The Great Taboo. Allen Grant

chest with conscious pride, “he can knock these bones together—so—and bid them live again. Is it not I who cause women and beasts to bring forth their young? Is it not I who give the turtles their increase? And is it not a small thing to me, therefore, whether the sea tosses up my victims from my home in the sun, or whether it does not? Let us leave them alone on the reef for to-night; to-morrow we will send over our canoes to fetch them.”

      It was all pure brag, all pure guesswork; and yet, Tu-Kila-Kila himself profoundly believed it.

      As he spoke, the light from Felix’s fire blazed out against the dark sky, stronger and clearer still; and through that cloudless tropical air the figure of a man, standing for one moment between the flames and the lagoon, became distinctly visible to the keen and practised eyes of the savages. “I see them? I see them; I see the victims!” the foremost worshipper exclaimed, rushing forward a little at the sight, and beside himself with superstitious awe and surprise at Tu-Kila-Kila’s presence. “Surely our god is great! He knows all things! He brings us meat from the setting sun, in ships of fire, in blazing canoes, across the golden road of the sun-bathed ocean!”

      As for Tu-Kila-Kila himself, leaning on his elbow at ease, he gazed across at the unexpected sight with very languid interest. He was a god, and he liked to see things conducted with proper decorum. This crowing and crying over a couple of spirits—mere ordinary spirits come ashore from the sun in a fiery boat—struck his godship as little short of childish. “Let them be,” he answered, petulantly, crushing a blossom in his hand. “Let no man disturb them. They shall rest where they are till to-morrow morning. We have eaten; we have drunk; our soul is happy. The kava within us has made us like a god indeed. I shall give my ministers charge that no harm happen to them.”

      He drew a whistle from his side and whistled once. There was a moment’s pause. Then Tu-Kila-Kila spoke in a loud voice again. “The King of Fire!” he exclaimed, in tones of princely authority.

      From within the hut there came forth slowly a second stalwart savage, big built and burly as the great god himself, clad in a long robe or cloak of yellow feathers, which shone bright with a strange metallic gleam in the ruddy light of the huge pile of li-wood.

      “The King of Fire is here, Tu-Kila-Kila,” the lesser god made answer, bending his head slightly.

      “Fire,” Tu-Kila-Kila said, like a monarch giving orders to his attendant minister, “if any man touch the newcomers on the reef before I cause my sun to rise to-morrow morning, scorch up his flesh with your flame, and consume his bones to ash and cinder. If any woman go near them before Tu-Kila-Kila bids, let her be rolled in palm-leaves, and smeared with oil, and light her up for a torch on a dark night to lighten our temple.”

      The King of Fire bent his head in assent. “It is as Tu-Kila-Kila wills,” he answered, submissively.

      Tu-Kila-Kila whistled again, this time twice. “The King of Water!” he exclaimed, in the same loud tone of command as before.

      At the words, a man of about forty, tall and sinewy, clad in a short cape of white albatross feathers, and with a girdle of nautilus shells interspersed with red coral tied around his waist, came forth to the summons.

      “The King of Water is here,” he said, bending his head, but not his knee, before the greater deity.

      “Water,” Tu-Kila-Kila said, with half-tipsy solemnity, “you are a god too. Your power is very great. But less than mine. Do, then, as I bid you. If any man touch my spirits, whom I have brought from my home in the sun in a fiery ship, before I bid him to-morrow, overturn his canoe, and drown him in lagoon or spring or ocean. If any woman go near them without Tu-Kila-Kila’s leave, bind her hand and foot with ropes of porpoise hide, and cast her out into the surf, and dash her with your waves, and pummel her to pieces.”

      The King of Water bent his head a second time. “I am a great god,” he answered, “before all others save you: but for you, Tu-Kila-Kila, I haste to do your bidding. If any man disobey you, my billows shall rise and overwhelm him in the sea. I am a great god. I claim each year many drowned victims.”

      “But not so many as me,” Tu-Kila-Kila interposed, his hand playing on his knife with a faint air of impatience.

      “But not so many as you,” the minor god added, in haste, as if to appease his rising anger. “Fire and Water ever speed to do your bidding.”

      Tu-Kila-Kila stood up, turned toward the distant flame, and waved his hands round and round three times before him. “Let this be for you all a great taboo,” he said, glancing once more toward his awe-struck followers. “Now the mysteries are over. Tu-Kila-Kila will sleep. He has eaten of human flesh. He has drunk of cocoanut rum and of new kava. He has brought back his sun on its way in the heavens. He has sent it messengers of fire to reinforce its strength. He has fetched from it messengers in turn with fresh fire to Boupari, fire not lighted from any earthly flame; fire new, divine, scorching, unspeakable. To-morrow we will talk with the spirits he has brought. To-night we will sleep. Now all go to your homes; and tell your women of this great taboo, lest they speak to the spirits, and fall into the hands of Fire or of Water.”

      The savages dropped on their faces before the eye of their god and lay quite still. They made a path as it were from the pyre to the temple door with their prostrate bodies. Tu-Kila-Kila, walking with unsteady steps over their half-naked forms, turned to his hut in a drunken booze. He walked over them with no more compunction or feeling than over so many logs. Why should he not, indeed? For he was a god, and they were his meat, his servants, his worshippers.

CHAPTER IV. — THE GUESTS OF HEAVEN.

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      All that night through—their first lonely night on the island of Boupari—Felix sat up by his flickering fire, wide awake, half expecting and dreading some treacherous attack of the unknown savages. From time to time he kept adding dry fuel to his smouldering pile; and he never ceased to keep a keen eye both on the lagoon and the reef, in case an assault should be made upon them suddenly by land or water. He knew the South Seas quite well enough already to have all the possibilities of misfortune floating vividly before his eyes. He realized at once from his own previous experience the full loneliness and terror of their unarmed condition.

      For Boupari was one of those rare remote islets where the very rumor of our European civilization has hardly yet penetrated.

      As for Muriel, though she was alarmed enough, of course, and intensely shaken by the sudden shock she had received, the whole surroundings were too wholly unlike any world she had ever yet known to enable her to take in at once the utter horror of the situation. She only knew they were alone, wet, bruised, and terribly battered; and the Australasian had gone on, leaving them there to their fate on an unknown island. That, for the moment, was more than enough for her of accumulated misfortune. She come to herself but slowly, and as her torn clothes dried by degrees before the fire and the heat of the tropical night, she was so far from fully realizing the dangers of their position that her first and principal fear for the moment was lest she might take cold from her wet things drying upon her. She ate a little of the plantain that Felix picked for her; and at times, toward morning, she dozed off into an uneasy sleep, from pure fatigue and excess of weariness. As she slept, Felix, bending over her, with the biggest blade of his knife open in case of attack, watched with profound emotion the rise and fall of her bosom, and hesitated with himself, if the worst should come to the worst, as to what he ought to do with her.

      It would be impossible to let a pure young English girl like that fall helplessly into the hands of such bloodthirsty wretches as he knew the islanders were almost certain to be. Who could tell what nameless indignities, what incredible tortures they might wantonly inflict upon her innocent soul? Was it right of him to have let her come ashore at all? Ought he not rather to have allowed the more merciful sea to take her life easily, without the chance or possibility of such additional horrors?

      And