The Great Taboo

A VERY FAINT CLUE.

“But you hinted at some hope, some chance of escape,” Felix cried at last, looking up from the ground and mastering his emotion.  “What now is that hope?  Conceal nothing from me.”

“Monsieur,” the Frenchman answered, shrugging his shoulders with an expression of utter impotence, “I have as good reasons for wishing to find out all that as even you can have. Your secret is my secret; but with all my pains and astuteness I have been unable to discover it.  The natives are reticent, very reticent indeed, about all these matters.  They fear taboo; and they fear Tu-Kila-Kila.  The women, to be sure, in a moment of expansion, might possibly tell one; but, then, the women, unfortunately, are not admitted to the mysteries.  They know no more of all these things than we do.  The most I have been able to gather for certain is this—­that on the discovery of the secret depend Tu-Kila-Kila’s life and power.  Every Boupari man knows this Great Taboo; it is communicated to him in the assembly of adults when he gets tattooed and reaches manhood.  But no Boupari man ever communicates it to strangers; and for that reason, perhaps, as I believe, Tu-Kila-Kila often chooses for Korong, as far as possible, those persons who are cast by chance upon the island.  It has always been the custom, so far as I can make out, to treat castaways or prisoners taken in war as gods, and then at the end of their term to kill them ruthlessly.  This plan is popular with the people at large, because it saves themselves from the dangerous honors of deification; but it also serves Tu-Kila-Kila’s purpose, because it usually elevates to Heaven those innocent persons who are unacquainted with that fatal secret which is, as the natives say, Tu-Kila-Kila’s death—­his word of dismissal.”

“Then if only we could find out this secret—­” Felix cried.

His new friend interrupted him.  “What hope is there of your finding it out, monsieur,” he exclaimed, “you, who have only a few months to live—­when I, who have spent nine long years of exile on the island, and seen two Tu-Kila-Kilas rise and fall, have been unable, with my utmost pains, to discover it? Tenez; you have no idea yet of the superstitions of these people, or the difficulties that lie in the way of fathoming them.  Come this way to my aviary; I will show you something that will help you to realize the complexities of the situation.”

He rose and led the way to another cleared space at the back of the hut, where several birds of gaudy plumage were fastened to perches on sticks by leathery lashes of dried shark’s skin, tied just above their talons.  “I am the King of the Birds, monsieur, you must remember,” the Frenchman said, fondling one of his screaming protégés.  “These are a few of my subjects.  But I do not keep them for mere curiosity.  Each of them is the Soul of the tribe to which it belongs.  This, for example—­my Cluseret—­is the Soul of all the gray parrots; that that you see yonder—­Badinguet, I call him—­is the Soul of the hawks; this, my Mimi, is the Soul of the little yellow-crested kingfisher.  My task as King of the Birds is to keep a representative of each of these always on hand; in which endeavor I am faithfully aided by the whole population of the island, who bring me eggs and nests and young birds in abundance.  If the Soul of the little yellow kingfisher now were to die, without a successor being found ready at once to receive and embody it, then the whole race of little yellow kingfishers would vanish altogether; and if I myself, the King of the Birds, who am, as it were, the Soul and life of all of them, were to die without a successor being at hand to receive my spirit, then all the race of birds, with one accord, would become extinct forthwith and forever.”

He moved among his pets easily, like a king among his subjects.  Most of them seemed to know him and love his presence.  Presently, he came to one very old parrot, quite different from any Felix had ever seen on any trees in the island; it was a parrot with a black crest and a red mark on its throat, half blind with age, and tottering on its pedestal.  This solemn old bird sat apart from all the others, nodding its head oracularly in the sunlight, and blinking now and again with its white eyelids in a curious senile fashion.

The Frenchman turned to Felix with an air of profound mystery.  “This bird,” he said, solemnly stroking its head with his hand, while the parrot turned round to him and bit at his finger with half-doddering affection—­“this bird is the oldest of all my birds—–­is it not so, Methuselah?—­and illustrates well in one of its aspects the superstition of these people.  Yes, my friend, you are the last of a kind now otherwise extinct, are you not, mon vieux? No, no, there—­gently!  Once upon a time, the natives tell me, dozens of these parrots existed in the island; they flocked among the trees, and were held very sacred; but they were hard to catch and difficult to keep, and the Kings of the Birds, my predecessors, failed to secure an heir and coadjutor to this one.  So as the Soul of the species, which you see here before you, grew old and feeble, the whole of the race to which it belonged grew old and feeble with it.  One by one they withered away and died, till at last this solitary specimen alone remained to vouch for the former existence of the race in the island.  Now, the islanders say, nothing but the Soul itself is left; and when the Soul dies, the red-throated parrots will be gone forever.  One of my predecessors paid with his life in awful tortures for his remissness in not providing for the succession to the soulship.  I tell you these things in order that you may see whether they cast any light for you upon your own position; and also because the oldest and wisest natives say that this parrot alone, among beasts or birds or uninitiated things, knows the secret on which depends the life of the Tu-Kila-Kila for the time being.”

“Can the parrot speak?” Felix asked, with profound emotion.

“Monsieur, he can speak, and he speaks frequently.  But not one word of all he says is comprehensible either to me or to any other living being.  His tongue is that of a forgotten nation.  The islanders understand him no more than I do.  He has a very long sermon or poem, which he knows by heart, in some unknown language, and he repeats it often at full length from time to time, especially when he has eaten well and feels full and happy.  The oldest natives tell a romantic legend about this strange recitation of the good Methuselah—­I call him Methuselah because of his great age—­but I do not really know whether their tale is true or purely fanciful.  You never can trust these Polynesian traditions.”

“What is the legend?” Felix asked, with intense interest.  “In an island where we find ourselves so girt round by mystery within mystery, and taboo within taboo, as this, every key is worth trying.  It is well for us at least to learn everything we can about the ideas of the natives.  Who knows what clue may supply us at last with the missing link, which will enable us to break through this intolerable servitude?”

“Well, the story they tell us is this,” the Frenchman replied, “though I have gathered it only a hint at a time, from very old men, who declared at the same moment that some religious fear—­of which they have many—­prevented them from telling me any further about it.  It seems that a long time ago—­how many years ago nobody knows, only that it was in the time of the thirty-ninth Tu-Kila-Kila, before the reign of Lavita, the son of Sami—­a strange Korong was cast up upon this island by the waves of the sea, much as you and I have been in the present generation.  By accident, says the story, or else, as others aver, through the indiscretion of a native woman who fell in love with him, and who worried the taboo out of her husband, the stranger became acquainted with the secret of Tu-Kila-Kila.  As the natives themselves put it, he learned the Death of the High God, and where in the world his Soul was hidden.  Thereupon, in some mysterious way or other, he became Tu-Kila-Kila himself, and ruled as High God for ten years or more here on this island.  Now, up to that time, the legend goes on, none but the men of the island knew the secret; they learned it as soon as they were initiated in the great mysteries, which occur before a boy is given a spear and admitted to the rank of complete manhood.  But sometimes a woman was told the secret wrongfully by her husband or her lover; and one such woman, apparently, told the strange Korong, and so enabled him to become Tu-Kila-Kila.”

“But where does the parrot come in?” Felix asked, with still profounder excitement than ever.  Something within him seemed to tell him instinctively he was now within touch of the special key that must sooner or later unlock the mystery.

“Well,” the Frenchman went on, still stroking the parrot affectionately with his hand, and smoothing down the feathers on its ruffled back, “the strange Tu-Kila-Kila, who thus ruled in the island, though he learned to speak Polynesian well, had a language of his own, a language of the birds, which no man on earth could ever talk with him.  So, to beguile his time and to have someone who could converse with him in his native dialect, he taught this parrot to speak his own tongue, and spent most of his days in talking with it and fondling it.  At last, after he had instructed it by slow degrees how to repeat this long sermon or poem—­which I have often heard it recite in a sing-song voice from beginning to end—­his time came, as they say, and he had to give way to another Tu-Kila-Kila; for the Bouparese have a proverb like our own about the king, ‘The High God is dead; may the High God live forever!’ But before he gave up his Soul to his successor, and was eaten or buried, whichever is the custom, he handed over his pet to the King of the Birds, strictly charging all future bearers of that divine office to care for the parrot as they would care for a son or a daughter.  And so the natives make much of the parrot to the present day, saying he is greater than any, save a Korong or a god, for he is the Soul of a dead race, summing it up in himself, and he knows the secret of the Death of Tu-Kila-Kila.”

“But you can’t tell me what language he speaks?” Felix asked with a despairing gesture.  It was terrible to stand thus within measurable distance of the secret which might, perhaps, save Muriel’s life, and yet be perpetually balked by wheel within wheel of more than Egyptian mystery.

“Who can say?” the Frenchman answered, shrugging his shoulders helplessly.  “It isn’t Polynesian; that I know well, for I speak Bouparese now like a native of Boupari; and it isn’t the only other language spoken at the present day in the South Seas—­the Melanesian of New Caledonia—­for that I learned well from the Kanakas while I was serving my time as a convict among them.  All we can say for certain is that it may, perhaps, be some very ancient tongue.  For parrots, we know, are immensely long-lived.  Some of them, it is said, exceed their century.  Is it not so, eh, my friend Methuselah?”