XLVII

Wandering along the white strand of Tahiti, under the slim coco-palms, now and again, on some solitary headland where we look out on the blue immensity, in some spot chosen by the melancholy taste of forgotten generations, we come on funereal knolls, great barrows of coral. These are the maraé, the tombs of long departed chiefs; the history of the dead who sleep below is lost in the fabulous and unknown past which preceded the discovery of the islands of Polynesia. These maraé are to be met with on the shores of all the islands inhabited by the Maori race.