OF THE SOUTH SEAS 508 



spiritist, was certified by Sir William Crookes and An- 

 drew Lang to handle red-hot coals in his hands, and 

 could convey to others the same immunity. Lang tells 

 of a friend of his, a clergyman, whose hand was badly 

 blistered by a coal Home put in his palm. Home at- 

 tributing the accident to the churchman's unbelieving 

 state of mind. Crookes, the distinguished physicist, 

 took into his laboratory handkerchiefs in which Home 

 had wrapped live coals, and found them "unburned, un- 

 scorched, and not prepared to resist fire." 



The scene of the Umuti was an hour's walk up the 

 glen of Aataroa, which began at our swimming-place. 

 On Thursday Choti, T'yonni, and I accompanied 

 Raiere to the place of the tii, where the preparations for 

 the sorcery were beginning. We went through a con- 

 tinuous forest of many kinds of trees, a vast, climbing 

 coppice, in which all the riches of the Tahitian earth 

 were mingled with growths from abroad. Oranges and 

 lemons, which had sprung decades before from seeds 

 strewn carelessly, had become giant trees of their kinds ; 

 and the lianas and parasites, guava, lantana, and a hun- 

 dred species of ferns and orchids, with myriad mosses, 

 covered every foot of soil, or stretched upon the trunks 

 and limbs, so that exquisite tapestries garlanded the 

 trees and hung like green and gold draperies between 

 them. Mape-ivQes prevailed, immense, weirdly shaped, 

 often appalling in their curious buttresses, their limbs 

 writhing as if in torture, suggestive of the old fetishism 

 that had endowed them with spirits which suffered and 

 spoke. Utterly uninhabited or forsaken, there was a 

 bare trail through this wood, which, led by Raiere, we 

 followed, wading the Aataroa River twice, and I arriv- 



