A fairly broad trail wound about the hill, the trail over which the dead and the mourners go, and the way was through a vast cocoanut-orchard, the trees planted with absolute regularity lifting their waving fronds seventy or eighty feet above the earth. There was no underbrush between the tall gray columns of the palms, only a twisted vegetation covered the ground, and the red volcanic soil of the trail, cutting through the green, was like a smear of blood.

     The road was long and hot. Halting near the summit, we looked upward, and I was struck with emotion as when in the courtyard I saw the group of the crucifixion. A cross forty feet high, with a Christ nailed upon it, all snow-white, stood up against the deep blue sky. It was like a note of organ music in the great gray cathedral of the palms.

     Another forty minutes climbing brought us to the foot of the white symbol. A half-acre within white-washed palings, like any country graveyard, lay on the summit of the mountain.

    To find Gauguin’s grave we began at the entrance and searched row by row. The graves were those of natives, mounds marked by small stones along the sides, with crosses of rusted iron filigree showing skulls and other symbols of death, and a name painted in white, mildewing away. Farther on were tombs of stone and cement, primitive and massive, defying the elements. Upon one was graven, « _Ci Git Daniel Vaimai, Kata-Kita_, 1867-1907. R.I.P. » The grave of a catechist, a native assistant to the priests. Beneath another lay « August Jorss, » he who had ordered the Golden Bed in which I slept. Most conspicuous of all was a mausoleum surrounded by a high, black, iron railing brought from France. On this I climbed to read while perched on the points :

     « _Ici repose Mg. Illustrissime et Reverendissime_ Rog. Jh. Martin, » and much more in Latin and French. It was the imposing grave of the Bishop of Uranopolis, vicar-apostolic to the Marquesas, predecessor to Bishop le Cadre, who had no pride and whom all called plain Father David.

     Suddenly rain poured down upon us, and looking about to find a shelter we saw a straw penthouse over a new and empty grave lined with stones. We huddled beneath it, our faces toward the sea, and while the heavy rain splashed above our heads and water rushed down the slope, we gazed in silence at the magnificent panorama below.

     We were directly above the Bay of Traitors, that arm of the sea which curved into the little bays of Taka-Uka and Atuona. At one side, a mere pinnacle through the vapor about his throat, rose the rugged head of Temetiu, and ranged below him the black fastnesses of the valleys he commands. In the foreground the cocoas, from the rocky
headlands to the gate of Calvary, stood like an army bearing palms of victory. In rows and circles, plats and masses, the gray trunks followed one another from sea to mountain, yielding themselves to the storm, swaying gently, and by some trick of wind and rain seeming to march toward the cross-crowned summit.

     The flimsy thatch under which we crouched, put up only to keep the sun from the grave-digger, bent to north and south, and threatened to wing away. But suddenly the shower ran away in a minute, as if it had an engagement elsewhere, and the sun shone more brightly in the rain-washed air.

     We continued our search, but uselessly. Hohine and Mupui had advertisement of their last mortal residence, but not Gauguin. We found an earring on one little tomb where a mother had laid her child, and on several those _couronnes des perles_, stiff, ugly wreaths brought from France, with « Sincere Regrets » in raised beads, speaking pityfully of the longing of the simple islanders to do honor to the memory of their loved ones. But the grave of Gauguin, the great painter, was unmarked. If a board had been placed at its head when he was buried, it had rotted away, and nothing was left to indicate where he was lying.

     The hibiscus was blood-red on the sunken graves, and cocoanuts sprouted in the tangled grass. Palms shut out from the half-acre had dropped their nuts within it, and the soil, rich in the ashes of man, was endeavoring to bring forth fairer fruit than headstones and iron crosses. The _pahue_, a lovely, long, creeping vine that wanders on the beaches to the edge of the tides, had crawled over many graves, and its flowers, like morning-glories, hung their purple bells on the humbler spots that no hand sought to clear.

     Perhaps under these is the dust of the painter who, more than any other man, made the Marquesas known to the world of Europe.

In Frederick O’Brien 1919, White shadows in the south seas. Chapter XIV