OF THE SOUTH SEAS 443 



The beach, too, was paved with coral fragments, the 

 debris of the temple. Though devastated thus bjr time, 

 by the waves, and by the hands of house-, bridge-, and 

 road-builders, by lime-makers, and iconoclastic vandals, 

 the marae yet had majesty and an air of mystery. It 

 was not nearly of the original height, hardly a third of it, 

 and w^as covered with twisted and gnarled toa, or iron- 

 wood, trees hke banians, the etoa of Cook, and by very 

 tall and broad pandanus, by masses of lantana and other 

 flowering growths. Tetuanui, Brooke, and I stumbled 

 through these, and walked about the uneven top, once 

 the floor of the temple. 



"Every man in Tahiti brought one stone, and the 

 marae was builded," said Tetuanui. "We were many 

 then." 



He had not been there in fifty years. 

 We crawled down the other side, a broken incline, 

 and to the beach. Land-crabs scrambled for their holes, 

 the sole inhabitants of the spot once given to chants and 

 prayers, burials, and the sacrifice of humans to the 

 never-satisfied gods. There was an acrid humor in the 

 name of the bay on which we looked, Popoti meaning 

 cockroach. That malodorous insect would be on this 

 shore when the last Tahitian was dead. It existed 

 hundreds of millions of years before man, and had not 

 changed. It was one of the oldest forms of present 

 life, better fitted to survive than the breed of Plato, 

 Shakespere, or Washington. Its insect kind was the 

 most dangerous enemy man had: the only form of life 

 he had not conquered, and would be crooning cradle- 

 songs when humanity, perhaps through its agency, or 

 perhaps through the sun growing cold, had passed from 



