KATAFA
Standing on the summit of Palm Tree Island and gazing sou’west, one saw
above the horizon line something that was not land; the sky just then
altered in colour, as though dimmed by a fingerprint, and sometimes,
just before sunset, this mysterious spot in the sky took on a vague
glow.
Any old South Sea man would have known at once that this spot was the
mirror blaze from a great lagoon reflected in the sky. Kearney
recognised the fact at once when he saw it. “There’s a big low island
somewheres down there,” had been his verdict, and he was right.
Karolin was the name of this atoll island; even the whalemen called it
by its native name instead of dubbing it with some outlandish term of
their own after their custom with islands not on the chart. But they
never entered the lagoon. The place had a bad name, wood and water being
scarce and the natives untrustable.
But the birds of Palm Tree cared nothing for the scarcity of wood or
water or the trustability of the natives, and the great gulls, when
fancy took them, would spread their wings for the south, thinking little
of the journey of fifty miles. League after league they would lay behind
them with nothing in view but the blaze of the sea till, like a trace of
pale smoke, the birds of Karolin showed circling in the sky. Then the
line of the reef sent its murmur to meet them, but, unheeding reef or
surf, they would pass over to poise above the lagoon before slanting
down to rest and fish.
The lagoon was forty miles in circumference and the containing reef
nowhere higher than six feet; standing on the reef, you could not see
the opposite shore, except when mirage lifted it, showing across the
great pond brimming with light a line dotted with palm clumps. There was
no water source on Karolin, only ponds cut in the coral and filled by
the rains; no taro, only puraka; no bread-fruit; cocoanuts, puraka,
pandanus-fruit and fish were the main support of the inhabitants, and
though Palm Tree, with all its vegetation lay within reach, they never
went there for food.
The fishing canoes, in the bad seasons when fish were poisonous at
Karolin, would push out with the northward-running current and sometimes
even skirt the reef of the northern island, but they never landed, and
for three reasons. The high island, with its dense trees and narrow
lagoon, was an abomination to the minds of the atoll-bred people. In the
remote past, for some reason, they had emigrated en masse, but had
returned in less than three months, broken in spirit and yearning for
the great spaces and the sun blaze on the lagoon. Again, years ago there
had been a tribal war and the remnants of the defeated tribe had made
north and had been pursued and killed on the beach of Palm Tree to a
man[1], and their ghosts were supposed still to haunt the beach. Lastly,
Palm Tree, though invisible from Karolin by direct vision, was sometimes
at long intervals raised by the witchery of mirage, showing as a picture
in the sky, and an island that could raise itself like this was a place
to be avoided. Katafa had only seen this vision twice, though she was
thirteen years of age.
Eleven years ago a ship had come into the lagoon of Karolin, a Spanish
ship, the _Pablo Poirez_, Spanish-owned and out of Valparaiso. Valores
was the captain’s name, and he had his wife and little daughter on
board, a child two years old, named Chita.
He came in for water. There had been a drought, and the wells of Karolin
were low, and Le Juan, the sorceress and rain expert, in a temper, and
Uta Matu, the chief man of the northern tribe, spoiling for a fight.
When the wells were low there was always trouble on Karolin—offerings to
the god Nanawa, rejuvenations of old vendettas and the general
nerve-tension and gloom of a people who feel that the Fates are against
them.
In the middle of all this the Spaniards came on shore with their water
barrels and were met by Le Juan and Uta Matu, who barred the way to the
wells only to be pushed aside by Valores and his men. In a moment the
beach was in a turmoil; daggers and shark’s-teeth spears were whipped
from beneath mats and from clefts in the rock; attacked on all sides,
and with the fury of a typhoon, the Spaniards fell, butchered like
sheep—slaughtered to a man.
Then the canoes put out for the ship, Uta Matu boarding her to starboard
and his son Laminai to port. There were six Spaniards on board. They had
knocked the shackle off the anchor chain and were trying to handle the
sails, forgetting that the tide was flooding and that the wind was
coming from the break—working like maniacs and falling like cattle
before the spearmen. The wife of Valores fell defending her child.
Stricken on the back with a coral-headed club, she fell with it in her
arms, covering it so that they had to turn her over to tear it from her.
Now the ship, free of the anchor, had been drifting with the flood and
wind, and just as Laminai was holding the child aloft before dashing it
on the deck, the keel took a submerged reef that rose from the lagoon
floor just there. The shock made him slip on the blood-soaked deck and
as he fell Uta caught the child.
His blood lust was satiated and the gods had spoken, at least so it
seemed to Uta Matu, and when Laminai got on his feet again and tried to
seize his prey he received a clip on the side of the head from the old
man’s right fist, strong to save as to kill.
But the chief had reckoned without Le Juan. The sight of the rescued
Chita filled the priestess of Nanawa with the most dismal forebodings.
It was a girl-child, belonging to the murdered papalagi whose spirits,
through it, would surely find revenge. Le Juan, despite her devotion to
sorcery or maybe because of it, was a very clever woman. She foresaw in
the growing up and mating of this alien with some young man of the tribe
danger to the people of Karolin. It might be that the ghosts of the
murdered ones would work through her and the children she bore; Le Juan
could not tell, she only knew that there was danger in the thing, and
that night, squatting in Uta Matu’s house whilst the rest of the tribe
lay about on the beach drunk with carnage and kava, she so worked on the
mind of the chief that he was about to assent to the strangling of
Chita, when of a sudden a noise filled the air, first a whisper, then a
murmur, then a roar—the rain, the long deferred rain, beating the lagoon
to foam and washing the coral free of blood-stains.
“How now about the ill luck?” asked Uta Matu. “The child is lucky; it
has brought us rain. Take her and do what you will with her, put spells
upon her or what you like, but if you injure one hair of her head I will
have you choked with a wedge of raw puraka and I will cast your body to
the sharks, Le Juan.”
“As you please,” said the old woman; “I will do what I can.”
She did.
She christened Chita, Katafa, or the “Frigate Bird,” a creature
associated with wanderings and great distances, and then gradually and
year by year she isolated Katafa from the tribe, absolutely and in all
but speech.
Now, how can you isolate human beings from their fellows so that whilst
living, talking, eating and moving amongst them they are as much apart
as though ringed round with a barrier of steel? It seems impossible, but
it was not impossible to Le Juan. She imposed upon Chita the rarest of
all the forms of tabu, _taminan_. There were men and women on Karolin
tabued from touching the skin of a shark, from eating certain forms of
shell-fish, and so forth, and so on, but the terrible tabu of _taminan_
debarred its victims from touching any human creature or _being
touched_.
From her earliest infancy the mind of the Spanish child had been worked
upon by Le Juan until the tabu had taken a firm hold and become part and
parcel of her brain processes, and evasion an instantaneous reflex act.
You might suddenly have put out your hand to grasp or touch Katafa—you
would have touched nothing but air; like an expert fencer, she would
have evaded you if only by the twentieth part of an inch. To understand
the tremendous grasp of this thing upon the mind, it is enough to say
that had she wished you to touch her, desired with all her heart that
you should touch her, wish or desire would have been fruitless before
the impassable barrier erected by the subliminal mind.
On no grown person could the tabu of _taminan_ be imposed. Only on the
plastic mind of childhood could it obtain its grip strong as hypnotism
and lasting till death.
At six years of age Le Juan’s work was accomplished and Katafa was
immune, isolated for ever from her kind. The work had been helped by the
fact that every creature on Karolin had avoided her, but on the day when
Le Juan proclaimed her free, she was taken into the tribe, men, women
and children no longer held apart, and she mixed with them, played with
them, fished with them, talked with them, a ghost in everything but
speech.
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Footnote 1:
See “Blue Lagoon”