OF THE SOUTH SEAS 295 



journal. After years of the newspaper habit, reading 

 and writing them, it had fallen away in Tahiti as the 

 prickly heat after a week at sea. Of what interest was 

 it that the divorce record was growing longer in New 

 York, that Hinky Dink had been reelected in Chicago, 

 and that Los Angeles had doubled in population. A 

 dawn on the beach, a swim in the lagoon, the end of the 

 iish strike, were vastly more entertaining. 



We passed the gorge of Fautaua, where Fragrance 

 of the Jasmine and I had had a charmed day. The pin- 

 nacles of the Diadem were black against the eastern 

 sky. Aorai, the tallest peak in sight, more than a mile 

 high, hid its head in a mass of snowy clouds. 



Not far away was the mausoleum of the last king of 

 the Society Islands, Pomare the Fifth, with whose wide- 

 awake widow, the queen, I had smoked a cigarette a day 

 ago. It was a pyramid of coral, a red funeral-urn on 

 top, and a red P on the fa9ade. Pillars and roof were 

 of the same color, and a chain surrounded it. The tomb 

 was rococo, glaring, typical of the monuments in the 

 South Seas where the aboriginal structures of beauty or 

 interest were destroyed by the missionaries to please 

 their Clapham Seminary god. Pomare, who had been 

 the victim of French political chicane, enjoyed now but 

 one privilege. If his spirit had senses, it heard the lap- 

 ping of the waves upon the beach of the lagoon across 

 which his ancestor, the first Pomare, had come from 

 Moorea to be a king. 



We left the Broom Road for Point Venus to see the 

 monument to Captain James Cook, the great mariner 

 of these seas. The only lighthouse on Tahiti is there. 

 On that spot Cook and his astronomers had observed 



