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vampire figure arose. At the end of the road, I sat for a while on the stone curbing, looking out at the sea which rustled softly on the reef. It was a peaceful spot: one could be alone here with the sea and sky, the hard clean stony land, and whatever spirits might be awake.
    The evening meeting would be over by now; the dance would be beginning at the house of Maukiri. I walked back slowly through the sand of the road, pausing to sit for a few minutes on the cemetery wall. Perhaps it was the moonlight, perhaps my Western unbelief—but the enclosure of the dead gave up no visible spirit, emitted no ghostly sound. I was to remember, with a question, that moonlight vigil when, long afterward, the tahunga shook his head, saying, “You have walked too near a grave.” But that evening, as I slid down from the wall and continued my way toward the lighted houses, I thought only of Walter de la Mare’s traveler who knocked at the moonlit door, and nobody answered; how, as he turned to go, “Tell them I came,” he said, and how “the silence surged softly backward, when the plunging hoofs were gone.”
I WALK TOO NEAR A GRAVE
    I HAD begun to think that the Dangerous Islands—with the exception of Reao—were a more healthful environment than many more civilized places.
    And then, it seems, I walked too near a grave!
    It started with that tiny eruption, like a heat blister, on the back of the little finger of my left hand. We never could trace the source of it to any known injury. Perhaps a sliver from a mat; one of the small thorns that arm the edges of pandanus leaves; these are but random guesses. Perhaps some decaying sea growth in the partly enclosed warm water of the lagoon, where we swam, generated a poison. Now my whole body was afire with it.
    On my return from Tepoto, Keneti and I opened the infected area with a sterilized pair of scissors and treated it with such medicines as we had. Next day the entire hand was swollen as far as the wrist, and the finger itself was larger than a thumb.
    Keneti was plainly worried.
    “We’re not getting anywhere with this. If the Vaite were here I’d send you back to Papeete aboard her. I’d be afraid to risk you on the Tiare Tahiti; we couldn’t treat the wound properly, and it would be hard to keep sea water out of it. All the natives say sea water is bad for these things.”
    But the Vaite was far away. There was no available contact with civilization; no communication. Even had there been a ship available, I might have reached hospitals and physicians too late. We must depend on our own meager resources, and those of the natives.
    The natives! There was a thought.
    “We’re just groping around in the dark, trying to treat this infection with civilized remedies,” Keneti concluded. “Our treatment not only isn’t curing it; it seems to be making it worse.
    “It’s a native infection. The natives undoubtedly know a lot more about it than we do, and if it were my own hand, I’d have them treat it with their own medicines. They’ve had hundreds of years of experience with the few native diseases there are. Likely enough this kind of infection isn’t known to civilized doctors at all.”
    “What do you do for this illness?” I asked Tauria, who was in the house at the time.
    “A tobacco poultice,” was his suggestion.
    I had chewed tobacco just once. My mind flashed back from that coral island to the grassy violet-starred bank of a little river in Wisconsin; my father nodding in an afternoon nap over his fishing-pole; the sample plug of Battle-Ax that had been tossed on the doorstep, brought furtively from my pocket. I hadn’t repeated that experiment. However, if I didn’t chew now, Tauria would, for he was eager to try the remedy. So I reduced to pulp a sufficient quantity of the acrid Tahitian “twist” and bound it upon the injury.
    The tobacco didn’t make it worse, but it didn’t improve it, either.
    “Tauria is only a young man,” Keneti reflected.