Noa Noa

Noa Noa
by Paul Gauguin
Translated by O.T. Theis
1919
From sacred-texts.com
Noa Noa
"Dites, qu'avez-vous vu?" Charles Baudelaire.
ON the eighth of June, during the night, after a sixty-three days' voyage,
sixty-three days of feverish expectancy, we perceived strange fires,
moving in zigzags on the sea. From the somber sky a black cone with
jagged indentions became disengaged.
We turned Morea and had Tahiti before us.
Several hours later dawn appeared, and we gently approached the reefs,
entered the channel, and anchored without accidents in the roadstead.
The first view of this part of the island discloses nothing very
extraordinary; nothing, for instance, that could be compared with the
magnificent bay of Rio de Janeiro.
It is the summit of a mountain submerged at the time of one of the
ancient deluges. Only the very point rose above the waters. A family
fled thither and founded a new race--and then the corals climbed up
along it, surrounding the peak, and in the course of centuries builded a
new land. It is still extending, but retains its original character of
solitude and isolation, which is only accentuated by the immense
expanse of the ocean.

Toward ten o'clock I made my formal call on the governor, the Negro
Lacascade, who received me as though I had been an important
personage.
I owed this distinction to the mission with which the French
government--I do not know why--had entrusted me. It was an artistic
mission, it is true. But in the view of the Negro, however, this word
was only an official synonym for espionage, and I tried in vain to
undeceive him. Every one about him shared this belief, and when I said
that I was receiving no pay for my mission no one would believe me.
Life at Papeete soon became a burden.
It was Europe--the Europe which I had thought to shake off--and that
under the aggravating circumstances of colonial snobbism, and the
imitation, grotesque even to the point of caricature, of our customs,
fashions, vices, and absurdities of civilization.
Was I to have made this far journey, only to find the very thing which I
had fled?
Nevertheless, there was a public event which interested me.
At the time King Pomare was mortally ill, and the end was daily
expected.
Little by little the city had assumed a singular aspect.
All the Europeans, merchants, functionaries, officers, and soldiers,
laughed and sang on the streets as usual, while the natives with grave
mien and lowered voice held converse among themselves in the
neighborhood of the palace. In the roadstead there was an abnormal
movement of orange sails on the blue sea, and often the line of reefs
shone in a sudden silvery gleam under the sun. The natives of
neighboring islands were hastening hither to attend at the last moments
of their king, and at the definite taking possession of their empire by
France.

By signs from above they had had report of this, for whenever a king
was about to die the mountains in certain places became covered with
dark spots at the setting of the sun.
The king died, and lay in state in the palace in the uniform of an
admiral.
There I saw the queen, Maraü--such was her name--decorating the
royal hall with flowers and materials. When the director of public
works asked my advice about the artistic arrangements of the funeral, I
pointed out the queen to him. With the beautiful instinct of her race she
dispersed grace everywhere about her, and made everything she
touched a work of art.
I understood her only imperfectly at this first meeting. Both the human
beings and the objects were so different from those I had desired, that I
was disappointed. I was disgusted by all this European triviality. I had
disembarked too recently yet to distinguish how much of nationality,
fundamental realness, and primitive beauty still remained in this
conquered race beneath the artificial and meretricious veneer of our
importations. I was still in a manner blind. I saw in this queen, already
somewhat mature in years, only a commonplace stout woman with
traces of noble beauty. When I saw her again later, I revised my first
judgment. I fell under the spell of her "Maori charm." Notwithstanding
all the intermixture, the Tahitian type was still very pure in her. And
then the memory of her ancestor, the great chief Tati, gave her as well
as her brother and all her family an appearance of truly imposing
grandeur. She had the majestic sculptural form of her race, ample and
at the same time gracious. The arms were like the two columns of a
temple, simple, straight; and the whole bodily form with the long
horizontal line of the shoulder, and the vast height terminating above in
a point, inevitably