Chapter Twenty-one

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THE SPRING OF ARVA WAI--REMARKABLE MONUMENTAL REMAINS--SOME IDEAS
WITH REGARD TO THE HISTORY OF THE PI-PIS FOUND IN THE VALLEY

ALMOST every country has its medicinal springs famed for their
healing virtues. The Cheltenham of Typee is embosomed in the
deepest solitude, and but seldom receives a visitor. It is
situated remote from any dwelling, a little way up the mountain,
near the head of the valley; and you approach it by a pathway
shaded by the most beautiful foliage, and adorned with a thousand
fragrant plants. The mineral waters of Arva Wai* ooze forth from
the crevices of a rock, and gliding down its mossy side, fall at
last, in many clustering drops, into a natural basin of stone
fringed round with grass and dewy-looking little violet-coloured
flowers, as fresh and beautiful as the perpetual moisture they
enjoy can make them.

*I presume this might be translated into 'Strong Waters'. Arva
is the name bestowed upon a root the properties of which are both
inebriating and medicinal. 'Wai' is the Marquesan word for
water.

The water is held in high estimation by the islanders, some of
whom consider it an agreeable as well as a medicinal beverage;
they bring it from the mountain in their calabashes, and store it
away beneath heaps of leaves in some shady nook near the house.
Old Marheyo had a great love for the waters of the spring. Every
now and then he lugged off to the mountain a great round demijohn
of a calabash, and, panting with his exertions, brought it back
filled with his darling fluid.

The water tasted like a solution of a dozen disagreeable things,
and was sufficiently nauseous to have made the fortune of the
proprietor, had the spa been situated in the midst of any
civilized community.

As I am no chemist, I cannot give a scientific analysis of the
water. All I know about the matter is, that one day Marheyo in
my presence poured out the last drop from his huge calabash, and
I observed at the bottom of the vessel a small quantity of
gravelly sediment very much resembling our common sand. Whether
this is always found in the water, and gives it its peculiar
flavour and virtues, or whether its presence was merely
incidental, I was not able to ascertain.

One day in returning from this spring by a circuitous path, I
came upon a scene which reminded me of Stonehenge and the
architectural labours of the Druids.

At the base of one of the mountains, and surrounded on all sides
by dense groves, a series of vast terraces of stone rises, step
by step, for a considerable distance up the hill side. These
terraces cannot be less than one hundred yards in length and
twenty in width. Their magnitude, however, is less