OF THE SOUTH SEAS 151 



under one's skin and pulsated one's nerves, arousing dor- 

 mant desires. I felt like leaping into the arena and 

 showing them my mettle on alternate feet, but a ^loorea 

 beauty anticipated me. 



She placed herself before the proud Llewellyn, half of 

 her own blood, and began an upaupahura. She pos- 

 tured before him in an attitude of love, and commenced 

 an improvisation in song about him. She praised his de- 

 scent from his mother, his strength, his capacity for rum, 

 and especially his power over women. He was own 

 brother to the great ones of the Bible, Tolomoni and Ne- 

 butodontori, who had a thousand wives. He drew all 

 women to him. 



The dance was a gambol of passion. It was a free 

 expression of uninhibited sex feeling. The Hawaiian 

 hula J the nautch, and minstrelsy combined. So rapid 

 was the movement, so fast the music, so strenuous the 

 singing, and so actual the vision of the dancer, that she 

 exhausted herself in a few minutes, and another took the 

 turf. 



A thousand years the Tahitians had had these upau- 

 paliuras. Their national ballads, the achievements of 

 the warrior, the fisherman, the woodsman, the canoe- 

 builder, and the artist, had been orally recorded and im- 

 pressed in this manner in the conclaves of the Arioi. 

 Dancing is for prose gesture what song is for the instinc- 

 tive exclamation of feeling, and among primitive peoples 

 they are usually separated ; but those cultured Tahitians 

 from time immemorial had these highly developed dis- 

 plays of both methods of manifesting acute sensations. 

 The Kamchadales of the Arctic — curious the similarities 

 of language and custom between these far Northerners 



