You know you're on a true literary pilgrimage when your
taxi driver can recite Robert Louis Stevenson's Requiem in the time it takes to
wind five kilometers up the hill from Apia to the old plantation home of Vailima.
It was here that the Scottish writer (1850-1894) - who blended boy's-own
adventure with psychological insight and a sense of history in such tales as Treasure
Island, The Strange Case of DrJekyll and Mr Hyde and the
The Body Snatchers - came to die. "Our place is in a deep cleft of Vaea
Mountain, some 600 feet above the sea, embowered in forest, which is our
strangling enemy, and which we combat with axes and dollars," he wrote to his
friend Sidney Colvin at the British Museum in 1890.
These days Vailima is itself a museum, and literary
curiously beats a path to its door. The house Stevenson and his American wife
Fanny carved into the mountainside recently made it into Patricia Schulz's
bestselling 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, and each year up to
12,000 Stevensonians, tourists and scholars climb the hill to peer into the
world of a man who has kidnapped the imagination of generations. Devoted
pilgrims will hike a further hour to the author's final resting place on the
peak of Mount Vaea. Here, under the breadfruit trees, they can wonder about his
death at 44 from a brain hemorrhage, whose suddenness turned his life "into a
fable as strange and romantic as one of his own." Henry James wrote to the
distraught Fanny "There have been ... for men of letters few deaths more
romantically right."
For many of the 115,000 Samoans who live on the main
island of Upolu, Robert Louis Stevenson is still very much alive. From his
office on the sixth floor of the Central Bank of Samoa building, Deputy Prime
Minister Misa Telefoni points out the window to Tusitala's mountain tomb. "See,
it's up under those trees - right on top. that's an indication of how much the
Samoas cared for him, because they had to hack the road up there and carry his
heavy coffin." Telefoni's memory of Tusitala, or "Writer of Tales," as he was
known locally, is entwined with his own family history. "He had a very close
relationship with an old uncle of mine."
