of small bird-cage huts, made in picturesque style of yellow bamboo and twining sinnet, sat the wild denizens of the forest. It seemed as if we had suddenly passed through some little forest door that led from reality into faeryland. The coco-nut-oil lamps burning with a pale light by the hut doors gave a magical effect to the scene as they flickered in the brilliant moonlight. By some of the bee-hive-shaped dens sat handsome, savage, semi-nude old men and women, the genuine tattooed chiefs and their wives—the faded, dusky, harem beauties of a past which teemed with awful cannibalistic orgies. As those grim old warriors, dressed in the picturesque, barbaric Marquesan garb, sat there, they looked like idols or images, or tree trunks carved to resemble man. Only the blinking of the bright, dark eyes and drifts of tobacco smoke coming from their lips revealed the fact that they breathed. Some had their hair well oiled, done up mopwise, bunched high on top of the head; it almost looked as if some humorist had stuck huge coco-nuts on broad, living, headless shoulders, and painted hideous faces on them. Those grotesque physiognomies considerably enhanced the fine appearance of the really handsome Marquesan chiefs, who, squatting opposite their less fortunate companions, smoked vigorously and repeatedly expectorated on the naked feet of the chiefs who sat before them. (I believe this odious anointment was a sacrificial act of extreme politeness, a survival of some old rite that expressed brotherhood.)
Just on the outskirts of those picturesque village huts was a cleared forest patch, where was erected a kind of _pae-pae_, fashioned something after the style of the old heathen altars. Decorated with gorgeous hibiscus blossoms and forest festoons, which glimmered amongst the hanging lanterns, it inspired one with a vivid idea of what the old primeval fêtes must have been. The chief attraction of this _pae-pae_ was the monstrous wooden idol that adorned it. The carven face was the acme of ugliness, and had been painted up for the occasion. The goggling glass eyes seemed to express the glorious humour of the situation. The big, slit mouth revealed one huge tooth, and its fixed grin expressed wonder, as though it showed its delight at being brought out of its hiding-place once more to be reinstated as supreme deity of heathen-land. Just below the _pae-pae_, directly opposite the huge wooden feet of the _tiki_ (idol), squatted a bevy of pretty Marquesan girls. They looked like a group of dusky nymphs as they swayed their nut-brown arms and the moonlit wind uplifted their masses of dark hair. Some had golden tresses (dyed with coral lime).