Читать книгу Men Against the Sea – Book Set. The Greatest Maritime Adventure Novels: The Bounty Trilogy, Lost Island, The Hurricane, Botany Bay, The Far Lands, Tales of the South Seas… онлайн

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“My God, Byam!” he said in a low voice.

Slenderly and strongly made, in the first bloom of young womanhood, and with her magnificent dark hair unbound, Maimiti made a picture worth traveling far to behold. She stood for a moment with a hand on the elder woman’s shoulder, and then, gathering her kilt about her, she ran nimbly up a gnarled limb that overhung the deep water. Poising herself for an instant high above the pool, she sprang into the water with a merry shout, and I saw her swimming with slow easy strokes along the bottom, two fathoms deep. Christian, a capital swimmer, went in head first, and Hina followed him with a great splash. For an hour or more we frolicked in the pool, startling shoals of small speckled fish like trout, and making the cool green tunnel overhead echo with laughter.

The Indians of Tahiti rarely bathe in the sea except when a great surf is running. At such times the more daring among the men and women delight in a sport they call horue—swimming out among the great breakers with a light board about a fathom long, and choosing their moment to come speeding in, a quarter of a mile or more, on the crest of a high feathering sea. Their daily bathing is done in the clear cool streams which flow down from the mountains everywhere, and though they bathe twice, and often three times each day, they look forward to the next bath as though it were the first in a month. Men, women, and children bathe together with a great hubbub of shouting and merriment, for this is the social hour of their day, when friends are met, courtships carried on, and gossip and news exchanged.