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- 2026-01-30T20:48:15.153Z
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- 7730
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- trees were casting long shadows in the setting sun. Here, a piece of
ground some hundred feet square, covered with weeds and brambles, and
sounding hollow to the tread, was inclosed by a ruinous wall of stones.
Tonoi said it was an almost forgotten burial-place, of great antiquity,
where no one had been interred since the islanders had been Christians.
Sealed up in dry, deep vaults, many a dead heathen was lying here.
Curious to prove the old man’s statement, I was anxious to get a peep
at the catacombs; but hermetically overgrown with vegetation as they
were, no aperture was visible.
Before gaining the level of the valley, we passed by the site of a
village, near a watercourse, long since deserted. There was nothing but
stone walls, and rude dismantled foundations of houses, constructed of
the same material. Large trees and brushwood were growing rankly among
them.
I asked Tonoi how long it was since anyone had lived here. “Me,
tammaree (boy)—plenty kannaker (men) Martair,” he replied. “Now, only
poor pehe kannaka (fishermen) left—me born here.”
Going down the valley, vegetation of every kind presented a different
aspect from that of the high land.
Chief among the trees of the plain on this island is the “Ati,” large
and lofty, with a massive trunk, and broad, laurel-shaped leaves. The
wood is splendid. In Tahiti, I was shown a narrow, polished plank fit
to make a cabinet for a king. Taken from the heart of the tree, it was
of a deep, rich scarlet, traced with yellow veins, and in some places
clouded with hazel.
In the same grove with the regal “AH” you may see the beautiful
flowering “Hotoo”; its pyramid of shining leaves diversified with
numberless small, white blossoms.
Planted with trees as the valley is almost throughout its entire
length, I was astonished to observe so very few which were useful to
the natives: not one in a hundred was a cocoa-nut or bread-fruit tree.
But here Tonoi again enlightened me. In the sanguinary religious
hostilities which ensued upon the conversion of Christianity of the
first Pomaree, a war-party from Tahiti destroyed (by “girdling” the
bark) entire groves of these invaluable trees. For some time afterwards
they stood stark and leafless in the sun; sad monuments of the fate
which befell the inhabitants of the valley.
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