"Michener, James - Hawaii" - читать интересную книгу автора (Michener James A)

Across a million years, down more than ten million years it existed silently in the unknown sea and then died, leaving only a fringe of coral where sea birds rest and where gigantic seals of the changing ocean play. Ceaseless life and death, endless expenditure of beauty and capacity, tireless ebb and flow and rising and subsidence of the ocean. Night comes and the burning day, and the island waits, and no man arrives. The days perish and the nights, and the aching beauty of lush valleys and waterfalls vanishes, and no man will ever see them.
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All that remains is a coral reef, a calcium wreath on the surface of the great sea that had given the island life, a memorial erected by the skeletons of a billion billion billion little animals.
While this first island was rising to prominence and dying back to nothingness, other would-be islands, stretching away to the southeast, were also struggling to attain br knocked off!"
In wild burlesque, Pa ridiculed the coronation of the headless would-be king. Paddlers stopped and began to beat rhythms on the canoe, and a woman produced a little drum with a high, almost metallic sound, and the night's revelry was launched.
"What is this new dance?" Tamatoa inquired.
"I've never seen it before," Tupuna replied.
"Do you know what he's doing?" the king asked Teroro.
"Yes," the younger man said hesitantly. "Pa is ... Well, Tamatoa, some of us heard that fat Tatai was to be king after we left . . . and . . ."
Tamatoa looked at the headless dancer and asked, "So you sneaked over to Havaiki . . . some of you . . ."
"Yes."
"And now Tatai has no head."
"Well . . . yes. You see, we felt ..."
"You could have ruined the entire voyage, couldn't you?"
"We could have, but we figured that Tatai's village wouldn't come over to Bora Bora very soon . . ."
"Why not?"
"Well, when we left there wasn't any village."
In the light of the quarter moon King Tamatoa looked at his daring young brother, and there was much that he would have said,
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but the sound of ancient drumming stifled his logical thoughts, and with a stirring leap he whirled forward to where Pa was dancing and entered into the ritual dance of the kings of Bora Bora. Like a boy, he gestured and postured and told forgotten stories, until toward the end he grabbed Pa's tapa and threw it over his head and did the now popular dance of the headless king from Havaiki. When the drums had reached a crescendo he threw off the tapa, stood very straight in the night wind, and exulted: "We did not go like cowardsl I, the king, was afraid to strike at those evil worms, those faces of excrement, those vile and awful dead fish of the stinking lagoon. I was afraid to endanger the coming voyage. But Pa here was not afraid. And Mato was not afraid. And my brother ..." In gratitude Tamatoa looked aft to where Teroro stood in darkness. The king did not finish his sentence. With demonic energy he leaped into a dance of victory, shouting, "I dance in honor of brave men! Let's have the celebration you were denied!" And he ordered extra rations of food to be broken out, and more drums, and all the water anyone wanted.
Like children careless of the dawn, they reveled through the night, got drunk on laughter, and feasted on food that should have been conserved. It was a wild, wonderful night of victory, and each half hour someone shouted, "Pa! Do the dance of the headless king!" Then, one by one, in savage triumph, they rose and screamed classic island insults at the vanquished.
"Havaiki is the strong scent of spoiled meat!"
"The worthless trash of Havaiki take pleasure in their shame."
"Fat Tatai trembles in fear. The hair on his head trembles. He crawls away and hides like a hen in a secret place."
"The warriors of Havaiki are the froth of water, boys playing with mud balls."
Teroro, succumbing to the excitement, shouted, "Fat Tatai is a sneaking little dog, excrement of excrement." But as his voice shrieked in the wind, he happened to look forward to where beautiful Tehani huddled against the masts, weeping as her father was reviled. Then he also saw Mato, from the left hull, touch the girl's hand.
Mato said, "This is the way of victory. You must forgive us." From the rear new voices rose with foul invective, and the drums beat on.
In the rainy dawn, of course, King Tamatoa took gloomy stock of what the celebration had cost and for a moment he thought: "We are children. We discover we're lost and half an hour later we eat enough food for a week." Contritely, he issued stringent orders that what had been wasted must be made up by austere rationing. "Even though we have plenty of water," he warned, "each must drink only a cupful a day."
So, with the remnants of the tempest at their back and with victory in their hearts, the voyagers sailed eastward for the ninth night, and the tenth, and the fifteenth. Their swift canoe, fleetest large craft that ever up to then had plied the oceans of the world,
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averaged two hundred miles a day, better than eight miles an hour, day after day. They sailed more than halfway to the lands where Aztecs were building mighty temples, and well onto the approaches of the northern land where Cheyennes and Apaches built nothing. In the direction they were then headed they could encounter no land until they struck the continent itself; but before that happened they would have perished of thirst and starvation in the doWrums. Nevertheless, they carried on, according to Teroro's plan. There was fear each dawn when the sun rose; there was momentary joy each night when the stars reappeared to tell their progress; for day was the enemy, crowded with uncertainty and the hourly acknowledgment of their forlorn position; but night was consolation and the spiritual assurance of known stars, and the waxing of the fat moon through its many stages, and the soft cries of birds at dusk. How tremendous an experience this was, at the end of a long day which had provided only the unstable sun, to watch the return of night and to discover, there in the west where the sun went down, the evening star and its wandering companion, and out of the vastness to see the Little Eyes come peeping with their message: "You are coming closer to the land we guard." How marvelous, how marvelous the night!
As THE CANOE REACHED EASTWARD and the storm abated, the daily routine became more settled. Each dawn the six slaves stopped bailing and cleaned out the canoe, while farmers moved among the animals and fed them, giving the pigs and dogs fish caught in the early hours, plus some mashed sweet potatoes and fresh water trapped in the sails. The chickens got dried coconut and a fish to pick at, but if they lagged in eating, a slim, dark object darted out from among the freight and grabbed the food away, unseen by the slaves, for as on all such trips, some rats had stowed aboard, and if the voyage turned out badly, they would be the last to die ... would indeed sustain themselves for many drifting days on those who had already perished.
After the women in the grass hut had wakened, the female slaves would move inside, throw out the slops and do the other necessary chores. Particularly, they kept clean that corner of the hut which had been cut off by lengths of tapa and reserved for those women who were experiencing their monthly sickness, for it was a tabu entailing death for there to be any communication between men and women at such time.
In general, however, the tabus which were rigidly enforced on land had to be suspended aboard a crowded canoe. For example, had any of the rowers while ashore come as near the king as all now were, or had they stepped upon his shadow, or even the shadow of his cape, they would have been killed instantly, but in the canoe the tabu was suspended, and sometimes when the king moved, men actually touched him. They recoiled as if doomed, but he ignored the insult.
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The tabus which centered upon eating were also held in abeyance, for there was no one aboard of sufficient status to prepare the king's food as custom required; nor had the keeper of the king's toilet pot come on the journey, so that a slave, terrified at the task, had to throw into the sea the kingly bowel movements, rather than follow the required custom of burying them secretly in a sacred grove, lest enemies find them and with evil spells conjure the king to death.
Women upon such a trip did not fare well. Obviously, the food had to be reserved for men who did the hard work of paddling. The pigs and dogs also had to be kept alive to stock the new land, which left little for the women. That was why, at every opportunity, they set fishing lines and tended them carefully. The first fish they caught went to the king and Teroro, the next to Tupuna and his old wife, the next four to the paddlers, the seventh and eighth to the pigs, the ninth to the dogs, the tenth to the chickens and the rats. If there were more, the women could eat.
With great niggardliness, the prepared foods were doled out, a piece at a time, but when they were distributed, how good they tasted. A man would get his stick of hard and sour breadfruit, and as he chewed on it he would recall the wasteful feasts he had once held, when abundant breadfruit, fresh and sweet, had been thrown to animals. But the food that gave most pleasure, the master food of the islands, came when the king directed that one of the bamboo lengths of dried poi be opened, and then the rich purplish starch would be handed out, and as it grew sticky in the mouth, men would smile with pleasure.
But soon the poi was finished and the bundles of dried breadfruit diminished. Even the abundant rain ceased and King Tamatoa had to reduce his rations still further, until the crew were getting only two mouthfuls of solid food, two small portions of water. Women and slaves got half as much, so that unless the fishermen could land bonito, or trap water in the sails, all existed at the starvation level.
Early in the dry period the king and Teroro made one discovery, a tormenting and frustrating one made by all similar voyagers: when the tongue was parched and the body scorched with heat, when one's whole being craved only water, an unexpected squall often passed a mile to the left or right, dumping untold quantities of water upon the sea, just out of reach, but it was no use paddling furiously to overtake the squall, for by the time the canoe reached the spot where the rain had been falling, the squall had moved on, leaving all hands hotter and thirstier than before. Not even an expert navigator like Teroro could anticipate the vagaries of a rain squall and intercept it; all one could do was to plod patiently on, his lips burning with desire and his eyes aflame, trying to ignore the cascades of water that were being dumped out of reach; but one could also pray that if one did continue purposefully, in a seamanlike manner, sooner or later some squall would have to strike the canoe.
On a voyage such as this, sexual contact was expressly tabu, but this did not keep the king from gazing often at his stately wife
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Natabu; and old Tupuna saw to it that Teura got some of his food; and in the heat of day Tehani would dip a length of tapa into the sea, cool it, and press it over her husband's sleeping form. At night, when the stars were known and the course set, the navigator would often sit quietly beside the vivacious girl he had brought with him and talk with her of Havaiki, or of his youth on Bora Bora, and although she rarely had anything sensible to say in reply, the two did grow to respect and treasure each other.
But the most curious thoughts between men and women involved the twelve unassigned women and the thirty-four unattached men. Perhaps the word unassigned is not completely accurate to describe the women, because some of them in Bora Bora had been specific wives of individual men, but on such an expedition it was understood that upon landing, any such woman would accept as her additional husbands two or three of the men who had no wives, and no one considered this strange. So on the long voyage men with no women began cautiously to do two things: to form close friendships with men who had women, establishing a congenial group of three or four who would later share one woman as their common wife; or to study the unmarried women in an effort to decide which one could most satisfactorily be shared with one's group; so that before the voyage had consumed even fifteen days, groups had begun to crystallize, and without anything definite having been said, it was remarkably well understood that this woman and these three men would build a house for themselves and raise common children, or that that husband and wife would accept those two friends of the man into complete and intimate harmony, thus populating the new land. It was further understood that each woman, until she reached the age when children no longer came, would be kept continuously pregnant. The same, of course, was true of the sows and the bitches, for the major task of all was to populate an empty, new land.
On the eleventh night occurred an event which, in its emotional impact upon a people who lived by the stars, had no equal on this voyage. Even the abandonment of Oro had failed to generate the excitement caused by this phenomenon.
As the West Wind crept constantly northward it became obvious to the astronomers on board that they must lose, and forever, many old familiar stars which lay below what astronomers would later call the Southern Cross. It was with sorrow, and even occasionally with tears, that Tupuna would follow some particular star which as a boy he had loved, and watch it vanish into the perpetual pit of the sky from which stars no more rise. Whole constellations were washed into the sea, never to be seen again.
Although this was cause for regret, it did not occasion alarm, for the men of Bora Bora were exceptional astronomers. They had developed, from careful observation, a year of 365 days, and they had found that from time to time an extra day was required to keep the seasons aligned. Their ritual life was organized around a moon-month