XIV

At about three in the afternoon I took leave of Taïrapa and went on my way. We still walked on for about an hour, along sandy paths, across lands which Tatari told me belonged to Queen Pomaré. Then we reached a lovely bay, where thousands of coco-palms rocked their heads in the gale. Under these grand trees man feels himself as insignificant, as infinitely small, as a microscopic insect creeping about among tall reeds. All these high, slender stems, were, like the soil itself, of a uniform ashen-grey; here and there a pandanus, or an oleander loaded with flowers, broke the endless colonnade with a blaze of bright colour. The bare earth was strewn with fragments of madrepores and dried palm leaves. The sea, deeply blue, broke on a strand of dead coral as white as snow; on the horizon Tahiti was in sight, half-hidden in mist, basking in the broad tropical sunshine. The wind whistled mournfully under the palms, as if they were enormous organ-pipes; my head was full of gloomy thoughts and strange impressions—and the memory of my brother, which I had come hither to find, revived like the visions of my childhood, in the night of the past.