Gradually he began to win out.A grass-walled house was built.On the fertile, volcanic soil he had wrested from the jungle and jungle beasts were growing five hundred cocoanut trees, five hundred papaia trees, three hundred mango trees, many breadfruit trees and alligator-pear trees, to say nothing of vines, bushes, and vegetables.He developed the drip of the hills in the canyons and worked out an efficient irrigation scheme, ditching the water from canyon to canyon and paralleling the ditches at different altitudes.
His narrow canyons became botanical gardens.The arid shoulders of the hills, where formerly the blazing sun had parched the jungle and beaten it close to earth, blossomed into trees and shrubs and flowers.Not only had the Nature Man become self-supporting, but he was now a prosperous agriculturist with produce to sell to the city-dwellers of Papeete.
Then it was discovered that his land, which the government officials had informed him was without an owner, really had an owner, and that deeds, descriptions, etc., were on record.All his work bade fare to be lost.The land had been valueless when he took it up, and the owner, a large landholder, was unaware of the extent to which the Nature Man had developed it.A just price was agreed upon, and Darling's deed was officially filed.
Next came a more crushing blow.Darling's access to market was destroyed.The road he had built was fenced across by triple barb-wire fences.It was one of those jumbles in human affairs that is so common in this absurdest of social systems.Behind it was the fine hand of the same conservative element that haled the Nature Man before the Insanity Commission in Los Angeles and that deported him from Hawaii.It is so hard for self-satisfied men to understand any man whose satisfactions are fundamentally different.It seems clear that the officials have connived with the conservative element, for to this day the road the Nature Man built is closed; nothing has been done about it, while an adamant unwillingness to do anything about it is evidenced on every hand.But the Nature Man dances and sings along his way.He does not sit up nights thinking about the wrong which has been done him; he leaves the worrying to the doers of the wrong.He has no time for bitterness.He believes he is in the world for the purpose of being happy, and he has not a moment to waste in any other pursuit.
The road to his plantation is blocked.He cannot build a new road, for there is no ground on which he can build it.The government has restricted him to a wild-pig trail which runs precipitously up the mountain.I climbed the trail with him, and we had to climb with hands and feet in order to get up.Nor can that wild-pig trail be made into a road by any amount of toil less than that of an engineer, a steam-engine, and a steel cable.But what does the Nature Man care? In his gentle ethics the evil men do him he requites with goodness.And who shall say he is not happier than they?
"Never mind their pesky road," he said to me as we dragged ourselves up a shelf of rock and sat down, panting, to rest."I'll get an air machine soon and fool them.I'm clearing a level space for a landing stage for the airships, and next time you come to Tahiti you will alight right at my door."Yes, the Nature Man has some strange ideas besides that of the gorilla pounding his chest in the African jungle.The Nature Man has ideas about levitation."Yes, sir," he said to me, "levitation is not impossible.And think of the glory of it--lifting one's self from the ground by an act of will.Think of it! The astronomers tell us that our whole solar system is dying; that, barring accidents, it will all be so cold that no life can live upon it.