Women’s Prison
Taiohae, Nuku Hiva. October 23, 1989.
Dear Bob:
Living here on the beach where Melville and my father ran away, the crossover land of stray whites and errant locals, the place where our centuries have made their deepest erasure of island time. You see, I’ve done my homework. I’m also literally on the beach, sitting at a picnic table beneath a barringtonia, which drops red and white brushes every night on the strand.
I’m staying at Hotel Hikokua, the best my budget will allow, a tiny guest house just above the tideline where jetsam gathers. I include myself: I am certainly jetsam. The Marquesans let you know. These are the Surly Isles, though one can hardly blame them.
Mine host, a taciturn Nuku Hivan, cuts a figure like Schwarzenegger playing the Illustrated Man. A promising extra for my film. His tattoos are mysterious. No hearts and anchors and winged swords. They look like hieroglyphs or heraldry, and are a work-in-progress. The left foot is done from toenails to mid-calf but the right one isn’t, so he seems to be wearing one blue tartan sock. Round his neck is a choker of whirls and chevrons. Each shoulder and elbow has a large dark oval, as if he once wore a motorcycle jacket of which only the pads remain, while the right forearm is intricately inscribed to the wrist, stopping short of his divers Rolex (a fake). I asked what this armful might mean: C’est une longue histoire, M’selle. What kind of story? Longue.
His daily attire: hot pink bathing trunks, yellow flip-flops, a seashell necklace. All morning he reads bodybuilder mags, sips Hinano beer, and is augustly drunk by lunch, when friends drop in to watch TV and help him eat the profits. His wife—a pretty waif with a baby on her hip, a mauve pareu round her waist, and nothing above it save a black lace bra—eventually drives them away by swearing a blue streak in Marquesan.
Yesterday afternoon the tattooist came to continue the Work, and my siesta was punctuated not by the tap-tap-tap of mallet on sharks tooth that Melville describes, but a familiar mechanical buzzing. The twentieth-century gear is an old Philishave with a needle soldered to the heads. The artist was carrying dog-eared photocopies of Krusenstern, Steinen, and Willowdean Handy; hence the designs, entirely authentic, recorded before the last original canvases rotted with their owners. Long story indeed.
My neighbours. Room 3: a tall Tahitian, a nurse I think, her black hair in a single plait to her bum.
Room 4, next to mine: a vintage Kiwi hippie “finding himself.” Possibly a divorced computer salesman. Spends long hours practising the ukulele. This morning I uttered a threat to fill it with concrete.
Room 5, across the passage: an Englishman, about my age, toffish voice and an expensive surfboard he “never travels without.” Bummed with the Marquesas because there’s nowhere to go surfing “unless one fancies being splattered on the rocks.” His girlfriend, a wilting rose named Lavinia, is tired of travel and very bored with the surfboard. She talks about the kitchen she wants to put in their Hampstead house. She touched her knee to mine last night at dinner and kept it there. Enough of man, apparently.
But I don’t want to talk kitchens. Come here and rescue me, you old wanker.
Missing you like hell. Come and treat me to Chez Merivi, Melville’s Place, the best and most romantic on the island. Gorgeous view and you’d like the owner, an exiled American comme toi. I’ve a lot to tell you, especially about those contacts of yours. We’ve been “helping the police.” I’ll save that for next time, when things have shaken out. Nothing yet on my dad, but the police are also helping me.
XXXXXX Liv
Well, I was missing him, and I don’t mind letting you peek at my letters (parts of them). I owe you so much—twenty-two years—yet I don’t know how much of this you really want or need. In low moments I think you may be getting in touch just for the medical records, to make sure there’s nothing nasty up the family tree. And that’s fine. If those are all you want, you shall have them with my blessing. This long letter to you is, above all, about the blood in our veins. Whether you and I will ever have more than blood in common remains to be seen.
We returned to the gendarmerie at four that first day in Taiohae, and went back there every day for a week, but no word came from Papeete. Strange how that brash port now loomed in our minds as a metropolis, as it did for the Marquesans. The police took sworn statements and asked us tactfully not to leave town without letting them know.
Sergeant Benoit wasn’t sure, at first, how to take my own search. I think the story of Jon seemed almost as incredible to him as the unprecedented matter of the girl. The Ça alors and Mon Dieus came thickly. But he listened and tried to help. No immigration records survived from those days. His were routinely sent to Papeete after five years and kept, he thought, for five more before being discarded or sent on microfiche to Paris. The police records of the Marquesas—he indicated some metal cabinets—went back twenty years. Anything older would also have been sent to a warehouse in Papeete, where … he shrugged and allowed himself a smile, “Let us just say, Mademoiselle, that the little grey mice and the little white ants have relieved many a felon of his anxieties.”
I left him my father’s details, asking if someone might be able to go through the records. Or perhaps, if they were too busy, I could look myself? The latter was out of the question, especially as I and my friends were under investigation. But he introduced me to Heikua, his secretary, asking her to spend any slack hours on my request.
Nothing was going to happen quickly. And the benign languor of the island must have begun to soak into me, for I saw how unreasonable, how métropolitan, it would be to expect that anything should.
I was bitterly homesick, missing Lottie and Mother, missing Jon—my old idea of him seemed so distant now, and my imaginings of what I might find were washing away in the tides of daily life. And I was thinking of a Yankee in a rainy city at the top right-hand corner of this ocean, of the day he looked at the postmark on a letter I’d hoped might tell me everything, and which was starting to seem a dead end.
If there were clues, they were forgotten or so deeply buried I hadn’t the archaeological skill to unearth them. No one remembered the 1950s, or wanted to. The Marquesans seemed to live in a continual present. Most were young, younger than I, their numbers bouncing back from catastrophic decline. I’d seen the figures: perhaps 80,000 on these islands when contact with the outside world began; by 1860 fewer than 10,000; by 1920 only 2,000. In 1936 a mere 1,300 Marquesans were counted, and experts foretold their imminent extinction. Syphilis, smallpox, tuberculosis, alcohol, opium, murder, suicide.
The Nuku Hiva I saw was twenty miles across, with this one small town and two or three tiny hamlets. But old Nuku Hiva had been a teeming, edgy place, ethnically and geographically as convoluted as a brain, each valley a nation, each ridge a frontier. That was how the old civilization died, in disease and rum to be sure, but also in a last conflagration of ancient feuds, modern firearms, and despair.
Small wonder the survivors were so withdrawn, so divorced from their past, so given to silence and drink.
“I’m fiu with Taiohae!” Natalie and I were having coffee below my hotel, sitting by the middle of the horseshoe beach, opposite the ocean passage, hard below the dark cusp of Muake, at the focal point of the land. “If you’re bored, fed up, exasperated with husband, job, place or weather, the word is fiu. Are we under house arrest or what?”
There’d been no word from the Tui’s owner, the anonymous angel of Fletcher Christian Tours. Attempts to ring Lars had raised only a recorded voice apologizing for difficulties with the line. Natalie felt watched and trapped in all this beauty, on centre stage in an amphitheatre filled with ghosts. When she left I jotted in my notebook: I have come for ghosts.
I was seeing him on the road, the way one does at the beginning and end of an affair; your heart quickens, you peer inquiringly—it can’t be! And no, it isn’t. I had a picture of Jon in my handbag, Lottie on his knee. I’d been stumping up and down streets, knocking on doors like a Jehovah’s Witness, showing it to everyone, especially the old. But what would he look like now, half a lifetime later?
My father could be anywhere in the world, or dead thirty years, but if I moved on without searching the Marquesas inside out, I’d spend the rest of my life haunted by the thought that while I sat at a café table, he might have shuffled past: the white-haired fisherman disappearing into a shop, the muttering street-sweeper with his head bent, the old fellow in a crash-helmet starting his scooter.
And if he’d found a woman there might be people like me, my half-brothers and sisters, his Nordic features mingled with their colour. These younger ghosts were everywhere. Many islanders had European looks, a legacy of whalers, beachcombers, slavers, marines, or even of Spaniards from the sixteenth century, when Mendaña fetched up here and butchered hundreds while looking for a New Jerusalem. Several mistook me for a local until I opened my mouth, and of course I was wondering about this. If I had a touch of the tarbrush (as Lottie liked to say), was it only mine? Was that my mother’s secret? Or had it surfaced from deeper in the family gene pool, from Henderson’s time? Jon himself might not be here, but there could well be descendants of the man he’d come looking for, distant cousins of ours walking the street.
I wanted to go everywhere at once, every village and valley, all six inhabited islands. The task may seem overwhelming to you, as it did to me while I was stuck in Taiohae. But the tiny population was a tragedy in my favour. Only a few dozen people on each island could have been adults in 1953. I’d stay until I’d spoken to them all.
At the mairie—an old fort that Americans, British, and French had all held at one time or another—I bought a topographical map showing every house and feature on Nuku Hiva, except for white spaces in the mountains where cloud had blanked the aerial survey. The mayor, who had a Xerox machine, helped me make up a poster with Jon’s photo to put in shops and offices: CONNAISSEZ-VOUS CET HOMME?
Simon announced he was flying to Papeete to talk to Lars and the Australian consul. All seats on the whimsical air service were still booked solid, and the airstrip was several hours away across the mountains. But he was going to camp there for a stand-by seat “and be such a bastard they’ll bounce someone just to get rid of me.” This seemed a workable plan. The gendarmes raised no objection, and he left in Taiohae’s only taxi, a battered jeep.
Meanwhile I covered church, state, and free enterprise with my posters and enquiries. The schoolteacher, a young Demi from Tahiti named Monique, listened well but knew nothing. The priest, a Father Yves, had been on Nuku Hiva only a year; his heart was still in France. He poured out coffee and memories of Avignon. He showed me his church and took me to the cemetery, where I spent hours pulling weeds from weathered stones and lacy cast-iron crosses, in a welter of emotion, hardly knowing whether I wanted to find Jon or not to find him there.
Was there anywhere else the dead might be buried; in house platforms, for example, as I’d read?
“No! Not in the nineteen-fifties.” Father Yves laughed awkwardly, as if the persistence of heathen customs might be a professional embarrassment. “I doubt anyone has been buried in a paepae this century. Of course, two villages also have churchyards. Hatiheu. Taipivai.” Taipi-vai, the Taipi Valley: Melville’s Typee. Since landing on Nuku Hiva I’d hardly thought about him, his book, my film.
“The only other place I can suggest,” the priest added, “is an old Protestant cemetery, beyond the fort. No one’s been buried there in years. Marquesans are Catholics. But occasionally, when a Tahitian or a foreigner dies here.…”
I left fuming. I should have gone there first. Surely a French priest would know that an Englishman was likely to be a Protestant? Either Father Yves was a bit dim-witted (Nuku Hiva was hardly the plummest parish in the French empire) or he’d stalled from some ridiculous sectarian rivalry.
The small burial ground lay up a track beyond the government wharf at the far end of the village. I had to ask directions several times to find it. When I got there I saw I’d judged the priest harshly; the place might easily have slipped his mind. Cliffs rose sharply behind, their wild vegetation tiptoeing back among the graves. Elderly frangipani, leafless but in bloom, tottered like branching coral over the headstones. I found a stick and began slashing at the undergrowth.
My discovery took less than an hour, but raised many more questions than it answered. I peeled a poultice of moss and roots from a simple concrete slab edged with pebbles. I swept away loose earth, and read:
J. HENDERSON
†1953
Age inconnu
Inhumé 25.8.1959
R.I.P
It began to rain but I hardly noticed. I knelt down on the brush I’d felled, ran my finger over the crude letters, confirming they’d been scratched into the cement when it was soft. Could this be the man Jon was looking for—some descendant of Franks? Or was it Jon himself, under a false name? But why the precise date of burial and vague time of death? No one else had a pair of dates like these.
Of course it was just possible that this Henderson had no connection to Jon whatsoever, like the Mormon in Tahiti. The name is common enough. But surely not in a place the size of Nuku Hiva. There can’t have been eight hundred people on the whole island in 1953. If this was coincidence, it was cruel enough to make one believe the Greeks were right about the gods: that they’re a bunch of overgrown wastrels roistering away in the clouds, and every now and again one of them gets bored—gets tired of brawling and screwing with the rest—and decides to toss down a lump of shit or gold in the path of us mortals, just to see what we’ll do.
Sergeant Benoit gripped my elbow warmly and handed me into a chair. We’d fallen into a pattern of communication: I understood his French if he spoke slowly, he understood my English if I did the same. He came round from his desk and sat opposite me, his fingers in a cat’s cradle.
“My secretary has checked the earliest papers.” He looked over at Heikua, who nodded glumly. “She has found nothing yet. No Englishman of the right age. Not even an American or Australian.…”
I burst in with my discovery, explaining that Henderson was a family name. He thought for a moment, then snatched up a bunch of keys. “Come!” We jounced back to the graveyard in his Land Rover. Soon we were standing by the slab, in light rain and the moist fetor of slashed weeds.
“As you describe,” he muttered. “It is curious, two dates. This person—and let us keep in mind that we don’t know if this is a man or a woman—this individual must have been moved or reburied. Or found six years after death. This is possible.” He got down and scraped at the letters. “The grave is very plain, even for a Protestant. No headstone. No Christian name. Only an initial. Facts, nothing more. This looks to me like an official inscription.”
“R.I.P. is something one might put when one knows nothing. On the grave of a sailor or a soldier, for example. It is possible this belongs to a body washed up from the sea, from a wreck.”
“Who might know? There must be people around who’d remember. It was only thirty years ago.”
“I’m afraid thirty years is a long time on Nuku Hiva, Mademoiselle. If this grave were in the Catholic cemetery there might be some connection with a local family. But here, and the age unknown.… It must have been an outsider. If I were you I’d ask anyone over fifty. But you’ve already been doing so.” He turned and gazed down through the trees to the sheen of the bay. “There may be records in Papeete of a shipwreck at that time.”
He fell silent, thinking, eager to help, oblivious of the rain soaking into his starched shirt. Suddenly he stamped his foot, a winning, childish gesture. “Je suis vachement stupide! Tari Kautai is the one for you! Many years ago he was constable here. Long before my time.”
This man, very old now, lived in Taipivai but wasn’t on the island at the moment. He’d been flown to Tahiti some weeks ago for an operation, but was expected back soon. “A hip replacement. They say he has a new woman! Some wood on the old tree must still be green.” The sergeant allowed himself a smirk. “Though you wouldn’t think so. Tari is half blind and deaf as a stone. But his brain is not bad. Well conserved in alcohol, like that of Einstein. Or is it Comte? Is it Comte whose preserved brain is no bigger than a chimpanzee’s?”
“Where will he go when he comes back? Will he come to Taiohae?”
“He’ll go straight home. We’ll send our helicopter to the airstrip. He’ll be home in twenty minutes. Old Tari’s too frail to go by road. The Taipivai road’s washed out anyway. You should visit him at his house. If this rain ever stops.”
I begged him to let me go immediately. I wanted to be on the spot when the old man returned. Benoit was cagy, saying I might still be needed as a witness. I was terrified of being summoned to Papeete before having a chance to talk to this ex-constable. I wanted to be hard to find.
“How would you get there? I regret I can’t let you go by boat. My orders. And more important for me, how would you get back?”
“I’ll walk. I’m a keen hiker. How bad is the road?”
He pointed at the sugarloaf above the bay, thrusting darkly into cloud. “There’s a landslide about three kilometres beyond Muake.”
“Let me try. I’ve got a good map. If I reach Taipivai, and you need me in a hurry, you can always fetch me by boat or helicopter.”
“If you knew our helicopter, Mademoiselle, you would not say such a thing! Only the very ill are not afraid of it.” He laughed. Then he went silent, looking at the grave, and his eyes said he’d decided to let me go.
“You may go. But please, no boats.” He wagged a finger. “Not even little ones.” Then he shook his head, as if clearing water from his ears. His expression was strained, his voice low. “You yourself were only a passenger with the others, is that not true?”
I said it was. He hissed in exasperation.
“This is what I have been telling Papeete!”
At sundown I went to Lily McIver’s for dinner, to find the others and say goodbye. I got there before them and sat by the window. A stout man was unpacking woodcarvings he made to sell to yachtsmen, setting out a row of incised bowls and weirdly foetal tikis—gods and ancestors with pursed lips and bulging eyes. Like the tattooist, he copied ancient examples. Two or three generations ago, Marquesan society had shrunk to where there were not enough hands to pass the culture on. This happens in families, too, I thought. The road from the past is washed out, and all one can do is rescue a few artifacts and echoes and bits of paper.
I showed him Jon’s photograph. He shook his head.
The sun had fallen behind the western rim but its light, coppery in the thick air, still lit a shoulder of Muake and the ridge above the little graveyard. The bay filled gently with dusk.
The others came in. Natalie sat down and puckered at the wine list. “Only one Aussie and it’s a shit. Dunno about the Chilean. Won’t touch French on principle. Doubt it’s fit to drink by the time it gets here anyway. Even though we’re in France right now!” she cawed sardonically.
Lily appeared, bright as ever.
“When are y’all going Melville hunting?”
“Just me. These two aren’t crazy enough. I’m going up that ridge tomorrow, rain or shine.”
“Last year I had some professor from … I don’t rightly recall. Maybe Noo Yawk? He said the boys went that way.” She pointed to a hollow far below the ridge. “There’s a big ruin down in there, a place where they used to dance in the old days. What Melville called a hula-hula ground, on account of his time in Hawaii.” A French oath issued from the kitchen. Lily glided away gracefully, a dancer herself, rolling a clear blue eye.
“I can’t agree with that professor,” I said sotto voce. “They stuck to the ridge all the way. You can read Typee like a guidebook. …”
“Listen, Liv.” said Natalie, glancing at Vatu. “We have to say our final goodbyes tonight. Simon got out on a plane this morning. He’s being questioned in Papeete. Sent a telex. They still have those here. We’ve got to go back to Tahiti.”
“Flying?”
“Sailing. They may want to look over the boat.”
I wondered what the authorities would make of Simons samples. But I kept this to myself; I didn’t want to take care of them.
“Can you sail her, just the pair of you?”
“We’ll manage. It’s true about Vatu—he’s worth two.” Natalie patted the Fijians burly forearm. “The trades’ll be with us. We’ll motor if it gets rough.”
They didn’t seem too put out by this change of plan. Indeed, they were relieved to be off. They even planned to do some more “snooping,” as they put it—something they’d have done on our way here if we hadn’t had the death to report. They’d heard rumours the French were preparing a new test site on Eiao, an uninhabited rock island only sixty miles from Nuku Hiva.
I’d seen it on the charts but given it no thought, till now.
“Could someone live there?”
“You mean your father?”
“I’d leave Eiao till the very end,” Vatu said. “Too barren. Good for goats and bombs, and not much else. Long time ago, four Navy blokes deserted there. Three died of thirst.” He topped up my glass and grinned. “The last one survived by using the others’ skulls as water bottles.”
It seemed very foolish of Natalie and Vatu to do more spying. But their plans weren’t my business. I told them about the Henderson grave, the old constable in Taipivai. Hours later, after brandy with Lily and a conversation that seemed haunted by the dead—by Melville, Henderson, the girl, and perhaps by Jon—we walked along the beach to their dinghy, beneath a field of stars.
“Maybe we’ll see you when you’re back on Tahiti,” Natalie said. “Ring Lars. He’ll know where we are.” She hugged me, a little desperately.
This was the last I saw of them until I spotted Natalie here in the prison yard.
The Tui Marama was gone from her mooring by sunrise. There were no other boats. I walked down to the beach for a swim. In its stillness and emptiness the bay might have belonged to a time before man, to any of the twenty thousand centuries since Nuku Hiva rose and cooled.
“When I was a boy,” my hotelier said unexpectedly at breakfast, after watching me study my map, “people used to walk that way to Taipivai across Hapaa. Before there were cars.”
The menace of his silence, his bulk, and his tattoos vanished with these words. I asked him what he meant by Hapaa, which wasn’t on the map. Soon we were chatting easily. His name was Pierre. Marquesans weren’t surly, just shy and reserved—as I should have known, being English.
Taipivai and Hapaa: Melville’s Typee and Happar. The first hundred pages of Typee resound with the question of these names. The Happar were said to be peaceful folk, already half tamed by missionaries, who might shelter Melville and his friend until their ship sailed off. But at all costs the runaways had to steer clear of the heathen Typee, “inveterate gormandizers of human flesh.”
Pierre’s large finger settled on a green blank running east from the crater rim. Across the contours was a dotted line, marked Sentier. “That’s Hapaa. No one goes up there now except to hunt pig.”
He thought this path joined the Taipivai road, probably beyond the landslide. From there it was only a few kilometres down to the village of Taipivai, where Tari Kautai lived.
I left most of my luggage with Pierre, taking only camping things and a change of clothes. His wife (a fuchsia bra that day) packed me a lunch. I made my way to the edge of town, found the path, and began climbing the crater rim.
Melville had been on board the Acushnet a year and half when she anchored at Taiohae in 1842. He’d seen no land in six months. Provisions were low. “The bark that once clung to the wood we use for fuel has been gnawed off and devoured by the captains pig; and … the pig himself has in turn been devoured.” He decided to risk his luck “among the savages of the island.”
From the Acushnet’s deck it had looked easy: a dash down a village lane and up the nearest spur, a scramble along the crab-claw ridge until they reached the high mountains. Opportunity came when the starboard watch were given a few hours’ shore leave. A storm drove the Marquesans into their houses and the sailors into a boat shed. When their shipmates grew drowsy and began to doze among the war canoes, the two runaways sprinted through breadfruit groves and gardens, unseen in the misty downpour.
Even though I had a path to follow, the first stage of Melville’s route was tough going—steep, overgrown, the humidity enervating. My pack seemed heavier than it should be; I blamed the bottle of whisky it held for Tari Kautai, bought on Sergeant Benoit’s advice. It took more than an hour to gain the ridge and a phaeton’s view of the Taiohae amphitheatre, its heights fogged, a tarnish on the bay. Due south, across a windy sea, I could just make out the spires of Ua Pou.
The trail wound through a grove of Tahitian chestnut into an empty wooded valley, the sun winking through heavy leaves. Here and there the land sloped away, giving views of folded greenery ringed by mountains. There was no sight of the sea, no sound whatever of man. Only parakeets and bees, and wild cockerels flashing gaudily in the woods. I was enthralled. It was wonderful to be alone. If Jon had wanted to hide from the world he could hardly have picked a more delightful spot. But the thought faded as soon as it took full shape in my mind. No one could live here without supplies—matches, for a start. Sooner or later the most elusive hermit would become known to travellers and hunters.
There was a snort, the crunch of a large animal bullying through undergrowth, leaving a piggy scent on the air. This Eden had its dangers. Then I began to worry more about the hunters than the prey. What might they do to a foreign woman alone? I walked on nervously, considered turning back before dark, but the trail showed no recent footprints; I had Hapaa to myself.
Nearly all the trees—mango, guava, pandanus, banana, breadfruit—were food trees, descendants of old Marquesan orchards. This jungle was the work of woman and man, the overgrown garden of a ruined estate. And soon I saw ruins in the shadows, walls of paepae, the high rafts of stone on which wooden houses once stood. A neolithic civilization had thrived on these islands, glimpsed by Melville in its last good days. Now it was lost as Stonehenge, in only a hundred years.
The last two Hapaa, a man and a woman, had crossed the ridge to Taiohae a century ago, leaving their tribal home behind, a memory still fresh when Stevenson came, himself tubercular and doomed. Now nothing remained of them, and even their name was no longer written on maps. These were islands of oblivion, where people tattooed themselves with glyphs they couldn’t read.
| E hari te fau, E toro te faaro E mo te taata. |
The palm tree will grow, The coral will spread, Butman will die. |
By mid-afternoon the path had branched several times, bearing no relation to the confident line on paper. The way I chose became clogged with recent growth; soon I was breaking trail with a stick. I wasn’t exactly lost—map and compass told me I’d hit the road beyond Muake eventually—but I was running on dead reckoning.
The sky whitened to a lifeless haze. The air became oppressive. I stopped to drink at every stream that looked undisturbed by pigs, beginning to see the wisdom in Vichy water. The more I drank, the more I sweated.
Then rain came, thick cool rain, welcome until I stopped for the night and began to feel downright chilled. I had trouble finding a level spot to pitch the tent. Eventually I flattened some bush on an ancient paepae, and slept under nylon where a Marquesan family had lived under thatch.
I woke often from frightening dreams to more tangible fears of drunken hunters and wild boars. Once, I had to force myself outside to pee. Squatting in the bushes (always the worst part of camping) I remembered the giant centipede: a bite characterized by immediate severe pain, followed by tissue necrosis. It took a long time to fall asleep after that. There were things in the night beyond the nylon membrane—snapping branches, footfalls, breaths, grunts, stifled cries. It wasn’t hard to understand the old Polynesian dread of tupapau, the restless ghosts who lurk in lonely places. No doubt there were plenty of them in Hapaa. And as I floated between sleep and wakefulness, I was visited by a ghost of my own—scenes of my father lost and starving, stumbling about up here like Melville, sick in body or mind. He was buried in this very paepae, and I was lying on his bones.
The rain ended by dawn. I wriggled from my cocoon into a world of mist. Somehow I got a fire going and made tea. After that I pressed on miserably, each step bringing down a shower of drips. At last, around midday, I saw open light through the trees: a track, presumably the road to Taipivai. But Muake seemed too close.
I sat under a mango tree and ate some nuts and chocolate. Revived, I left my pack there and took a look around. I could hear the roar of a waterfall; if I could see it, it might fix my position. The central plateau of Nuku Hiva is a raised dish of swamps and streams overflowing in three great waterfalls, two of which drop into the forked canyon of Typee.
This high wilderness had been a no mans land in ancient times, avoided by the Marquesan tribes except when they swarmed up here to make war in clearings strewn with bones and broken weapons. Again it struck me how Balkanized these islands had become, as if the history of whole continents had had to be repeated here in miniature. The people might know themselves to be descended from a single fleet, yet still they divided and fought—as if human enmity must always fill the space allowed it, whether an island or a world.
The roaring strengthened until I was certainly above a large waterfall. But all I could see was a swollen river, narrow, deep, and fast, vanishing over the lip of a chasm brimming with spray. I went closer, lured by an illusion of safety spun by the mist. The edge was dangerous, an overhang of slippery grass, loose stones, and clay. Suddenly the mist rose in an updraft, revealing a long canyon gouged a thousand feet deep into the land. This great waterfall had to be Vaiahu. Not far from here, Melville had pushed aside a bough and looked “straight down into the bosom of a valley” like “a glimpse of the gardens of Paradise.”
He had seen thatched houses, bleached and glistening, but now there was no sign of human beings at all. Jungle covered everything except the steepest cliffs. Small clouds were sailing like balloons between the sheer green walls.
I wondered if Jon had seen this. I felt certain he had. He sought out such places—for their own sake and for photographs. I felt him with me, looking through my eyes. And I thought of you. If you were like me, you’d want to see this too.
There was no way down. It took Melville and Toby several days and nights of great hardship to cross the Vaiahu River higher up, reach the second branch of the Y-shaped Typee Valley, and literally drop into the canyon, launching themselves from a precipice onto the crown of a palm tree as if it were a safety net.
By then Melville was feverish and lame, his leg bitten by some “congenial inhabitant of the chasm,” probably a centipede. “The continual roaring of the cataract—the dismal moaning of the gale through the trees—the pattering of the rain, and the profound darkness, affected my spirits to a degree which nothing had ever before produced. Wet, half famished,… nearly wild with the pain I endured, I abandoned myself to frightful anticipations of evil.”
I went back to where I’d had lunch and started along the road towards Taipivai. After an hour I came to the slide, a cone of red earth and chunks of basalt. It wasn’t hard to scramble across. I’d not gone much further when I heard a vehicle. A Marquesan family went past in a red pick-up, inspected the barrier, and turned round, giving me a welcome lift to Typee.
They were free with smiles, but taciturn as the rest. I thought: Getting people to speak to me (let alone to camera) will be difficult. No one here seems even faintly curious about outsiders. I suppose they’ve had enough of us.