After the morning meal was concluded, pipes were lighted; and among
them my own special pipe, a present from the noble Mehevi. The
islanders, who only smoke a whiff or two at a time, and at long
intervals, and who keep their pipes going from hand to hand
continually, regarded my systematic smoking of four or five pipefuls of
tobacco in succession as something quite wonderful. When two or three
pipes had circulated freely, the company gradually broke up. Marheyo
went to the little hut he was for ever building. Tinor began to inspect
her rolls of tappa, or employed her busy fingers in plaiting
grass-mats. The girls anointed themselves with their fragrant oils,
dressed their hair, or looked over their curious finery, and compared
together their ivory trinkets, fashioned out of boar’s tusks or whale’s
teeth. The young men and warriors produced their spears, paddles,
canoe-gear, battle-clubs, and war-conchs, and occupied themselves in
carving all sorts of figures upon them with pointed bits of shell or
flint, and adorning them, especially the war-conchs, with tassels of
braided bark and tufts of human hair. Some, immediately after eating,
threw themselves once more upon the inviting mats, and resumed the
employment of the previous night, sleeping as soundly as if they had
not closed their eyes for a week. Others sallied out into the groves,
for the purpose of gathering fruit or fibres of bark and leaves; the
last two being in constant requisition, and applied to a hundred uses.
A few, perhaps, among the girls, would slip into the woods after
flowers, or repair to the stream with small calabashes and cocoa-nut
shells, in order to polish them by friction with a smooth stone in the
water. In truth these innocent people seemed to be at no loss for
something to occupy their time; and it would be no light task to
enumerate all their employments, or rather pleasures.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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