Puslapio vaizdai
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his time is taken up by these demands of his people. One of his nephews, only a little younger than the young aunt, is here with us; he has been mostly in France, and no one would know by anything he says that he was not a Frenchman, with a perfect knowledge of the native tongue and ways. His father was a Scotchman of good lineage, who made a great fortune here, and married into this family of native aristocracy. So that there could be no greater contrast than that presented by the good people on the mats with us, last evening, while the old lady told us of the ways of the older time. It is all too disconnected for me to get it down here now, but one curious little trait she spoke of, when we told her of the Samoan Taupou, or official maiden, who had been so large a part of our entertainment in Samoa. They, too, she said, had maidens set apart to show for the fame and good report of the districts: girls who were kept fair in the shade, who were carefully looked after, and who, on certain occasions, were exhibited to the admiration of all. These occasions, especially, were when the girls went out to bathe and play in the sea. Then, relieved of their confinement and of their dresses, their forms could be seen, and the fame of their beauty spread about, along with their good repute.

This evening a long story has been told, a legend made unutterably lengthy by the repetition of the names, surnames, appurtenances, etc., not only of the hero and heroines, but even of the idealized waters in which the hero bathes, and which accompany him.

It is the tale of a king who goes to visit the girl he is promised to, and who takes the appearance of a leper or old sick man, to try her. She discards him, and he having miraculous powers and help (birds, rainbows, light, water, etc.), pursues another love in the same way, beneath the sea, and finally returns again, clad in consuming light, to the girl who had despised him. Though warned of dangers, she endeavors to secure her prize, and perishes in the fire.

This is the story of the "Prince of the Double Body" (Terii-tinorua-Princebody-two), and the old lady justly rebuked her grandson, who did not appreVOL. XXX.-9

ciate that this was the story of his own name, for that was one of his ancestral titles.

These are all people with many names. There is an English baptismal name, as Loys for our young lady; a native name for the same person, Tefatau; a nickname, as Pri (short for Piritani, British); a marriage name—the old lady's marriage name is Huruate, if I remember. She is called Hinaari and Teriitere * i tooarai. Her official name with the Government is Ariitamai; and she holds many other names of chieftainship, for each place upon which she has rights. I hope I have mentioned them all the sorts of names, I mean; but if I have not, I shall make it straight farther on.

All through the evening has been running in my sleepy mind the impression of my being present at the end of something the twilight of a past.

The Queen's sister, the young lady with the delicate features, talked to us about her likings in Europe, and referred incidentally, as I said before, to the Nibelungen, while her old mother, of the antique cast of head, had repeated to us, in the dreamy and half-bashful way old people have when recalling their youth, those old cadences and words by which great people once saluted each other-things that with her will pass into the vague darkness where forgotten nations are.

Do you remember the story of the parrot, that alone kept a few words of the language of the Incas, when they had melted away before the Spaniards? Well, when this venerable dame has joined her ancestors, not even a parrot will be able to speak this language that was spoken sixty years ago.

We who listen and she who speaks represent, as we sit about her on the mats, vast differences of training and of race; extreme varieties of habits of mind; and I am all the more impressed when I realize the vast spaces of the physical and the intellectual world that are compressed together into this little space. When the delicate voice of the younger princess whispers, that, too, is like the German legends; or the Queen translates into French, because the exact meaning is not so possibly represented in English, I feel

Terii is Prince or Princess.

that we have come really to the end of the ancient world. I am listening to a person who when a child must have been near to the Phædra of the dramatist or to the other descendants of the gods of Greece. "Mon aïeul est le père et le maître des dieux. Le ciel, tout l'univers est plein de mes aïeux."

Christianity is here, in a very simple and I think a very sincere form. One of our ladies repeats to herself, during the evening songs, the word of great meaning to her, the Sacred Name Ietu (Jesus).* But the old ideas have not perished all about us. Tati, on looking over my pictures, says, "You know that that manthe old man before the hut by the water, under the pandanus-trees, calls in the spirits of the dead."

When I ask about the old tutelar divinity of the family, the shark, I am told that he still frequents-harmless to his friends -the water inside the reef; changing his size when he comes in or out, because of the small passage, which gives but little place. And our Chiefess repeats, this evening for us, the following story:

STORY TOLD BY ARIITAMAI OR HINARII, OUR CHIEFESS

When Queen Pomaré Vahine of Huahine had died of some sudden illness she was wrapped up and carried from place to place, around the island, watched only by daughters of chiefs, who brushed away the flies and oiled her body. She was carried about because it was proper that each district or part of her islands should lament over her as chieftain of each separate place.

Then on her return, after some weeks, to the little island which was the place of her family or race, just outside or inside of the reef, she lay before the final burial, watched by mourners. Already they were prepared, for there were signs that the sacred body had yielded to decay. The night was far through when one of the women saw that the Queen had moved first her eyelid and then her foot. Soon she uttered a sigh, and life came back throughout her.

When she recovered her senses and her faculties she was able to relate the story of her experiences after death. She had *No s in the Tahitian language.

wandered about, forced in some way, that I do not remember distinctly enough to give in detail, from place to place, protected by her guardian spirit and in danger of others. For already she had been singled out of womankind to be the chosen wife of another Varuaino, who lay in wait for her, in watch at some tree by which the road she had to travel obliged her to pass. She was fought for by different chiefs of the spirit-land, and fell to the share of one, a young chief, who managed to hide her, for a time, under nets and tappa. From him she could not escape, and was detained in some sort of cage, that need not have been so different from the native house, with its wooden barred walls. Around it hovered her protector, ready to take any chance for her escape. In some manner she was caught away from there, and served elsewhere as handmaiden for a time.

Many were her adventures in different islands. In one, unknown to her before, when she came back to life, she pointed out the cocoanut-tree up which, as a servant, in her spirit life, she had been made to climb, so as to gather what I suppose was the spirit of the fruit.

Again she fell into the hands of her new husband the Chief, but while he was away there came a spirit to her-her grandfather or her great-grandfather-and urged her back to life, hurrying her to her own dead body. Commanded to re-enter it, strange as it may seem, she hesitated at beginning all over again; but her protector forced her again through the paths of life, into the empty shell now beginning to give way.

She related all this, and her many wanderings during the period of her death, as long as she lived; indeed, it is not many years ago that she died. In proof of the accuracy of her statements, she told her people where they would find this or that tree, this or that water, through the places she had traversed; and her body remained marked by the scars of the places where dissolution had begun, as a further test of the extreme limit which she had reached before her return to a second life.

Here you see we have again the good and bad angels, whom we found in Samoa. The paths after life are the same: there are jumping-off places for the souls, and boats of Charon and difficult places that are trials. Our dear old Chiefess told us

the story, and she had heard it from the old Queen herself. This ancient personage was a remarkable woman; had been engaged, perhaps married, to the Pomaré of history; had yielded her place-if, indeed, it was a place—to her sister Terito, whose resemblance to a girl of low degree with whom Pomaré was entangled, had made this latter marriage more agreeable. The relation is difficult to understand, evidently not laid down in the books.

With all his protection of the new religion and general devoutness as per missionary accounts, the introducer of Christianity was somewhat loose in conduct, ac

cording to the same accounts. Indeed, if the anecdotes I have heard are true, he was in certain matters "perfectly awful." But as these cannot be insisted upon, on account of the habits of our language, I shall return to say this much more of our heroine that she was brave and capable, and that her capacity in war seems to have had a great deal to do with the success of Pomaré.

Perhaps I ought to quote her words also in telling her story to our Chiefess, that we do not believe these things now, my this was before I became a Chris

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dear tian."

THE DELTA COUNTRY OF ALASKA

By G. R. Putnam

No white man lives on the coast of Alaska between the Kuskokwim River and the northern mouth of the Yukon, a stretch of 350 miles, and no portion of the coast of the territory, not even the Arctic shore, is less known. Yet this is not a desert country, for it readily supplies the means of life to those who can confine their needs to four things salmon, seal, water-fowl, and drift-wood. Nor is this region beyond the limits of civilization, for to the south of it is Bristol Bay, with its salmon canneries and fishing banks, and to the north the Yukon, carrying its large river trade, St. Michael, an important port where have been at one time as many as thirty ocean vessels, and the Cape Nome district, already occupied by thousands of miners. Numerous Eskimos dwell throughout the delta country, and its southern portion is the most densely populated with natives of any part of Alaska. One can go no great distance on the coast, rivers, or sloughs without seeing their low log huts. It is true that these are frequently unoccupied, for the Eskimos have different houses for the seasons of the year, but this is offset by the fact that a single house shelters on an average about a dozen people, and sometimes double this number, and there is but one room to a house. Nature has set up a barrier which has had much to do

with the Eskimos being left in undisturbed possession of this region; a barrier of sand and mud, which by the action of the two great rivers, the Yukon and Kuskokwim, has been filled in along the shores of Bering Sea to such an extent that vessels cannot approach within sight of land on this delta coast except at two points. There is, further, little to attract the civilized man, for it is a cheerless region to the eye, and there has been no rumor of the discovery of gold.

The geography of this delta coast has been veiled in mysteries, of which the Yukon itself was long one. The Russians knew its mouth; the Kwikpak, they called it, after the Eskimo "great river." The English traded on its upper reaches; to them the "Yukon" meant, in Indian, "the river"; but they supposed that it turned to the northward and emptied into the Arctic Ocean, east of Point Barrow, and it was so shown on early maps. 1863 for the first time the identity of the Yukon and Kwikpak was established by a Russian who ascended the river from St. Michael. As the interior trade has always gone along the extreme northern channel of the Delta, there has been little occasion to explore the other outlets of the river, so it is not surprising that remarkable discrepancies were developed when lately it

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150 miles back from the coast the rivers approach within ten miles, and it seems probable that in this vicinity were at one time the outlets of the two rivers. From this point to the sea-coast the land between them is a great marsh, filled with lakes and ponds and cut with innumera

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ble sloughs. In the midst of this marsh, however, rise a few groups of mountains, isolated peaks, and hills. These were probably once islands off this coast, and indeed so low and flat and watery is the surrounding country that they still look like islands. Very unlike are the mouths of these neighboring rivers; the Kuskokwim empties into a single great estuary, so wide that one cannot see the opposite shore, while the Yukon has pushed the land far into Bering Sea and dissipates its energy in finding its way through this delta to more than two dozen mouths. A mighty river it is, discharging into Bering Sea, at the low summer stage, 430,000 cubic feet (or about 13,000 tons) of water each second. This is about twothirds the average flow of the Mississippi. Deep and wide also is the Yukon in its lower stretches, with twenty to eighty feet in the channels, and one to two miles of open water, and yet this volume is rendered ineffective when with its strength divided among so many outlets it meets the opposing tidal forces of Bering Sea. Across many of these mouths one can wade at low tide, and the deepest of them carries but nine feet to sea. It is ninety-four miles, by the coast, between the mouths of the river now surveyed, and it is reported that there is still another outlet 100 miles south of these. The river water is of a grayish tinge, and carries a very fine sediment, taking long to settle. Immediately after the break up of the ice each spring the lower delta region is flooded, and doubtless during this period an immense amount of material is swept out

(as much as 35 miles in one portion), making an addition to the continental area of 3,000 square miles. Of the southern half of this coast, near the Kuskokwim, little is known as yet. Very few white people have visited it, although, according to the census of 1890, it is more thickly peopled with natives than any other portion of Alaska. The census enumerator reported that he was the first white man ever seen by thousands of people in this and the neighboring district.

The Yukon and the Kuskokwim rivers, which drain a large proportion of Alaska, have joined forces in building out a delta and in filling in the eastern portions of Bering Sea. Although their mouths are now 200 miles apart, yet at a distance of

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into Bering Sea. No trees grow anywhere on the coasts of western or northern Alaska, and yet these shores, for thousands of miles, and the islands of Bering Sea are strewn with immense quantities of drift-wood, in places piled high on the beach, bearing good testimony to the work of these rivers. This drift is the salvation of the Eskimo, furnishing him with fuel, and material for houses, boats, and sleds. The entire northeastern half of Bering Sea is very shoal, less than 500 feet in depth, while the southwestern half is mostly over 12,000 feet deep.

The delta of the Yukon is a dreary region, covering thousands of square miles, cut up by a net-work of sloughs, and with very little land not subject to overflow by the spring floods. During the last few years hundreds of Klondike miners have floated down the Yukon in the same boats that they built

VOL. XXX.-10

at Lake Bennett to take them to Dawson; all bound to St. Michael, many completely "broke," perhaps in health. as well as financially, others looking for better luck, while some travel this way simply to see the scenery. There is a very simple direction that will carry them safely through the delta, "keep to the right," for the channel for St. Michael is always on the right hand. But sometimes when they come to that labyrinth

Taking a Ride Behind a Steamer.

of passes, bars, and islands at the head of the delta, they overlook the narrow steamboat channel, and the swift current quickly carries them far from their route. When they discover their mistake it is very difficult to work back against the current with the clumsy Bennett boats. The friendly Eskimos will help them as far as they are able, but there are doubt. less Klondikers who will never be heard from, gone

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