38 MYSTIC ISLES 



almost daily deluges, when the air seems turned to 

 water, the land and sea are hidden by the screen of 

 driving rain, and the thunder shakes the flimsy houses, 

 and echoes menacingly in the upper valleys. 



Papeete, the seat of government and trade capital of 

 all the French possessions in these parts of the world, 

 is a sprawling village stretching lazily from the river 

 of Fautaua on the east to the cemetery on the west, 

 and from the sea on the north to half a mile inland. It 

 is the gradual increment of garden and house upon an 

 aboriginal village, the slow response of a century to the 

 demand of official and trading white, of religious group 

 and ambitious Tahitian, of sailor and tourist. Here 

 flow all the channels of business and finance, of plotting 

 and robbery, of pleasure and profit, of literature and art 

 and good living, in the eastern Pacific. Papeete is the 

 London and Paris of this part of the peaceful ocean, 

 dispensing the styles and comforts, the inventions and 

 luxuries, of civilization, making the laws and enforcing 

 or compromising them, giving justice and injustice to 

 litigants, despatching all the concomitants of modernity 

 to littler islands. Papeete is the entrepot of all the 

 archipelagoes in these seas. 



The French, who have domination in these waters of 

 a hundred islands and atolls between 8° and 27° south 

 latitude, and between 137° and 1.54° west longitude, a 

 stretch of about twelve hundred miles each way, make 

 them all tributary to Papeete; and thus it is the me- 

 tropolis of a province of salt water, over which come its 

 couriers and its freighters, its governors and its soldiers, 

 its pleasure-seekers and its idlers. From it an age ago 

 went the Maoris to people Hawaii and New Zealand. 



