Since Nature’s so generously inclined toward them, these people must create their own tragedies. So they have their tradition in which the eldest choose maidens as priestesses for the gods—maidens who then may no longer love men. They become “tabu.”

Mehao uses my sense of his exoticism as a screen. Which is more blinding to the truth: the fetishism of the colonialist or the mimicry of the native?

****Lightning all night. An ominous reminder of the fever curve. Toward morning, a promising little breeze. Around breakfast, an attack of flies.

****26 August. Crosby and Flaherty asked me to walk the beach with them. Discipline was breaking down, they reported. The project was coming apart. Changes had to be made. The shooting schedule had to be tightened. Unessential personnel had to be released. Crosby cited the uncertain weather not far off.

I told them I thought things were going well. Some listless haggling followed. At one point I sat in the waves’ wrack at the edge of a tidal pool. As the rushing water withdrew, marvels of color and design streamed through my fingers. I caught only the occasional conch or miracle spiral as proof of what I’d missed with each wave’s retreat.

At lunch they tried again. The orange of Tahiti is delicious: small and sweet with a thin, dry rind. Mehao visible from the veranda, spearfishing again. The palm-tree tattoo accentuated the muscles in his back. A minor and sad surprise: he’s spent some of the money I gave him on a straw boater’s hat. The bickering with Crosby and F. petered out.

At dusk we set up Crosby’s camera at the edge of the breakwater reef for some sunset shots. In places, we were walking on the roof of immense subterranean caverns. The sea rushed into them with uncanny noise, geysering mist and spray through the cracks. It made me feel fifteen years old.

Flaherty took the occasion to deliver a lesson on the local folklore. There was throughout Tahitian culture an element of dread. Fears of demons and the dark were deeply written in the Polynesian mind. Presences called vehinehae made the nocturnal roadside, and particularly the crossroads, frightful; they were like mist shaped as men and with the eyes of cats. They represented the dead. When a native said he was a man, he meant a man and not a demon, instead of a man and not a beast. Only recently, after twilight, Flaherty said, a demon was said to have taken the younger of two boys to the edge of the jungle. The demon was said to have whispered “You are so-and-so, son of so-and-so?” and then caressed and beguiled the boy deeper into the undergrowth while his older brother watched, petrified.