KARA! KARA! KARA!
There was a girl of the islands, Nalia by name, who, living under the
tabu of _taminan_ and pursued by a lover, found refuge in the sea.
Swimming far out, she could not return, for the place of refuge had in
some way, by association, linked itself with the spell and she could not
leave it. She was swept away and drowned. Katafa, crouching amidst the
ferns, heard the wind in the matamata leaves, the flutter of birds, the
murmur of the reef, muted by the woods. Then a voice faint and far away,
the voice of Taori:
“Katafa, hai, amonai, Katafa.”
She listened—nothing more. Nothing but the wind, the reef murmur and the
birds.
Time passed, sunset bloomed and the dusk rose, and then, as the
starlight fell, silvering the lagoon and the sea, she came gliding
through the trees.
Dividing the leaves, she looked and saw the sward and the house with the
starlight upon it. There in the house, with the little ships above him,
Taori was sleeping, far from her as any star.
She could no more leave the protection of the trees than Nalia could
have left the sea. The open space repelled her as it might have repelled
an agoraphobiac, only with infinitely greater power. She was bound to
the woods for ever.
In the old romances we read of women spell-bound by witches and black
magic. Le Juan had used no black magic; working with no material but
Katafa’s self, she had moulded into it a law that had become part of
self. Passion could not fight with or break that law; nothing could
break it but something higher than self, something not yet fully
existent in her still nebulous soul.
Like an animal held from its mate, she crouched now, her eyes fixed on
the house, the very depth of her passion forging her bonds more securely
in so far as it destroyed reason. Dead to thought, her senses were yet
acutely alive.
She heard with miraculous clearness the thousand little noises of the
night, the moving of leaves, the faint creak of branches, the rustle of
a lizard. She heard the surf on the outer beach and the far-off splash
of a fish from the lagoon water. Then, as the wind from the sea died to
the faintest stirring of air, the moon rising across the eastern trees
struck the house, and the air, as though some crystal door had been
closed, grew still. Not a leaf moved. Katafa, crouched amidst the
leaves, seemed part of the silence that had taken the world, a silence
reaching from the furthest sea stars to the trees, a silence suddenly
broken by a sound more terrible than the voice of any beast. Suddenly
through the utter silence of the night it came, howling, bubbling,
bellowing, echoing through the trees from the distant eastern beach,
raising the birds in screaming flocks, waking roosting gulls on the
reef.
She knew that sound. It was the blowing of a lambai shell, the great
conch shell of Karolin, blown only for war.
“We have come!” cried the shell. “The long canoes have come from the
south, from the south, from the south! Kara! Kara! Kara! War! War! War!”