Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Samoa Under the Sailing Gods

I

I

I Remember walking along the shore one evening at Salailua. Never before or since have I seen such a sunset. The universe was a blaze of crimson. It was as if buckets of blood had been dashed all over sea and sky, and on the rise of sandy beach beneath the dark fringe of leaning palms lay three small dug-out canoes, stark and black-interiored. It was a lovely and intolerable sight. It may have been the pang of perfect beauty or it may have been the resurrection of some racial memory infinitely remote, struggling to break through.

"Or go up [wrote Rupert Brooke], one of a singing flower-garlanded crowd, to a shaded pool of a river in the bush, cool from the mountains. The blossom-hung darkness is streaked with the bodies that fling themselves, head or feet first, from the cliffs around the water, and the haunted forest-silence is broken by laughter. It is part of the charm of these people that, while they are not so foolish as to 'think,' their intelligence is incredibly lively and subtle, their sense of humour and their intuitions of other people's feelings are very keen and living. They have built up, in the long centuries of their civilization, a delicate and noble complexity of behaviour and personal relationships. A white man living with them soon feels his mind as deplorably dull as his skin is pale and unhealthy among those glorious golden-brown bodies…. He is perpetually and intensely aware of the subtleties of taste in food, of every tint and line of the incomparable glories of those dawns and evenings, of each shade of intercourse in fishing or swimming or dancing with the best companions in the world. That alone is life; all else is death. And after dark, the black palms against a tropic night, the smell of the wind, the tangible moonlight like a white, dry, translucent mist, the lights in the huts, the murmur and laughter of passing figures, the passionate, queer thrill of the rhythm of some hidden dance—all this page break
A Samoan Child

A Samoan Child

page 267will seem to him, inexplicably and almost unbearably, a scene his heart has known long ago, and forgotten, and yet always looked for."

I remember again sitting after nightfall alone in a Samoan house, and suddenly from the floor of a neighbouring fale a tiny fire blazed up tended by a little half-naked, copper-coloured girl who seemed as if performing some incantation. And again I had the almost unbearable sensation of "a scene my heart had known long ago, and forgotten, and yet always looked for."

And all this—something unique and beyond price—was being destroyed by fools. By the Mandates Commission "doing its best." By reformers who could see nothing better than modelling others in their own unlovely images. By the cranks, perverts, and publicists who make the South Seas their happy hunting-ground.