Mystic Isles of the South Seas. Frederick O'Brien

36
beads in various colors.
As I strolled past the houses, every one greeted me pleasantly.
"Ia ora na," they said, or "Bonjour!" I replied in kind. I had not
been a day in Tahiti before I felt kindled in me an affection for
its dark people which I had never known for any other race. It was
an admixture of friendship, admiration, and pity--of affection for
their beautiful natures, of appreciation of the magnificence of their
physical equipment, and of sympathy for them in their decline and
inevitable passing under the changed conditions of environment made
by the sudden smothering of their instinctive needs in the sepia of
commercial civilization. I saw that those natives remaining, laughing
and full of the desire for pleasure as they were, must perish because
unfit to survive in the morass of modernism in which they were sinking,
victims of a system of life in which material profits were the sole
goal and standard of the rulers.
The Tahitians are tall, vigorous, and superbly rounded. The men,
often more than six feet or even six and a half feet in height, have
a mien of natural majesty and bodily grace. They convey an impression
of giant strength, reserve power, and unconscious poise beyond that
made by any other race. American Indians I have known had much of this
quality when resident far from towns, but they lacked the curving,
padded muscles, the ease of movement, and, most of all, the smiling
faces, the ingratiating manner, of these children of the sun.
The Tahitians' noses are fairly flat and large; the nostrils dilated;
their lips full and sensual; their teeth perfectly shaped and very
white and sound; their chins strong, though round; and their eyes
black and large, not brilliant, but liquid. Their feet and hands are
mighty--hands that lift burdens of great weight, that swing paddles
of canoes for hours; feet that tread the roads or mountain trails
for league on league.
The women are of middle size, with lines of harmony that give them a
unique seal of beauty, with an undulating movement of their bodies,
a coordination of every muscle and nerve, a richness of aspect in
color and form, that is more sensuous, more attractive, than any
feminine graces I have ever gazed on. They have the forwardness of
boys, the boldness of huntresses, yet the softness and magnetism of