Noa Noa | Page 9

from her
possibilities of development. Thus modeled on a bizarre ideal of
slenderness to which, strangely enough, we continue to adhere, our
women have nothing in common with us, and this, perhaps, may not be
without grave moral and social disadvantages.
On Tahiti the breezes from forest and sea strengthen the lungs, they
broaden the shoulders and hips. Neither men nor women are sheltered
from the rays of the sun nor the pebbles of the sea-shore. Together they
engage in the same tasks with the same activity or the same indolence.
There is something virile in the women and something feminine in the
men.
This similarity of the sexes make their relations the easier. Their
continual state of nakedness has kept their minds free from the
dangerous pre-occupation with the "mystery" and from the excessive
stress which among civilized people is laid upon the "happy accident"
and the clandestine and sadistic colors of love. It has given their
manners a natural innocence, a perfect purity. Man and woman are
comrades, friends rather than lovers, dwelling together almost without
cease, in pain as in pleasure, and even the very idea of vice is unknown
to them.
In spite of all this lessening in sexual differences, why was it that there
suddenly rose in the soul of a member of an old civilization, a horrible
thought? Why, in all this drunkenness of lights and perfumes with its
enchantment of newness and unknown mystery?
The fever throbbed in my temples and my knees shook.

But we were at the end of the trail. In order to cross the brook my
companion turned, and in this movement showed himself full-face. The
androgyne had disappeared. It was an actual young man walking ahead
of me. His calm eyes had the limpid clearness of waters.
Peace forthwith fell upon me again.
We made a moment's halt. I felt an infinite joy, a joy of the spirit rather
than of the senses, as I plunged into the fresh water of the brook.
"Toë, toë (it is cold)," said Jotefa 1.
"Oh, no!" I replied.
This exclamation seemed to me also a fitting conclusion to the struggle
which I had just fought out within myself against the corruption of an
entire civilization. It was
the end in the battle of a soul that had chosen between truth and untruth.
It awakened loud echoes in the forest. And I said to myself that Nature
had seen me struggle, had heard me, and understood me, for now she
replied with her clear voice to my cry of victory that she was willing
after the ordeal to receive me as one of her children.
We took up our way again. I plunged eagerly and passionately into the
wilderness, as if in the hope of thus penetrating into the very heart of
this Nature, powerful and maternal, there to blend with her living
elements.
With tranquil eyes and ever uniform pace my companion went on. He
was wholly without suspicion; I alone was bearing the burden of an evil
conscience.
We arrived at our destination.
The steep sides of the mountain had by degrees spread out, and behind
a dense curtain of trees, there extended a sort of plateau, well-concealed.
Jotefa, however, knew the place, and with astonishing sureness led me

thither.
A dozen rosewood trees extended their vast branches.
We attacked the finest of these with the ax. We had tô sacrifice the
entire tree to obtain a branch suitable for my project.
I struck out with joy. My hands became stained with blood in my wild
rage, my intense joy of satiating within me, I know not what divine
brutality. It was not the tree I was striking, it was not it which I sought
to overcome. And yet gladly would I have heard the sound of my ax
against other trunks when this one was already lying on the ground.
And here is what my ax seemed to say to me in the cadence of its
sounding blows:
Strike down to the root the forest entire!
Destroy all the forest of evil,
Whose seeds were once sowed within thee by the breathings of death! p.
51
Destroy in thee all love of the self!
Destroy and tear out all evil, as in the autumn we cut with the hand the
flower of the lotus.
Yes, wholly destroyed, finished, dead, is from now on the old
civilization within me. I was reborn; or rather another man, purer and
stronger, came to life within me.
This cruel assault was the supreme farewell to civilization, to evil. This
last evidence of the depraved instincts which sleep at the bottom of all
decadent souls, by very contrast exalted the healthy simplicity of the
life at which I had already made a beginning into a feeling