The two midshipmen were amazed at the sight when the place chosen for the council had been reached. A score or more of warriors were found squatting in the grass near the huge rock over which the Vaisaigo stream plunged. A large pool of dark water below the falls was thus kept filled, and where the solid stream curved and fell the blackness was changed to white foam and iridescent spray. They found the council was over. The business having been finished the chiefs were ready to eat and then after a time bathe in the deep pool beneath them. Tuamana made the midshipmen and Alice sit beside him, and all the best things to eat were pressed upon the visitors. “I’m glad there’s no more kava,” Phil said in an aside to Alice. After the feast, consisting of roast young pig, yams, breadfruit, roast chicken and many kinds of tropical fruit, Tuamana called Avao to him. The father talked to his daughter fully fifteen minutes. Phil noticed that both were serious and solemn. Alice had meanwhile risen and wandered away with two of her Kapuan girl friends, to gather the many variegated flowers and leaves so plentiful in the virgin forests. The lads, left to themselves, eyed in wonder the warrior chiefs seated now in small groups; some were motionless, a look of deep contemplation upon their intelligent bronze faces, while others talked, but with the same solemn expression. Each wore the fighting head-dress of human hair, standing above a band of gleaming pearl-shell knobs clasped around the forehead. In the center of this marvelous, barbaric creation of a head-dress and to add picturesqueness and color, a bunch of long red feathers plucked from the boatswain bird waved in the breeze, while in the middle of each forehead, reflecting the sunlight as it filtered through the dense foliage above them, was a small mirror. About their necks were hung necklaces of the scarlet pandanus fruit. About their waists and hanging half-way to their knees were tapa and mats of finely woven grass. Below this their only covering, the indigo tattooing, was visible above their knees. Every warrior when he reaches manhood must submit to the old women tattooers; they cover the would-be warrior with their intricate designs from the waist to the knee, and to refuse to be tattooed is considered by a Kapuan a crime against manhood. Many of the warrior chiefs, as they arose to cool themselves in the icy cold waters of the Vaisaigo, stopped and shook hands with the two officers. “They seem to think there is a tacit understanding between them and ourselves,” Phil said to Sydney as one chief after shaking hands brought his “fui”[20] to his shoulder as if it were a gun and took aim at an imaginary enemy. “I wonder if there is,” he added thoughtfully. “That chap’s sign language either means you are going to furnish him a gun, or that he and we are going gunning together after the same human game.”