The festival’s orchestra helped in no small way to enhance the poetic beauty of the whole scene. The bamboo flutes and bone-clappers (made from the skeletons of dead chiefs) played a suitable accompaniment to the many “turns” that I witnessed. The special music that was performed on this occasion was something between a Marquesan _Tapriata_ and a Samoan _Siva dance_. Though I cannot reproduce the moaning of the resounding seas on the shore below or the echoes in the mountains, I give here an impressionist piano-forte arrangement of the wild music I heard that night.
It is many years since O Le Tao departed for the legendary splendours of his beloved shadowland: that much I certainly know. For, on a voyage bound for the Malay Archipelago, not so long ago, my ship put into Samoa, and, standing in the small village cemetery near Safuta, I gazed in sorrow on a little wooden cross, and distinctly made out these words, written in English and Samoan:
“Here lieth the mortal remains of High Chief O LE TAO Died, aged 83, in the year of our Lord, 1903.” “In my Father’s House are Many Mansions.”
Gazing on that grave, I realized the briefness of all living things, be they great or small. There was something pathetic too in so humble a tomb for one who had dwelt in such imaginative splendour. For the island nightingale still sang its passionate song in the breadfruit, as the same aged tamanu trees sighed in their glory by the sea. But, doubtless, the children of a new age still whisper his name in wonder, telling how he was favoured by the goddess Pafuto for the majesty and inborn virtue of his mighty heart.