The Great Taboo

TU-KILA-KILA PLAYS A CARD.

Before the Frenchman could carry out his plan, however, he was himself the recipient of the high honor of a visit from his superior god and chief, Tu-Kila-Kila.

Every day and all day long, save on a few rare occasions when special duties absolved him, the custom and religion of the islanders prescribed that their supreme incarnate deity should keep watch and ward without cessation over the great spreading banyan-tree that overshadowed with its dark boughs his temple-palace.  High god as he was held to be, and all-powerful within the limits of his own strict taboos, Tu-Kila-Kila was yet as rigidly bound within those iron laws of custom and religious usage as the meanest and poorest of his subject worshippers.  From sunrise to sunset, and far on into the night, the Pillar of Heaven was compelled to prowl up and down, with spear in hand and tomahawk at side, as Felix had so often seen him, before the sacred trunk, of which he appeared to be in some mysterious way the appointed guardian.  His very power, it seemed, was intimately bound up with the performance of that ceaseless and irksome duty; he was a god in whose hands the lives of his people were but as dust in the balance; but he remained so only on the onerous condition of pacing to and fro, like a sentry, forever before the still more holy and venerable object he was chosen to protect from attack or injury.  Had he failed in his task, had he slumbered at his post, all god though he might be, his people themselves would have risen in a body and torn him limb from limb before their ancestral fetich as a sacrilegious pretender.

At certain times and seasons, however, as for example at all high feasts and festivals, Tu-Kila-Kila had respite for a while from this constant treadmill of mechanical divinity.  Whenever the moon was at the half-quarter, or the planets were in lucky conjunctions, or a red glow lit up the sky by night, or the sacred sacrificial fires of human flesh were lighted, then Tu-Kila-Kila could lay aside his tomahawk and spear, and become for a while as the islanders, his fellows, were.  At other times, too, when he went out in state to visit the lesser deities of his court, the King of Fire and the King of Water made a solemn taboo before He left his home, which protected the sacred tree from aggression during its guardian’s absence.  Then Tu-Kila-Kila, shaded by his divine umbrella, and preceded by the noise of the holy tom-toms, could go like a monarch over all parts of his realm, giving such orders as he pleased (within the limits of custom) to his inferior officers.  It was in this way that he now paid his visit to M. Jules Peyron, King of the Birds.  And he did so for what to him were amply sufficient reasons.

It had not escaped Tu-Kila-Kila’s keen eye, as he paced among the skeletons in his yard that morning, that Felix Thurstan, the King of the Rain, had taken his way openly toward the Frenchman’s quarters.  He felt pretty sure, therefore, that Felix had by this time learned another white man was living on the island; and he thought it an ominous fact that the new-comer should make his way toward his fellow-European’s hut on the very first morning when the law of taboo rendered such a visit possible.  The savage is always by nature suspicious; and Tu-Kila-Kila had grounds enough of his own for suspicion in this particular instance.  The two white men were surely brewing mischief together for the Lord of Heaven and Earth, the Illuminer of the Glowing Light of the Sun; he must make haste and see what plan they were concocting against the sacred tree and the person of its representative, the King of Plants and of the Host of Heaven.

But it isn’t so easy to make haste when all your movements are impeded and hampered by endless taboos and a minutely annoying ritual.  Before Tu-Kila-Kila could get himself under way, sacred umbrella, tom-toms, and all, it was necessary for the King of Fire and the King of Water to make taboo on an elaborate scale with their respective elements; and so by the time the high god had reached M. Jules Peyron’s garden, Felix Thurstan had already some time since returned to Muriel’s hut and his own quarters.

Tu-Kila-Kila approached the King of the Birds, amid loud clapping of hands, with considerable haughtiness.  To say the truth, there was no love lost between the cannibal god and his European subordinate.  The savage, puffed up as he was in his own conceit, had nevertheless always an uncomfortable sense that, in his heart of hearts, the impassive Frenchman had but a low opinion of him.  So he invariably tried to make up by the solemnity of his manner and the loudness of his assertions for any trifling scepticism that might possibly exist in the mind of his follower.

On this particular occasion, as he reached the Frenchman’s plot, Tu-Kila-Kila stepped forward across the white taboo-line with a suspicious and peering eye.  “The King of the Rain has been here,” he said, in a pompous tone, as the Frenchman rose and saluted him ceremoniously.  “Tu-Kila-Kila’s eyes are sharp.  They never sleep.  The sun is his sight.  He beholds all things.  You cannot hide aught in heaven or earth from the knowledge of him that dwells in heaven.  I look down upon land and sea, and spy out all that takes place or is planned in them.  I am very holy and very cruel.  I see all earth and I drink the blood of all men.  The King of the Rain has come this morning to visit the King of the Birds.  Where is he now?  What has your divinity done with him?”

He spoke from under the sheltering cover of his veiled umbrella.  The Frenchman looked back at him with as little love as Tu-Kila-Kila himself would have displayed had his face been visible.  “Yes, you are a very great god,” he answered, in the conventional tone of Polynesian adulation, with just a faint under-current of irony running through his accent as he spoke.  “You say the truth.  You do, indeed, know all things.  What need for me, then, to tell you, whose eye is the sun, that my brother, the King of the Rain, has been here and gone again?  You know it yourself.  Your eye has looked upon it.  My brother was indeed with me.  He consulted me as to the showers I should need from his clouds for the birds, my subjects.”

“And where is he gone now?” Tu-Kila-Kila asked, without attempting to conceal the displeasure in his tone, for he more than half suspected the Frenchman of a sacrilegious and monstrous design of chaffing him.

The King of the Birds bowed low once more.  “Tu-Kila-Kila’s glance is keener than my hawk’s,” he answered, with the accustomed Polynesian imagery.  “He sees over the land with a glance, like my parrots, and over the sea with sharp sight, like my albatrosses.  He knows where my brother, the King of the Rain, has gone.  For me, who am the least among all the gods, I sit here on my perch and blink like a crow.  I do not know these things.  They are too high and too deep for me.”

Tu-Kila-Kila did not like the turn the conversation was taking.  Before his own attendants such hints, indeed, were almost dangerous.  Once let the savage begin to doubt, and the Moral Order goes with a crash immediately.  Besides, he must know what these white men had been talking about.  “Fire and Water,” he said in a loud voice, turning round to his two chief satellites, “go far down the path, and beat the tom-toms.  Fence off with flood and flame the airy height where the King of the Birds lives; fence it off from all profane intrusion.  I wish to confer in secret with this god, my brother.  When we gods talk together, it is not well that others should hear our converse.  Make a great Taboo.  I, Tu-Kila-Kila, myself have said it.”

Fire and Water, bowing low, backed down the path, beating tom-toms as they went, and left the savage and the Frenchman alone together.

As soon as they were gone, Tu-Kila-Kila laid aside his umbrella with a positive sigh of relief.  Now his fellow-countrymen were well out of the way, his manner altered in a trice, as if by magic.  Barbarian as he was, he was quite astute enough to guess that Europeans cared nothing in their hearts for all his mumbo-jumbo.  He believed in it himself, but they did not, and their very unbelief made him respect and fear them.

“Now that we two are alone,” he said, glancing carelessly around him, “we two who are gods, and know the world well—­we two who see everything in heaven or earth—­there is no need for concealment—­we may talk as plainly as we will with one another.  Come, tell me the truth!  The new white man has seen you?”

“He has seen me, yes, certainly,” the Frenchman admitted, taking a keen look deep into the savage’s cunning eyes.

“Does he speak your language—­the language of birds?” Tu-Kila-Kila asked once more, with insinuating cunning.  “I have heard that the sailing gods are of many languages.  Are you and he of one speech or two?  Aliens, or countrymen?”

“He speaks my language as he speaks Polynesian,” the Frenchman replied, keeping his eye firmly fixed on his doubtful guest, “but it is not his own.  He has a tongue apart—­the tongue of an island not far from my country, which we call England.”

Tu-Kila-Kila drew nearer, and dropped his voice to a confidential whisper.  “Has he seen the Soul of all dead parrots?” he asked, with keen interest in his voice.  “The parrot that knows Tu-Kila-Kila’s secret?  That one over there—­the old, the very sacred one?”

M. Peyron gazed round his aviary carelessly.  “Oh, that one,” he answered, with a casual glance at Methuselah, as though one parrot or another were much the same to him.  “Yes, I think he saw it.  I pointed it out to him, in fact, as the oldest and strangest of all my subjects.”

Tu-Kila-Kila’s countenance fell.  “Did he hear it speak?” he asked, in evident alarm.  “Did it tell him the story of Tu-Kila-Kila’s secret?”

“No, it didn’t speak,” the Frenchman answered.  “It seldom does now.  It is very old.  And if it did, I don’t suppose the King of the Rain would have understood one word of it.  Look here, great god, allay your fears.  You’re a terrible coward.  I expect the real fact about the parrot is this:  it is the last of its own race; it speaks the language of some tribe of men who once inhabited these islands, but are now extinct.  No human being at present alive, most probably, knows one word of that forgotten language.”

“You think not?” Tu-Kila-Kila asked, a little relieved.

“I am the King of the Birds, and I know the voices of my subjects by heart; I assure you it is as I say,” M. Peyron answered, drawing himself up solemnly.

Tu-Kila-Kila looked askance, with something very closely approaching a wink in his left eye.  “We two are both gods,” he said, with a tinge of irony in his tone.  “We know what that means…. I do not feel so certain.”

He stood close by the parrot with itching fingers.  “It is very, very old,” he went on to himself, musingly.  “It can’t live long.  And then—­none but Boupari men will know the secret.”

As he spoke he darted a strange glance of hatred toward the unconscious bird, the innocent repository, as he firmly believed, of the secret that doomed him.  The Frenchman had turned his back for a moment now, to fetch out a stool.  Tu-Kila-Kila, casting a quick, suspicious eye to the right and left, took a step nearer.  The parrot sat mumbling on its perch, inarticulately, putting its head on one side, and blinking its half-blinded eyes in the bright tropical sunshine.  Tu-Kila-Kila paused irresolute before its face for a second.  If he only dared—­one wring of the neck—­one pinch of his finger and thumb almost!—­and all would be over.  But he dared not! he dared not!  Your savage is overawed by the blind terrors of taboo.  His predecessor, some elder Tu-Kila-Kila of forgotten days, had laid a great charm upon that parrot’s life.  Whoever hurt it was to die an awful death of unspeakable torment.  The King of the Birds had special charge to guard it.  If even the Cannibal God himself wrought it harm, who could tell what judgment might fall upon him forthwith, what terrible vengeance the dead Tu-Kila-Kila might wreak upon him in his ghostly anger?  And that dead Tu-Kila-Kila was his own Soul!  His own Soul might flare up within him in some mystic way and burn him to ashes.

And yet—­suppose this hateful new-comer, the King of the Rain, whom he had himself made Korong on purpose to get rid of him the more easily, and so had elevated into his own worst potential enemy—­suppose this new-comer, the King of the Rain, were by chance to speak that other dialect of the bird-language, which the King of the Birds himself knew not, but which the parrot had learned from his old master, the ancient Tu-Kila-Kila of other days, and in which the bird still recited the secret of the sacred tree and the Death of the Great God—­ah, then he might still have to fight hard for his divinity.  He gazed angrily at the bird.  Methuselah blinked, and put his head on one side, and looked craftily askance at him.  Tu-Kila-Kila hated it, that insolent creature.  Was he not a god, and should he be thus bearded in his own island by a mere Soul of dead birds, a poor, wretched parrot?  But the curse!  What might not that portend?  Ah, well, he would risk it.  Glancing around him once more to the right and left, to make sure that nobody was looking, the cunning savage put forth his hand stealthily, and tried with a friendly caress to seize the parrot.

In a moment, before he had time to know what was happening, Methuselah—­sleepy old dotard as he seemed—­had woke up at once to a sense of danger.  Turning suddenly round upon the sleek, caressing hand, he darted his beak with a vicious peck at his assailant, and bit the divine finger of the Pillar of Heaven as carelessly as he would have bitten any child on Boupari.  Tu-Kila-Kila, thunder-struck, drew back his arm with a start of surprise and a loud cry of pain.  The bird had wounded him.  He shook his hand and stamped.  Blood was dropping on the ground from the man-god’s finger.  He hardly knew what strange evil this omen of harm might portend for the world.  The Soul of all dead parrots had carried out the curse, and had drawn red drops from the sacred veins of Tu-Kila-Kila.

One must be a savage one’s self, and superstitious at that, fully to understand the awful significance of this deadly occurrence.  To draw blood from a god, and, above all, to let that blood fall upon the dust of the ground, is the very worst luck—­too awful for the human mind to contemplate.

At the same moment, the parrot, awakened by the unexpected attack, threw back its head on its perch, and, laughing loud and long to itself in its own harsh way, began to pour forth a whole volley of oaths in a guttural language, of which neither Tu-Kila-Kila nor the Frenchman understood one syllable.  And at the same moment, too, M. Peyron himself, recalled from the door of his hut by Tu-Kila-Kila’s sharp cry of pain and by his liege subject’s voluble flow of loud speech and laughter, ran up all agog to know what was the matter.

Tu-Kila-Kila, with an effort, tried to hide in his robe his wounded finger.  But the Frenchman caught at the meaning of the whole scene at once, and interposed himself hastily between the parrot and its assailant. “Hé! my Methuselah,” he cried, in French, stroking the exultant bird with his hand, and smoothing its ruffled feathers, “did he try to choke you, then?  Did he try to get over you?  That was a brave bird!  You did well, mon ami, to bite him!...  No, no, Life of the World, and Measurer of the Sun’s Course,” he went on, in Polynesian, “you shall not go near him.  Keep your distance, I beg of you.  You may be a high god—­though you were a scurvy wretch enough, don’t you recollect, when you were only Lavita, the son of Sami—­but I know your tricks.  Hands off from my birds, say I. A curse is on the head of the Soul of dead parrots.  You tried to hurt him, and see how the curse has worked itself out!  The blood of the great god, the Pillar of Heaven, has stained the gray dust of the island of Boupari.”

Tu-Kila-Kila stood sucking his finger, and looking the very picture of the most savage sheepishness.