826 MYSTIC ISLES 



Mataiea is twenty-seven miles from Papeete, and 

 well on toward the isthmus. 



Most of our passengers were Chinese, and I realized 

 the Asiaticizing of Tahiti. They were store-keepers, 

 small farmers, or laborers. The Broom Road lay most 

 of the way along the beach, back of the fringe of cocoa- 

 nut and pandanus-trees, and between the homes and 

 plantations of Tahitians and foreigners. I saw all the 

 fruits of the islands in matchless profusion, intermingled 

 with magnificent ferns, the dazzling bougainvillea, the 

 brilliant flamboyant-tree, and a thousand creepers and 

 plants. Every few minutes the road rushed to the 

 water's-edge, and the glowing main, with its flashing 

 reef, and the shadowy outlines of Moorea, a score of 

 miles away, appeared and fled. Past villages, churches, 

 schools, and villas, the shops of the Chinese merchants, 

 the sheds for drying copra, rows of vanilla-vines, beaches 

 with canoes drawn up and nets drying on sticks, men 

 and women lolling on mats upon the eternal green car- 

 pet of the earth, girls waving hands to us, superb men, 

 naked save for parens, with torsos, brown, satinj^ and 

 muscled like Greek gladiators, women bathing in 

 streams, their forms glistening, their breasts bare; and 

 constant to the scene, dominating it, the lofty, snake- 

 like cocoanuts and their brothers of less height and 

 greater girth. 



At Fa'a a postwoman appeared. Before opening 

 the mail-box she tarried to light a cigarette and to chat 

 with the driver about the new picture at the cinema in 

 Papeete. She commented laughingly on the writers 

 and addressees of the letters, and flirted with a passen- 

 ger. The former himene -house, which had been the 



