ABSTRACT
Then began a strange night, full of fantastic visions and terrors. The hangings of paper-mulberry tissue fluttered about me with rustlings like bats' wings, the tremendous sea breeze swept over my head. I shivered with cold in my pareo; I endured all the fears, all the misery of a castaway child. How can I find, in any European tongue, words which at all represent that night in Polynesia, those heart-broken sounds of nature—of the vast sonorous words; the loneliness of the infinite Ocean; the forests, full of uncanny piping and murmurs, 177peopled with phantoms—the Toupapahous of Oceanian legend wandering through the wood, with doleful cries, blue faces, sharp teeth, and long dishevelled hair.
