The Great Taboo

LAND; but what land?

As the last glimmering lights of the Australasian died away to seaward, Felix Thurstan knew in his despair there was nothing for it now but to strike out boldly, if he could, for the shore of the island.

By this time the breakers had subsided greatly.  Not, indeed, that the sea itself was really going down.  On the contrary, a brisk wind was rising sharper from the east, and the waves on the open Pacific were growing each moment higher and loppier.  But the huge mountain of water that washed Muriel Ellis overboard was not a regular ordinary wave; it was that far more powerful and dangerous mass, a shoal-water breaker.  The Australasian had passed at that instant over a submerged coral-bar, quite deep enough, indeed, to let her cross its top without the slightest danger of grazing, but still raised so high toward the surface as to produce a considerable constant ground-swell, which broke in windy weather into huge sheets of surf, like the one that had just struck and washed over the Australasian, carrying Muriel with it.  The very same cause that produced the breakers, however, bore Felix on their summit rapidly landward; and once he had got well beyond the region of the bar that begot them, he found himself soon, to his intense relief, in comparatively calm shoal water.

Muriel Ellis, for her part, was faint with terror and with the buffeting of the waves; but she still floated by his side, upheld by the life-belts.  He had been able, by immense efforts, to keep unseparated from her amid the rending surf of the breakers.  Now that they found themselves in easier waters for a while, Felix began to strike out vigorously through the darkness for the shore.  Holding up his companion with one hand, and swimming with all his might in the direction where a vague white line of surf, lit up by the red glare-of some fire far inland, made him suspect the nearest land to lie, he almost thought he had succeeded at last, after a long hour of struggle, in feeling his feet, after all, on a firm coral bottom.

At the very moment he did so, and touched the ground underneath, another great wave, curling resistlessly behind him, caught him up on its crest, whirled him heavenward like a cork, and then dashed him down once more, a passive burden, on some soft and yielding substance, which he conjectured at once to be a beach of finely powdered coral fragments.  As he touched this beach for an instant, the undertow of that vast dashing breaker sucked him back with its ebb again, a helpless, breathless creature; and then the succeeding wave rolled him over like a ball, upon the beach as before, in quick succession.  Four times the back-current sucked him under with its wild pull in the self-same way, and four times the return wave flung him up upon the beach again like a fragment of sea-weed.  With frantic efforts Felix tried at first to cling still to Muriel—­to save her from the irresistible force of that roaring surf—­to snatch her from the open jaws of death by sheer struggling dint of thews and muscle.  He might as well have tried to stem Niagara.  The great waves, curling irresistibly in huge curves landward, caught either of them up by turns on their arched summits, and twisted them about remorselessly, raising them now aloft on their foaming crest, beating them back now prone in their hollow trough, and flinging them fiercely at last with pitiless energy against the soft beach of coral.  If the beach had been hard, they must infallibly have been ground to powder or beaten to jelly by the colossal force of those gigantic blows.  Fortunately it was yielding, smooth, and clay-like, and received them almost as a layer of moist plaster of Paris might have done, or they would have stood no chance at all for their lives in that desperate battle with the blind and frantic forces of unrelenting nature.

No man who has not himself seen the surf break on one of these far-southern coral shores can form any idea in his own mind of the terror and horror of the situation.  The water, as it reaches the beach, rears itself aloft for a second into a huge upright wall, which, advancing slowly, curls over at last in a hollow circle, and pounds down upon the sand or reef with all the crushing force of some enormous sledge-hammer.  But after the fourth assault, Felix felt himself flung up high and dry by the wave, as one may sometimes see a bit of light reed or pith flung up some distance ahead by an advancing tide on the beach in England.  In an instant he steadied himself and staggered to his feet.  Torn and bruised as he was by the pummelling of the billows, he looked eagerly into the water in search of his companion.  The next wave flung up Muriel, as the last had flung himself.  He bent over her with a panting heart as she lay there, insensible, on the long white shore.  Alive or dead? that was now the question.

Raising her hastily in his arms, with her clothes all clinging wet and close about her, Felix carried her over the narrow strip of tidal beach, above high-water level, and laid her gently down on a soft green bank of short tropical herbage, close to the edge of the coral.  Then he bent over her once more, and listened eagerly at her heart.  It still beat with faint pulses—­beat—­beat—­beat.  Felix throbbed with joy.  She was alive! alive!  He was not quite alone, then, on that unknown island!

And strange as it seemed, it was only a little more than two short hours since they had stood and looked out across the open sea over the bulwarks of the Australasian together!

But Felix had no time to moralize just then.  The moment was clearly one for action.  Fortunately, he happened to carry three useful things in his pocket when he jumped overboard after Muriel.  The first was a pocket-knife; the second was a flask with a little whiskey in it; and the third, perhaps the most important of all, a small metal box of wax vesta matches.  Pouring a little whiskey into the cup of the flask, he held it eagerly to Muriel’s lips.  The fainting girl swallowed it automatically.  Then Felix, stooping down, tried the matches against the box.  They were unfortunately wet, but half an hour’s exposure, he knew, on sun-warmed stones, in that hot, tropical air, would soon restore them again.  So he opened the box and laid them carefully out on a flat white slab of coral.  After that, he had time to consider exactly where they were, and what their chances in life, if any, might now amount to.

Pitch dark as it was, he had no difficulty in deciding at once by the general look of things that they had reached a fringing reef, such as he was already familiar with in the Marquesas and elsewhere.  The reef was no doubt circular, and it enclosed within itself a second or central island, divided from it by a shallow lagoon of calm, still water.  He walked some yards inland.  From where he now stood, on the summit of the ridge, he could look either way, and by the faint reflected light of the stars, or the glare of the great pyre that burned on the central island, he could see down on one side to the ocean, with its fierce white pounding surf, and on the other to the lagoon, reflecting the stars overhead, and motionless as a mill-pond.  Between them lay the low raised ridge of coral, covered with tall stems of cocoanut palms, and interspersed here and there, as far as his eye could judge, with little rectangular clumps of plantain and taro.

But what alarmed Felix most was the fire that blazed so brightly to heaven on the central island; for he knew too well that meant—­there were men on the place; the land was inhabited.

The cocoanuts and taro told the same doubtful tale.  From the way they grew, even in that dim starlight, Felix recognized at once they had all been planted.

Still, he didn’t hesitate to do what he thought best for Muriel’s relief for all that.  Collecting a few sticks and fragments of palm-branches from the jungle about, he piled them into a heap, and waited patiently for his matches to dry.  As soon as they were ready—­and the warmth of the stone made them quickly inflammable—­he struck a match on the box, and proceeded to light his fire by Muriel’s side.  As her clothes grew warmer, the poor girl opened her eyes at last, and, gazing around her, exclaimed, in blank terror, “Oh, Mr. Thurstan, where are we?  What does all this mean?  Where have we got to?  On a desert island?”

“No, not on a desert island,” Felix answered, shortly; “I’m afraid it’s a great deal worse than that.  To tell you the truth, I’m afraid it’s inhabited.”

At that moment, by the hot embers of the great sacrificial pyre on the central hill, two of the savage temple-attendants, calling their god’s attention to a sudden blaze of flame upon the fringing reef, pointed with their dark forefingers and called out in surprise, “See, see, a fire on the barrier!  A fire!  A fire!  What can it mean?  There are no men of our people over there to-night.  Have war-canoes arrived?  Has some enemy landed?”

Tu-Kila-Kila leaned back, drained his cocoanut cup of intoxicating kava, and surveyed the unwonted apparition on the reef long and carefully.  “It is nothing,” he said at last, in his most deliberate manner, stroking his cheeks and chin contentedly with that plump round hand of his.  “It is only the victims; the new victims I promised you.  Korong!  Korong!  They have come ashore with their light from my home in the sun.  They have brought fire afresh—­holy fire to Boupari.”

Three or four of the savages leaped up in fierce joy, and bowed before him as he spoke, with eager faces.  “Oh, Tu-Kila-Kila!” the eldest among them said, making a profound reverence, “shall we swim across to the reef and fetch them home to your house?  Shall we take over our canoes and bring back your victims!”

The god motioned them back with one outstretched palm.  His eyes were flushed and his look lazy.  “Not to-night, my people,” he said; readjusting the garland of flowers round his neck, and giving a careless glance at the well-picked bones that a few hours before had been two trembling fellow creatures.  “Tu-Kila-Kila has feasted his fill for this evening.  Your god is full; his heart is happy.  I have eaten human flesh; I have drunk of the juice of the kava.  Am I not a great deity?  Can I not do as I will?  I frown, and the heavens thunder; I gnash my teeth, and the earth trembles.  What is it to me if fresh victims come, or if they come not?  Can I not make with a nod as many as I will of them?” He took up two fresh finger-bones, clean gnawed of their flesh, and knocked them together in a wild tune, carelessly.  “If Tu-Kila-Kila chooses,” he went on, tapping his 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.