Only, at the end of the rickety pier, that once
(in the prosperous days of the American rebellion) was
used to groan under the cotton of John Hart, there
might have been spied upon a pile of lumber the famous
tattooed white man, the living curiosity of Tai-o-hae.
His eyes were open, staring down the bay. He saw the
mountains droop, as they approached the entrance, and
break down in cliffs: the surf boil white round the two
sentinel islets; and between, on the narrow bight of
blue horizon, Ua-pu upraise the ghost of her pinnacled
mountain-tops. But his mind would take no account of
these familiar features; as he dodged in and out along
the frontier line of sleep and waking, memory would
serve him with broken fragments of the past: brown
faces and white, of skipper and shipmate, king and
chief, would arise before his mind and vanish; he would
recall old voyages, old landfalls in the hour of dawn;
he would hear again the drums beat for a man-eating
festival; perhaps he would summon up the form of that
island princess for the love of whom he had submitted
his body to the cruel hands of the tattooer, and now
sat on the lumber, at the pier-end of Tai-o-hae, so
strange a figure of a European.
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