448 MYSTIC ISLES 



transported from this Tahitian temple to the pyramids 

 on the sands of Egypt. Forty centuries later I could 

 trace the same aspiration for community with deity and 

 for immortality of monument which had sweated a hun- 

 dred thousand men for twenty years to rear the lofty 

 pile of Gizeh. In Borobodo, in the jungle of Java, I 

 had seen, as near Cairo, the proudest trophy, temple, 

 and tomb of king and priest humbled in the dust by the 

 changing soul of man in his fight to throw off the 

 shackles of the past. 



This marae had not been a place of cannibalism, as the 

 Paepae Tapu of the INIarquesas Islands. The Tahi- 

 tians had no record of ever having eaten humans. They 

 replied to the first whites who asked them if they ate 

 people : 



"Do you?" 



Yet when a human sacrifice was made, the presiding 

 chief was offered the left eye of the victim, and at least 

 feigned to eat it. Was this a remnant of a forgotten 

 cannibalistic habit, or a protest of the Tahitians and 

 Hawaiians against the custom as not being Polynesian, 

 but a concession to a fashion adopted in fighting the 

 Fijian anthropopogi? 



The people of Huahine, an island near Tahiti, had a 

 supreme god named Tane, who might be touched only by 

 one human being, a man selected for that purpose. He 

 was the sole bachelor on the island, being forbidden to 

 marry. Whenever the priests wanted Tane moved to 

 a shrine, this chap, te amo atua (the god-bearer) had to 

 pack him on his back. The idol was a heavy block of 

 wood, and when his bearer wearied, it had to appear 

 that the god wanted to rest, for a god-bearer could not 



