"When I went to the house to get my things together Tari informed me that, as the schooner would not leave till next day, the people were preparing a farewell feast in my honor. It was held in the assembly house of the village, decorated with arches of palm frond, garlands of scented fern, and the scarlet flowers of the hibiscus. Everyone brought a gift for the departing stranger--a fan, a hat, a pearl fishhook, a drinking cup of ornamented coconut shell, a carved paddle of porcupine wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl. I distributed what little I had to offer, wishing it were a dozen times as much.
"On the beach next morning the people of Mataora gathered for a last handclasp; smile cynically if you will--there were tears shed; I wasn't too happy myself when I heard their plaintive song of farewell floating out across the water."
Worthington ceased speaking and leaned forward to scratch a match. The squall had passed long since; the immense arch of the Milky Way stretched overhead, and low in the south--beyond Hull Island and Rimatara, over the loneliest ocean in the world--the Southern Cross was rising. Lying on mats behind us, a party of Cook-Islanders spoke in soft tones, their faces illuminated fitfully by the glow of their cigarettes. My companion was lighting his pipe, and in the flare of the match I could see that he was smiling to himself.
"Some day," he said, "you will hear that I have closed up my affairs and disappeared. Don't worry when that happens; you'll know I have gone to Mataora--this time to stop for good."
I might attempt to set down a matter-of-fact description of this place if only the subject permitted one to be matter-of-fact. Strange and remote, set in a lonely space of the sea and isolated from the world for the seven or eight centuries following the decline of Polynesian navigation, there is no other land like this hollow island of Ahu Ahu. Week after week, month after month, the watcher on its cliffs may gaze out toward the horizon and see never a sail nor a distant trail of smoke to liven the dark-blue desert of the Pacific. The cliffs themselves are strange--the reef of an ancient atoll, upraised in some convulsion of the earth to form a ring of coral limestone--sheer precipices facing the sea, half a mile of level barren summit, and an inner wall of cliffs, overlooking the rich lowlands of the interior. During the unnumbered years of their occupation, the land has set a stamp upon its people--so long on Ahu Ahu that they have forgotten whence they came. Hardy, hospitable, and turbulent, they are true children of the islands, and yet a family apart--ruder and less languid than the people of Samoa or Tahiti, and speaking a harsher tongue. And, more than any other island folk, they live in the past, for ghosts walk on Ahu Ahu, and the living commune nightly with the old dead who lie in the _marae_.