The Great Taboo

The temple of the deity.

While these things were happening on the sea close by, a very different scene indeed was being enacted meanwhile, beneath those waving palms, on the island of Boupari.  It was strange, to be sure, as Felix Thurstan had said, that such unspeakable heathen orgies should be taking place within sight of a passing Christian English steamer.  But if only he had known or reflected to what sort of land he was trying now to struggle ashore with Muriel, he might well have doubted whether it were not better to let her perish where she was, in the pure clear ocean, rather than to submit an English girl to the possibility of undergoing such horrible heathen rites and ceremonies.

For on the island of Boupari it was high feast with the worshippers of their god that night.  The sun had turned on the Tropic of Capricorn at noon, and was making his way northward, toward the equator once more; and his votaries, as was their wont, had all come forth to do him honor in due season, and to pay their respects, in the inmost and sacredest grove on the island, to his incarnate representative, the living spirit of trees and fruits and vegetation, the very high god, the divine Tu-Kila-Kila!

Early in the evening, as soon as the sun’s rim had disappeared beneath the ocean, a strange noise boomed forth from the central shrine of Boupari.  Those who heard it clapped their hands to their ears and ran hastily forward.  It was a noise like distant rumbling thunder, or the whir of some great English mill or factory; and at its sound every woman on the island threw herself on the ground prostrate, with her face in the dust, and waited there reverently till the audible voice of the god had once more subsided.  For no woman knew how that sound was produced.  Only the grown men, initiated into the mysteries of the shrine when they came of age at the tattooing ceremony, were aware that the strange, buzzing, whirring noise was nothing more or less than the cry of the bull-roarer.

A bull-roarer, as many English schoolboys know, is merely a piece of oblong wood, pointed at either end, and fastened by a leather thong at one corner.  But when whirled round the head by practised priestly hands, it produces a low rumbling noise like the wheels of a distant carriage, growing gradually louder and clearer, from moment to moment, till at last it waxes itself into a frightful din, or bursts into perfect peals of imitation thunder.  Then it decreases again once more, as gradually as it rose, becoming fainter and ever fainter, like thunder as it recedes, till the horrible bellowing, as of supernatural bulls, dies away in the end, by slow degrees, into low and soft and imperceptible murmurs.

But when the savage hears the distant humming of the bull-roarer, at whatever distance, he knows that the mysteries of his god are in full swing, and he hurries forward in haste, leaving his work or his pleasure, and running, naked as he stands, to take his share in the worship, lest the anger of heaven should burst forth in devouring flames to consume him.  But the women, knowing themselves unworthy to face the dread presence of the high god in his wrath, rush wildly from the spot, and, flinging themselves down at full length, with their mouths to the dust, wait patiently till the voice of their deity is no longer audible.

And as the bull-roarer on Boupari rang out with wild echoes from the coral caverns in the central grove that evening, Tu-Kila-Kila, their god, rose slowly from his place, and stood out from his hut, a deity revealed, before his reverential worshippers.

As he rose, a hushed whisper ran wave-like through the dense throng of dusky forms that bent low, like corn beneath the wind, before him, “Tu-Kila-Kila rises!  He rises to speak!  Hush! for the voice of the mighty man-god!”

The god, looking around him superciliously with a cynical air of contempt, stood forward with a firm and elastic step before his silent worshippers.  He was a stalwart savage, in the very prime of life, tall, lithe, and active.  His figure was that of a man well used to command; but his face, though handsome, was visibly marked by every external sign of cruelty, lust, and extreme bloodthirstiness.  One might have said, merely to look at him, he was a being debased by all forms of brutal and hateful self-indulgence.  A baleful light burned in his keen gray eyes.  His lips were thick, full, purple, and wistful.

“My people may look upon me,” he said, in a strangely affable voice, standing forward and smiling with a curious half-cruel, half-compassionate smile upon his awe-struck followers.  “On every day of the sun’s course but this, none save the ministers dedicated to the service of Tu-Kila-Kila dare gaze unhurt upon his sacred person.  If any other did, the light from his holy eyes would wither them up, and the glow of his glorious countenance would scorch them to ashes.”  He raised his two hands, palm outward, in front of him.  “So all the year round,” he went on, “Tu-Kila-Kila, who loves his people, and sends them the earlier and the later rain in the wet season, and makes their yams and their taro grow, and causes his sun to shine upon them freely—­all the year round Tu-Kila-Kila, your god, sits shut up in his own house among the skeletons of those whom he has killed and eaten, or walks in his walled paddock, where his bread-fruit ripens and his plantains spring—­himself, and the ministers that his tribesmen have given him.”

At the sound of their mystic deity’s voice the savages, bending lower still till their foreheads touched the ground, repeated in chorus, to the clapping of hands, like some solemn litany:  “Tu-Kila-Kila speaks true.  Our lord is merciful.  He sends down his showers upon our crops and fields.  He causes his sun to shine brightly over us.  He makes our pigs and our slaves bring forth their increase.  Tu-Kila-Kila is good.  His people praise him.”

The god took another step forward, the divine mantle of red feathers glowing in the sunset on his dusky shoulders, and smiled once more that hateful gracious smile of his.  He was standing near the open door of his wattled hut, overshadowed by the huge spreading arms of a gigantic banyan-tree.  Through the open door of the hut it was possible to catch just a passing glimpse of an awful sight within.  On the beams of the house, and on the boughs of the trees behind it, human skeletons, half covered with dry flesh, hung in ghastly array, their skulls turned downward.  They were the skeletons of the victims Tu-Kila-Kila, their prince, had slain and eaten; they were the trophies of the cannibal man-god’s hateful prowess.

Tu-Kila-Kila raised his right hand erect and spoke again.  “I am a great god,” he said, slowly.  “I am very powerful.  I make the sun to shine, and the yams to grow.  I am the spirit of plants.  Without me there would be nothing for you all to eat or drink in Boupari.  If I were to grow old and die, the sun would fade away in the heavens overhead; the bread-fruit trees would wither and cease to bear on earth; all fruits would come to an end and die at once; all rivers would stop forthwith from running.”

His worshippers bowed down in acquiescence with awestruck faces.  “It is true,” they answered, in the same slow sing-song of assent as before.  “Tu-Kila-Kila is the greatest of gods.  We owe to him everything.  We hang upon his favor.”

Tu-Kila-Kila started back, laughed, and showed his pearly white teeth.  They were beautiful and regular, like the teeth of a tiger, a strong young tiger.  “But I need more sacrifices than all the other gods,” he went on, melodiously, like one who plays with consummate skill upon some difficult instrument.  “I am greedy; I am thirsty; I am a hungry god.  You must not stint me.  I claim more human victims than all the other gods beside.  If you want your crops to grow, and your rivers to run, the fields to yield you game, and the sea fish—­this is what I ask:  give me victims, victims!  That is our compact.  Tu-Kila-Kila calls you.”

The men bowed down once more and repeated humbly, “You shall have victims as you will, great god; only give us yam and taro and bread-fruit, and cause not your bright light, the sun, to grow dark in heaven over us.”

“Cut yourselves,” Tu-Kila-Kila cried, in a peremptory voice, clapping his hands thrice.  “I am thirsting for blood.  I want your free-will offering.”

As he spoke, every man, as by a set ritual, took from a little skin wallet at his side a sharp flake of coral-stone, and, drawing it deliberately across his breast in a deep red gash, caused the blood to flow out freely over his chest and long grass waistband.  Then, having done so, they never strove for a moment to stanch the wound, but let the red drops fall as they would on to the dust at their feet, without seeming even to be conscious at all of the fact that they were flowing.

Tu-Kila-Kila smiled once more, a ghastly self-satisfied smile of unquestioned power.  “It is well,” he went on.  “My people love me.  They know my strength, how I can wither them up.  They give me their blood to drink freely.  So I will be merciful to them.  I will make my sun shine and my rain drop from heaven.  And instead of taking all, I will choose one victim.”  He paused, and glanced along their line significantly.

“Choose, Tu-Kila-Kila,” the men answered, without a moment’s hesitation.  “We are all your meat.  Choose which one you will take of us.”

Tu-Kila-Kila walked with a leisurely tread down the lines and surveyed the men critically.  They were all drawn up in rows, one behind the other, according to tribes and families; and the god walked along each row, examining them with a curious and interested eye, as a farmer examines sheep fit for the market.  Now and then, he felt a leg or an arm with his finger and thumb, and hesitated a second.  It was an important matter, this choosing a victim.  As he passed, a close observer might have noted that each man trembled visibly while the god’s eye was upon him, and looked after him askance with a terrified sidelong gaze as he passed on to his neighbor.  But not one savage gave any overt sign or token of his terror or his reluctance.  On the contrary, as Tu-Kila-Kila passed along the line with lazy, cruel deliberateness, the men kept chanting aloud without one tremor in their voices, “We are all your meat.  Choose which one you will take of us.”

On a sudden, Tu-Kila-Kila turned sharply round, and, darting a rapid glance toward a row he had already passed several minutes before, he exclaimed, with an air of unexpected inspiration, “Tu-Kila-Kila has chosen.  He takes Maloa.”

The man upon whose shoulder the god laid his heavy hand as he spoke stood forth from the crowd without a moment’s hesitation.  If anger or fear was in his heart at all, it could not be detected in his voice or his features.  He bowed his head with seeming satisfaction, and answered humbly, “What Tu-Kila-Kila says must need be done.  This is a great honor.  He is a mighty god.  We poor men must obey him.  We are proud to be taken up and made one with divinity.”

Tu-Kila-Kila raised in his hand a large stone axe of some polished green material, closely resembling jade, which lay on a block by the door, and tried its edge with his finger, in an abstracted manner.  “Bind him!” he said, quietly, turning round to his votaries.  And the men, each glad to have escaped his own fate, bound their comrade willingly with green ropes of plantain fibre.

“Crown him with flowers!” Tu-Kila-Kila said; and a female attendant, absolved from the terror of the bull-roarer by the god’s command, brought forward a great garland of crimson hibiscus, which she flung around the victim’s neck and shoulders.

“Lay his head on the sacred stone block of our fathers,” Tu-Kila-Kila went on, in an easy tone of command, waving his hand gracefully.  And the men, moving forward, laid their comrade, face downward, on a huge flat block of polished greenstone, which lay like an altar in front of the hut with the mouldering skeletons.

“It is well,” Tu-Kila-Kila murmured once more, half aloud.  “You have given me the free-will offering.  Now for the trespass!  Where is the woman who dared to approach too near the temple-home of the divine Tu-Kila-Kila?  Bring the criminal forward!”

The men divided, and made a lane down their middle.  Then one of them, a minister of the man-god’s shrine, led up by the hand, all trembling and shrinking with supernatural terror in every muscle, a well-formed young girl of eighteen or twenty.  Her naked bronze limbs were shapely and lissome; but her eyes were swollen and red with tears, and her face strongly distorted with awe for the man-god.  When she stood at last before Tu-Kila-Kila’s dreaded face, she flung herself on the ground in an agony of fear.

“Oh, mercy, great God!” she cried, in a feeble voice.  “I have sinned, I have sinned.  Mercy, mercy!”

Tu-Kila-Kila smiled as before, a smile of imperial pride.  No ray of pity gleamed from those steel-gray eyes.  “Does Tu-Kila-Kila show mercy?” he asked, in a mocking voice.  “Does he pardon his suppliants?  Does he forgive trespasses?  Is he not a god, and must not his wrath be appeased?  She, being a woman, and not a wife sealed to Tu-Kila-Kila, has dared to look from afar upon his sacred home.  She has spied the mysteries.  Therefore she must die.  My people, bind her.”

In a second, without more ado, while the poor trembling girl writhed and groaned in her agony before their eyes, that mob of wild savages, let loose to torture and slay, fell upon her with hideous shouts, and bound her, as they had bound their comrade before, with coarse native ropes of twisted plantain fibre.

“Lay her head on the stone,” Tu-Kila-Kila said, grimly.  And his votaries obeyed him.

“Now light the sacred fire to make our feast, before I slay the victims,” the god said, in a gloating voice, running his finger again along the edge of his huge hatchet.

As he spoke, two men, holding in their hands hollow bamboos with coals of fire concealed within, which they kept aglow meanwhile by waving them up and down rapidly in the air, laid these primitive matches to the base of a great pyramidal pile of wood and palm-leaves, ready prepared beforehand in the yard of the temple.  In a second, the dry fuel, catching the sparks instantly, blazed up to heaven with a wild outburst of flame.  Great red tongues of fire licked up the mouldering mass of leaves and twigs, and caught at once at the trunks of palm and li wood within.  A huge conflagration reddened the sky at once like lightning.  The effect was magical.  The glow transfigured the whole island for miles.  It was, in fact, the blaze that Felix Thurstan had noted and remarked upon as he stood that evening on the silent deck of the Australasian.

Tu-Kila-Kila gazed at it with horrid childish glee.  “A fine fire!” he said, gayly.  “A fire worthy of a god.  It will serve me well.  Tu-Kila-Kila will have a good oven to roast his meal in.”

Then he turned toward the sea, and held up his hand once more for silence.  As he did so, an answering light upon its surface attracted his eye for a moment’s space.  It was a bright red light, mixed with white and green ones; in point of fact, the Australasian was passing.  Tu-Kila-Kila pointed toward it solemnly with his plump, brown fore-finger.  “See,” he said, drawing himself up and looking preternaturally wise; “your god is great.  I am sending some of this fire across the sea to where my sun has set, to aid and reinforce it.  That is to keep up the fire of the sun, lest ever at any time it should fade and fail you.  While Tu-Kila-Kila lives the sun will burn bright.  If Tu-Kila-Kila were to die it would be night forever.”

His votaries, following their god’s fore-finger as it pointed, all turned to look in the direction he indicated with blank surprise and astonishment.  Such a sight had never met their eyes before, for the Australasian was the very first steamer to take the eastward route, through the dangerous and tortuous Boupari Channel.  So their awe and surprise at the unwonted sight knew no bounds.  Fire on the ocean!  Miraculous light on the waves!  Their god must, indeed, be a mighty deity if he could send flames like that careering over the sea!  Surely the sun was safe in the hands of a potentate who could thus visibly reinforce it with red light, and white!  In their astonishment and awe, they stood with their long hair falling down over their foreheads, and their hands held up to their eyes that they might gaze the farther across the dim, dark ocean.  The borrowed light of their bonfire was moving, slowly moving over the watery sea.  Fire and water were mixing and mingling on friendly terms.  Impossible!  Incredible!  Marvellous!  Miraculous!  They prostrated themselves in their terror at Tu-Kila-Kila’s feet.  “Oh, great god,” they cried, in awe-struck tones, “your power is too vast!  Spare us, spare us, spare us!”

As for Tu-Kila-Kila himself, he was not astonished at all.  Strange as it sounds to us, he really believed in his heart what he said.  Profoundly convinced of his own godhead, and abjectly superstitious as any of his own votaries, he absolutely accepted as a fact his own suggestion, that the light he saw was the reflection of that his men had kindled.  The interpretation he had put upon it seemed to him a perfectly natural and just one.  His worshippers, indeed, mere men that they were, might be terrified at the sight; but why should he, a god, take any special notice of it?

He accepted his own superiority as implicitly as our European nobles and rulers accept theirs.  He had no doubts himself, and he considered those who had little better than criminals.

By and by, a smaller light detached itself by slow degrees from the greater ones.  The others stood still, and halted in mid-ocean.  The lesser light made as if it would come in the direction of Boupari.  In point of fact, the gig had put out in search of Felix and Muriel.

Tu-Kila-Kila interpreted the facts at once, however, in his own way.  “See,” he said, pointing with his plump forefinger once more, and encouraging with his words his terrified followers, “I am sending back a light again from the sun to my island.  I am doing my work well.  I am taking care of my people.  Fear not for your future.  In the light is yet another victim.  A man and a woman will come to Boupari from the sun, to make up for the man and woman whom we eat in our feast to-night.  Give me plenty of victims, and you will have plenty of yam.  Make haste, then; kill, eat; let us feast Tu-Kila-Kila!  To-morrow the man and woman I have sent from the sun will come ashore on the reef, and reach Boupari.”

At the words, he stepped forward and raised that heavy tomahawk.  With one blow each he brained the two bound and defenceless victims on the altar-stone of his fathers.  The rest, a European hand shrinks from revealing.  The orgy was too horrible even for description.

And that was the land toward which, that moment, Felix Thurstan was struggling, with all his might, to carry Muriel Ellis, from the myriad clasping arms of a comparatively gentle and merciful ocean!