Hue Fafaru!

The Dreadful Experience of a Sensitive Man in Tahiti

By A. C. Rowland

Eden had its serpent; the Garden of the Hesperides its dragon. The fly m the ointment of Tahiti’s romantic perfection is the hue fafaru.

The hue fafaru is an innocent-looking gourd, in which fish are steeped in sea water for several hours to prepare them for ingestion without the intervention of cookery.

The porous texture of the gourd ab sorbs the essences of these elements, and time and heat from the tropical sun so matures and mellows them that they be stow lavishly their virtues upon subse quent charges. The more these virtues have ripened and expanded, the more they delight the palates of connoisseurs.

Hence, an ageing hue fafaru gathers merit with the passage of time, and eventually becomes priceless. The frag rance of well matured Limberger or mossy Roquefort is as a gentle zephyr compared with the robust authority of a venerable hue fafaru.

Places where hue fafaru abound are un inhabitable except by individuals born there, who have grown up to regard such an atmosphere as normal.

We have an acquaintance, a Euro pean, who hates hue fafaru and all its works with fanatical fury. He is married to a wife possessed of a hue fafaru that

is an heirloom from her remote ancestors Their house faces the east, whence blow the prevailing winds and, being a wo man of great wisdom, she keeps the gourd in a distant outhouse well to the leeward of their main dwelling.

But one unlucky day, when the wife was on a visit with her relatives, the kitchen maid hung the hue fafaru tem porarily on a bush, adjacent to the win dows of the main bedroom and, after the custom of kitchen maids, forgot all about it.

At 12 o’clock, after the midday meal, the master of the house retired for a rest. During his slumbers the east wind died down and there ensued a dead calm.

The fervent rays of the noonday sun beating on that ancient gourd, drew forth all its latent worthiness into the fullest blossom.

The sleeper-after dreaming that he had been kidnapped by bandits and chamed to a pillar in a fish-glue fac tory-awoke to find himself in an ad vanced state of asphyxiation.

The instinct of self-preservation hurled his body automatically into the outer air, to a place where he could recover his breath. His first act, when he had re freshed his strength was to get a pick axe and spade; carry them to a field well to the westward, and there dig a hole measuring 3 ft. east and west and 6 ft perpendicular. Then taking the family rou (a long pole with a forked end, used to gather bread fruit from high branches) he stalked that gourd and. keeping well to windward, hurled it into the hole he had dug, tramping carefully the earth over it so that no evidence should rise to the surface which would enable his wife to locate and retrieve it.

Then, in fear and trembling, he await ed the tempest. It came, and the neigh bourhood shook with its fury. But, by some miracle, the winds and lightnings passed over his head. He was not even suspected. The theft was laid to some envious neighbour who had long coveted that priceless antique.

Slaves of the Gourd have solemnly as sured us that fish prepared in the hue fafaru carry no memories of that abiding place to the table, except a flavour deli cious beyond all description. We have been urged to try this gustatory delight.

But we have refrained.