Читать книгу Lolóma, or two years in cannibal-land - Henry Britton - Страница 10

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As I rambled about the mountain solitudes, the sound of the lali, or native drum, beaten in celebration of some heathen rite, and faint echoes from the shrill blast of the conch-shell, blown in honour of some chiefly observance, not infrequently floated up from an extensive valley lying in the centre of the hill country. Occasionally I had seen men moving in the distance, but I was always careful to keep out of view.

One day a party of village maidens, searching for the gay flowers of the forest, with which to decorate themselves for some festival, approached my hiding-place. I observed their gambols on a wooded slope, as they laughed, and danced, and sang with gladsome air, and I would willingly have joined the merry throng had not prudence forbidden. The queen of the company, to whom a certain deference was always paid, was a handsome girl of fifteen. Her dress and mien proclaimed her to be a lady in the land.

The elegant simplicity of her attire was well calculated to heighten the charm of her fine figure. She wore a cincture of hibiscus fibres a few inches broad, forming a girdle of beautifully variegated braidwork, from which depended a fringe of coloured grasses ten inches deep, ornamented with small shells and berries. The long fringe playing on her softly-rounded limbs had a most graceful appearance. Her ears were decorated with the brilliant blossom of the Chinese rose; garlands of bright flowers were hung on her neck, and a chaplet of pure white ivi blossoms lay on her brow, emitting a delicious perfume, and contrasting well with the glow of her dusk bosom. The likus or petticoats worn by her handmaidens were much scantier. They were of a bright, jet black colour, made from the stem of a parasite called waloa. They did not meet by several inches at the hip, and they were put on in such a coquettish way that they gave the idea that they must fall off every moment.

I could not but watch with interest the lovely forms of these gentle savages of the wild as they capered in the shade of the tropic afternoon. Soon they tired for a while of their innocent sports. The queen sank luxuriously into a crown of fern leaves, and lay like Aphrodite in her shell, with all her dimpled loves around her.

The whole party slept for a time in careless abandonment upon the leaves and grass, their floral treasures thrown around them in picturesque disorder. In the cool of the evening they awoke from refreshing slumbers and regaled themselves on the luscious fruits which hung around. The full moon arose, filling the dell with a soft splendour, and the maidens looked timorously at the shimmering trees, for the woods of Fiji are filled with diminutive fairies and elves, whose delight it is to plague poor mortals, who are no match for the trickeries of these little folks, who people the tangled grass and bushes, spring from hollows of the pine trees, tread softly as the lizards, and will eat the banquet spread for others when the feasters’ backs are turned, laughing merrily the while, and then retire to the branches of the trees, where anyone may hear them chattering together, and singing their little songs with the multitudinous voices of the cicadæ.

Breaking into a wild dance, full of animation and graceful movements, the girls, with rustling leaves and streamers of green about them, imitated the ebb and flow of the tide, counterfeiting the rippling and soft sighing of the water on some sandy beach with wonderful accuracy. After this they performed the flying-fox dance, mimicking with equal cleverness the gyrations of that animal as it lazily hangs from the branch of a tree, or, suddenly spreading its wings, takes its dive-like flight from some monarch of the wood to the lowest branch of a bread-fruit. The girls tripped as lightly over the grass as their fabled fairy elves, singing the while in merry measure—

“Away, away, away to the trees,

To dance, and dance as long as you please,

To sing and dance all night in the breeze,

As from trees the flying foxes!”

“Away to dance, the yellow-flow’r dance,

The white flow’r dance, the scarlet-flow’r dance!

Come dance and sing, and merrily dance.

For the world will soon be empty!”

While I was the unobserved witness of these pretty dramas of gesture I could not but think of the fabled dead dancing maidens whom the Germans call “The Willeis.” They are young brides who died the day before their happiness was to be consummated, but who, their passion for dancing still living within them, leave their graves at midnight, and give themselves up to the wildest measures, while the nearer the approach of the hour which recalls them to the silence of the tomb, the more deliriously they abandon themselves to the enjoyment of the fast-fleeting moments.

But I had no feeling that the mysterious rites of which I was the privileged beholder were fraught with perdition to man. The twittering prattle of voices low and sweet, and the vigorous gambols of these merry lassies, seemed full of the palpitating passion of life; while the dances of the fairies, the pirouettes of the elves, and the gambadoes of the earth-spirits, could not have had more of dainty grace. As for the queen herself, when she danced, like Perdita’s admirer, I wished her a wave of the sea that she might never do anything but that.

The evening’s madcap revels over, the frolicsome party prepared to return to their village. They ran down the green slopes, waking the echoes with their wild laughter. I followed at a distance, and saw that they gradually became divided into small knots, often walking in twos and threes linked in each other’s arms.

The queen, while roaming alone, struck her foot on a sharp twig, and stayed to bathe the injured member in a transparent pool into which a miniature cascade, lacing a bank like a thread of silver, fell. She sat looking at her reflection in the water with the innocent delight of a flower enjoying its own perfume.

Her companions passed on, and I confronted her. She was speechless with terror. She thought at first, as I afterwards learned, that I was either the departed spirit of some ancestor who had undergone a strange metamorphosis in the other world, or else that I was a goblin of a kind that she had never before heard of. Then she recollected the fables of the Kalou vulavula or white God, she had heard the court minstrel relate, and determined in her own mind that I must belong to that species of deity.

I reassured her by making use of a few Fijian phrases I had at command, and she soon felt satisfied that my intentions were friendly. I contrived to make her understand that I was tambu, and that my presence in the woods must be kept a profound secret. I also gained enough of her good will to feel sure that we should meet again. The event justified that belief. Whenever the Princess and her companions visited the locality I managed to have a secret interview with her.

In course of time I was able to explain to her that I had been cast ashore in the recent hurricane, and had wandered into the hills after the death of my companions. All she knew of white men was that they were god-like beings who lived in a far country beyond the seas, and who voyaged in ships as large as islands. Much that she had heard on this subject from the tribal minstrel she had always regarded as an idle tale invented for the amusement of the populace.

I said that I feared to surrender myself to her people, told her I was living in a cave which was difficult of access, and obtained from her a promise that she would come back alone some day, and advise me whether it would be safe for me to enter the town. I learned that her name was Lolóma, and that she was the daughter of Tui Thangi-Levu (King Big-Wind), who lived in Koroivónu (Turtle Town), in the neighbouring valley, and was sovereign of the inland tribes for many miles around.

One day the Princess sought me out alone. She brought me a welcome addition to my fare—some native puddings made of ripe bananas, served with a sauce compounded of the milky juice expressed from the cocoanut, and sweetened with rasped sugar-cane.

I showed her the mysterious entrance to the cave. She ascended the tree with the infinite grace of her nation. As she glided through the leaves into the darkened cavern, I thought she must be a veritable wood nymph or sylvan goddess. The sun penetrating through the thick-leaved trees’ glossy veil of green, dimly showed the fretted buttresses, the aisles, the naves, and the fantastic columns and architraves of our sparry bower.

Lolóma was not darker than a Spanish-born gipsy. Though a child in years, as judged in colder climes, she had the rounded form of perfect womanhood. Short curly hair set off a bright and laughing face, in which a pair of dark eyes danced like twin stars in the first shade of night. The soft caressing fingers and daintily-turned feet, the arched neck and the dimpled knee, were as perfect as statuary. The voice so sweet, and untaught smile so flattering, proclaimed the unsophisticated naturelle. And there was that which no sculptor’s art could copy—the heightened color which shone in her face and neck as her bosom heaved with some fresh emotion of joy or fear, and showed on her nut-brown skin like the red coral of the still lagoon seen blushing through the shadowed wave, or the warm glow of the young leaves of the dawn, which often makes a whole forest look in the distance as if it were in bloom.

She was as natural as the plants and flowers among which she lived, and as joyous as a waterfall. She was subject to none of the distractions of her compeers of civilisation. No sorrow had as yet fallen on her young life, and she knew not “passion’s desolating joy.”

Under the instruction of my teacher I made rapid progress in the Fijian language, that soft labial tongue,

“Which melts like kisses from a female mouth,

And sounds as if it should be writ on satin.”

The meaning of her name in Fijian I found to be love or pity. My home in the grotto soon ceased to be a hermit’s cell. A supply of elegantly-worked mats and printed tapa gave one nook in it an air of comfort. When illuminated with flambeaux of resinous wood, and liberally furnished with all the delicacies of the Fijian cuisine, it was a dwelling-place which an epicure need not have despised.

Lolóma pitied me for my loneliness and complete severance from kith and kin. Our daily conversation turned on the advisability of adopting some plan by which I could join her tribe and have full liberty among her people.

The Princess’s frequent unexplained absences from the village green of Koroivónu had been noticed. On several occasions she was followed up the mountain steep, but whenever she approached the tree which guarded the entrance to the cave she disappeared as if she had been swallowed up in the earth, and the mystery remained unsolved. The report in the village was that she was in secret communion with the spirits of the departed. One day Lolóma suggested that she should announce to her friends her discovery of a hobgoblin in the woods, whose acquaintance was worth making. I knew that the superstitions of the common people would induce them to believe anything, but I was not so sure of passing muster with the more intelligent chiefs in the character of an elf. However, the experiment seemed to be worth trying, and as I had escaped the cannibal pot of the coast tribe, I was not likely to be treated as flotsam and jetsam here, where the people were milder-mannered, and rarely indulged in human sacrifices, except in time of war, which but seldom visited their peaceful vale. The interest the account of the hobgoblin would excite would at least cause some search to be made, and I should have the opportunity of disclosing myself if the circumstances seemed favorable.