The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 17Stevenson, Robert Louis
History
The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 17
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Islands of the Pacific -- Fiction; Samoan Islands -- History; Short stories
the boat, and was all drenched with sweat and cold sea-water; and none
heeded him. Against all expectation, they came safe in a dreadful
tempest to Papa-malulu, where the palms were singing out, and the
cocoa-nuts flying like cannon-balls about the village green; and the
same night the five young gentlemen sickened, and spoke never a
reasonable word until they died.
"And do you mean to tell me you can swallow a yarn like that?" I asked.
She told me the thing was well known, and with handsome young men alone
it was even common; but this was the only case where five had been slain
the same day and in a company by the love of the women-devils; and it
had made a great stir in the island, and she would be crazy if she
doubted.
"Well, anyway," says I, "you needn't be frightened about me. I've no use
for the women-devils. You're all the women I want, and all the devil
too, old lady."
To this she answered there were other sorts, and she had seen one with
her own eyes. She had gone one day alone to the next bay, and, perhaps,
got too near the margin of the bad place. The boughs of the high bush
overshadowed her from the cant of the hill, but she herself was outside
on a flat place, very stony, and growing full of young mummy-apples four
and five feet high. It was a dark day in the rainy season, and now there
came squalls that tore off the leaves and sent them flying, and now it
was all still as in a house. It was in one of these still times that a
whole gang of birds and flying foxes came pegging out of the bush like
creatures frightened. Presently after she heard a rustle nearer hand,
and saw, coming out of the margin of the trees, among the mummy-apples,
the appearance of a lean grey old boar. It seemed to think as it came,
like a person; and all of a sudden, as she looked at it coming, she was
aware it was no boar, but a thing that was a man with a man's thoughts.
At that she ran, and the pig after her, and as the pig ran it holla'd
aloud, so that the place rang with it.
"I wish I had been there with my gun," said I. "I guess that pig would
have holla'd so as to surprise himself."
But she told me a gun was of no use with the like of these, which were
the spirits of the dead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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