Later in the day, as I sat writing up my journal, the cabin was
filled from end to end with Marquesans: three brown-skinned
generations, squatted cross-legged upon the floor, and regarding me
in silence with embarrassing eyes. The eyes of all Polynesians are
large, luminous, and melting; they are like the eyes of animals and
some Italians. A kind of despair came over me, to sit there
helpless under all these staring orbs, and be thus blocked in a
corner of my cabin by this speechless crowd: and a kind of rage to
think they were beyond the reach of articulate communication, like
furred animals, or folk born deaf, or the dwellers of some alien
planet.

To cross the Channel is, for a boy of twelve, to change heavens; to
cross the Atlantic, for a man of twenty-four, is hardly to modify
his diet. But I was now escaped out of the shadow of the Roman
empire, under whose toppling monuments we were all cradled, whose
laws and letters are on every hand of us, constraining and
preventing. I was now to see what men might be whose fathers had
never studied Virgil, had never been conquered by Caesar, and never
been ruled by the wisdom of Gaius or Papinian. By the same step I
had journeyed forth out of that comfortable zone of kindred
languages, where the curse of Babel is so easy to be remedied; and
my new fellow-creatures sat before me dumb like images. Methought,
in my travels, all human relation was to be excluded; and when I
returned home (for in those days I still projected my return) I
should have but dipped into a picture-book without a text. Nay,
and I even questioned if my travels should be much prolonged;
perhaps they were destined to a speedy end; perhaps my subsequent
friend, Kauanui, whom I remarked there, sitting silent with the
rest, for a man of some authority, might leap from his hams with an