THE TEMPLE OF THE DEITY.
While these things were happening on the sea close by, a very different
scene indeed was being enacted meanwhile, beneath those waving palms, on
the island of Boupari. It was strange, to be sure, as Felix Thurstan had
said, that such unspeakable heathen orgies should be taking place within
sight of a passing Christian English steamer. But if only he had known or
reflected to what sort of land he was trying now to struggle ashore with
Muriel, he might well have doubted whether it were not better to let her
perish where she was, in the pure clear ocean, rather than to submit an
English girl to the possibility of undergoing such horrible heathen rites
and ceremonies.
For on the island of Boupari it was high feast with the worshippers of
their god that night. The sun had turned on the Tropic of Capricorn at
noon, and was making his way northward, toward the equator once more;
and his votaries, as was their wont, had all come forth to do him honor
in due season, and to pay their respects, in the inmost and sacredest
grove on the island, to his incarnate representative, the living spirit
of trees and fruits and vegetation, the very high god, the divine
Tu-Kila-Kila!
Early in the evening, as soon as the sun's rim had disappeared beneath
the ocean, a strange noise boomed forth from the central shrine of
Boupari. Those who heard it clapped their hands to their ears and ran
hastily forward. It was a noise like distant rumbling thunder, or the
whir of some great English mill or factory; and at its sound every woman
on the island threw herself on the ground prostrate, with her face in the
dust, and waited there reverently till the audible voice of the god had
once more subsided. For no woman knew how that sound was produced. Only
the grown men, initiated into the mysteries of the shrine when they came
of age at the tattooing ceremony, were aware that the strange, buzzing,
whirring noise was nothing more or less than the cry of the bull-roarer.
A bull-roarer, as many English schoolboys know, is merely a piece of
oblong wood, pointed at either end, and fastened by a leather thong at
one corner. But when whirled round the head by practised priestly hands,
it produces a low rumbling noise like the wheels of a distant carriage,
growing gradually louder and clearer, from moment to moment, till at last
it waxes itself into a frightful din, or bursts into perfect peals of
imitation thunder. Then it decreases again once more, as gradually as it
rose, becoming fainter and ever fainter, like thunder as it recedes, till
the horrible bellowing, as of supernatural bulls, dies away in the end,
by slow degrees, into low and soft and imperceptible murmurs.
But when the savage hears the distant humming of the bull-roarer, at
whatever distance, he knows that the mysteries of his god are in full
swing, and he hurries forward in haste, leaving his work or his pleasure,
and running, naked as he stands, to take his share in the worship, lest
the anger of heaven should burst forth in devouring flames to consume
him. But the women, knowing themselves unworthy to face the dread
presence of the high god in his wrath, rush wildly from the spot, and,
flinging themselves down at full length, with their mouths to the dust,
wait patiently till the voice of their deity is no longer audible.
And as the bull-roarer on Boupari rang out with wild echoes from the
coral caverns in the central grove that evening, Tu-Kila-Kila, their god,
rose slowly from his place, and stood out from his hut, a deity revealed,
before his reverential worshippers.
As he rose, a hushed whisper ran wave-like through the dense throng of
dusky forms that bent low, like corn beneath the wind, before him,
"Tu-Kila-Kila rises! He rises to speak! Hush! for the voice of the mighty
man-god!"
The god, looking around him superciliously with a cynical air of
contempt, stood forward with a firm and elastic step before his silent
worshippers. He was a stalwart savage, in the very prime of life, tall,
lithe, and active. His figure was that of a man well used to command;
but his face, though handsome, was visibly marked by every external sign
of cruelty, lust, and extreme bloodthirstiness. One might have said,
merely to look at him, he was a being debased by all forms of brutal and
hateful self-indulgence. A baleful light burned in his keen gray eyes.
His lips were thick, full, purple, and wistful.
"My people may look upon me," he said, in a strangely affable
voice, standing forward and smiling with a curious half-cruel,
half-compassionate smile upon his awe-struck followers. "On every day
of the sun's course but this, none save the ministers dedicated to the
service of Tu-Kila-Kila dare gaze unhurt upon his sacred person. If
any other did, the light from his holy eyes would wither them up, and
the glow of his glorious countenance would scorch them to ashes." He
raised his two hands, palm outward, in front of him. "So all the year
round," he went on, "Tu-Kila-Kila, who loves his people, and sends
them the earlier and the later rain in the wet season, and makes their
yams and their taro grow, and causes his sun to shine upon them
freely--all the year round Tu-Kila-Kila, your god, sits shut up in his
own house among the skeletons of those whom he has killed and eaten, or
walks in his walled paddock, where his bread-fruit ripens and his
plantains spring--himself, and the ministers that his tribesmen have
given him."
At the sound of their mystic deity's voice the savages, bending lower
still till their foreheads touched the ground, repeated in chorus, to the
clapping of hands, like some solemn litany: "Tu-Kila-Kila speaks true.
Our lord is merciful. He sends down his showers upon our crops and
fields. He causes his sun to shine brightly over us. He makes our pigs
and our slaves bring forth their increase. Tu-Kila-Kila is good. His
people praise him."
The god took another step forward, the divine mantle of red feathers
glowing in the sunset on his dusky shoulders, and smiled once more that
hateful gracious smile of his. He was standing near the open door of his
wattled hut, overshadowed by the huge spreading arms of a gigantic
banyan-tree. Through the open door of the hut it was possible to catch
just a passing glimpse of an awful sight within. On the beams of the
house, and on the boughs of the trees behind it, human skeletons, half
covered with dry flesh, hung in ghastly array, their skulls turned
downward. They were the skeletons of the victims Tu-Kila-Kila, their
prince, had slain and eaten; they were the trophies of the cannibal
man-god's hateful prowess.
Tu-Kila-Kila raised his right hand erect and spoke again. "I am a great
god," he said, slowly. "I am very powerful. I make the sun to shine, and
the yams to grow. I am the spirit of plants. Without me there would be
nothing for you all to eat or drink in Boupari. If I were to grow old and
die, the sun would fade away in the heavens overhead; the bread-fruit
trees would wither and cease to bear on earth; all fruits would come to
an end and die at once; all rivers would stop forthwith from running."
His worshippers bowed down in acquiescence with awestruck faces. "It is
true," they answered, in the same slow sing-song of assent as before.
"Tu-Kila-Kila is the greatest of gods. We owe to him everything. We hang
upon his favor."
Tu-Kila-Kila started back, laughed, and showed his pearly white teeth.
They were beautiful and regular, like the teeth of a tiger, a strong
young tiger. "But I need more sacrifices than all the other gods," he
went on, melodiously, like one who plays with consummate skill upon some
difficult instrument. "I am greedy; I am thirsty; I am a hungry god. You
must not stint me. I claim more human victims than all the other gods
beside. If you want your crops to grow, and your rivers to run, the
fields to yield you game, and the sea fish--this is what I ask: give me
victims, victims! That is our compact. Tu-Kila-Kila calls you."
The men bowed down once more and repeated humbly, "You shall have victims
as you will, great god; only give us yam and taro and bread-fruit, and
cause not your bright light, the sun, to grow dark in heaven over us."
"Cut yourselves," Tu-Kila-Kila cried, in a peremptory voice, clapping his
hands thrice. "I am thirsting for blood. I want your free-will offering."
As he spoke, every man, as by a set ritual, took from a little skin
wallet at his side a sharp flake of coral-stone, and, drawing it
deliberately across his breast in a deep red gash, caused the blood to
flow out freely over his chest and long grass waistband. Then, having
done so, they never strove for a moment to stanch the wound, but let
the red drops fall as they would on to the dust at their feet, without
seeming even to be conscious at all of the fact that they were flowing.
Tu-Kila-Kila smiled once more, a ghastly self-satisfied smile of
unquestioned power. "It is well," he went on. "My people love me. They
know my strength, how I can wither them up. They give me their blood to
drink freely. So I will be merciful to them. I will make my sun shine and
my rain drop from heaven. And instead of taking _all_, I will choose one
victim." He paused, and glanced along their line significantly.
"Choose, Tu-Kila-Kila," the men answered, without a moment's hesitation.
"We are all your meat. Choose which one you will take of us."
Tu-Kila-Kila walked with a leisurely tread down the lines and surveyed
the men critically. They were all drawn up in rows, one behind the other,
according to tribes and families; and the god walked along each row,
examining them with a curious and interested eye, as a farmer examines
sheep fit for the market. Now and then, he felt a leg or an arm with his
finger and thumb, and hesitated a second. It was an important matter,
this choosing a victim. As he passed, a close observer might have noted
that each man trembled visibly while the god's eye was upon him, and
looked after him askance with a terrified sidelong gaze as he passed on
to his neighbor. But not one savage gave any overt sign or token of his
terror or his reluctance. On the contrary, as Tu-Kila-Kila passed along
the line with lazy, cruel deliberateness, the men kept chanting aloud
without one tremor in their voices, "We are all your meat. Choose which
one you will take of us."
On a sudden, Tu-Kila-Kila turned sharply round, and, darting a rapid
glance toward a row he had already passed several minutes before, he
exclaimed, with an air of unexpected inspiration, "Tu-Kila-Kila has
chosen. He takes Maloa."
The man upon whose shoulder the god laid his heavy hand as he spoke stood
forth from the crowd without a moment's hesitation. If anger or fear was
in his heart at all, it could not be detected in his voice or his
features. He bowed his head with seeming satisfaction, and answered
humbly, "What Tu-Kila-Kila says must need be done. This is a great honor.
He is a mighty god. We poor men must obey him. We are proud to be taken
up and made one with divinity."
Tu-Kila-Kila raised in his hand a large stone axe of some polished green
material, closely resembling jade, which lay on a block by the door, and
tried its edge with his finger, in an abstracted manner. "Bind him!" he
said, quietly, turning round to his votaries. And the men, each glad to
have escaped his own fate, bound their comrade willingly with green ropes
of plantain fibre.
"Crown him with flowers!" Tu-Kila-Kila said; and a female attendant,
absolved from the terror of the bull-roarer by the god's command, brought
forward a great garland of crimson hibiscus, which she flung around the
victim's neck and shoulders.
"Lay his head on the sacred stone block of our fathers," Tu-Kila-Kila
went on, in an easy tone of command, waving his hand gracefully. And the
men, moving forward, laid their comrade, face downward, on a huge flat
block of polished greenstone, which lay like an altar in front of the
hut with the mouldering skeletons.
"It is well," Tu-Kila-Kila murmured once more, half aloud. "You have
given me the free-will offering. Now for the trespass! Where is the
woman who dared to approach too near the temple-home of the divine
Tu-Kila-Kila? Bring the criminal forward!"
The men divided, and made a lane down their middle. Then one of them, a
minister of the man-god's shrine, led up by the hand, all trembling and
shrinking with supernatural terror in every muscle, a well-formed young
girl of eighteen or twenty. Her naked bronze limbs were shapely and
lissome; but her eyes were swollen and red with tears, and her face
strongly distorted with awe for the man-god. When she stood at last
before Tu-Kila-Kila's dreaded face, she flung herself on the ground in an
agony of fear.
"Oh, mercy, great God!" she cried, in a feeble voice. "I have sinned, I
have sinned. Mercy, mercy!"
Tu-Kila-Kila smiled as before, a smile of imperial pride. No ray of pity
gleamed from those steel-gray eyes. "Does Tu-Kila-Kila show mercy?" he
asked, in a mocking voice. "Does he pardon his suppliants? Does he
forgive trespasses? Is he not a god, and must not his wrath be appeased?
She, being a woman, and not a wife sealed to Tu-Kila-Kila, has dared to
look from afar upon his sacred home. She has spied the mysteries.
Therefore she must die. My people, bind her."
In a second, without more ado, while the poor trembling girl writhed and
groaned in her agony before their eyes, that mob of wild savages, let
loose to torture and slay, fell upon her with hideous shouts, and bound
her, as they had bound their comrade before, with coarse native ropes of
twisted plantain fibre.
"Lay her head on the stone," Tu-Kila-Kila said, grimly. And his votaries
obeyed him.
"Now light the sacred fire to make our feast, before I slay the victims,"
the god said, in a gloating voice, running his finger again along the
edge of his huge hatchet.
As he spoke, two men, holding in their hands hollow bamboos with coals of
fire concealed within, which they kept aglow meanwhile by waving them up
and down rapidly in the air, laid these primitive matches to the base of
a great pyramidal pile of wood and palm-leaves, ready prepared beforehand
in the yard of the temple. In a second, the dry fuel, catching the sparks
instantly, blazed up to heaven with a wild outburst of flame. Great red
tongues of fire licked up the mouldering mass of leaves and twigs, and
caught at once at the trunks of palm and li wood within. A huge
conflagration reddened the sky at once like lightning. The effect was
magical. The glow transfigured the whole island for miles. It was, in
fact, the blaze that Felix Thurstan had noted and remarked upon as he
stood that evening on the silent deck of the Australasian.
Tu-Kila-Kila gazed at it with horrid childish glee. "A fine fire!" he
said, gayly. "A fire worthy of a god. It will serve me well. Tu-Kila-Kila
will have a good oven to roast his meal in."
Then he turned toward the sea, and held up his hand once more for
silence. As he did so, an answering light upon its surface attracted his
eye for a moment's space. It was a bright red light, mixed with white and
green ones; in point of fact, the Australasian was passing. Tu-Kila-Kila
pointed toward it solemnly with his plump, brown fore-finger. "See," he
said, drawing himself up and looking preternaturally wise; "your god is
great. I am sending some of this fire across the sea to where my sun has
set, to aid and reinforce it. That is to keep up the fire of the sun,
lest ever at any time it should fade and fail you. While Tu-Kila-Kila
lives the sun will burn bright. If Tu-Kila-Kila were to die it would be
night forever."
His votaries, following their god's fore-finger as it pointed, all turned
to look in the direction he indicated with blank surprise and
astonishment. Such a sight had never met their eyes before, for the
Australasian was the very first steamer to take the eastward route,
through the dangerous and tortuous Boupari Channel. So their awe and
surprise at the unwonted sight knew no bounds. Fire on the ocean!
Miraculous light on the waves! Their god must, indeed, be a mighty deity
if he could send flames like that careering over the sea! Surely the sun
was safe in the hands of a potentate who could thus visibly reinforce it
with red light, and white! In their astonishment and awe, they stood with
their long hair falling down over their foreheads, and their hands held
up to their eyes that they might gaze the farther across the dim, dark
ocean. The borrowed light of their bonfire was moving, slowly moving over
the watery sea. Fire and water were mixing and mingling on friendly
terms. Impossible! Incredible! Marvellous! Miraculous! They prostrated
themselves in their terror at Tu-Kila-Kila's feet. "Oh, great god," they
cried, in awe-struck tones, "your power is too vast! Spare us, spare us,
spare us!"
As for Tu-Kila-Kila himself, he was not astonished at all. Strange as it
sounds to us, he really believed in his heart what he said. Profoundly
convinced of his own godhead, and abjectly superstitious as any of his
own votaries, he absolutely accepted as a fact his own suggestion, that
the light he saw was the reflection of that his men had kindled. The
interpretation he had put upon it seemed to him a perfectly natural and
just one. His worshippers, indeed, mere men that they were, might be
terrified at the sight; but why should he, a god, take any special notice
of it?
He accepted his own superiority as implicitly as our European nobles and
rulers accept theirs. He had no doubts himself, and he considered those
who had little better than criminals.
By and by, a smaller light detached itself by slow degrees from the
greater ones. The others stood still, and halted in mid-ocean. The lesser
light made as if it would come in the direction of Boupari. In point of
fact, the gig had put out in search of Felix and Muriel.
Tu-Kila-Kila interpreted the facts at once, however, in his own way.
"See," he said, pointing with his plump forefinger once more, and
encouraging with his words his terrified followers, "I am sending back a
light again from the sun to my island. I am doing my work well. I am
taking care of my people. Fear not for your future. In the light is yet
another victim. A man and a woman will come to Boupari from the sun, to
make up for the man and woman whom we eat in our feast to-night. Give me
plenty of victims, and you will have plenty of yam. Make haste, then;
kill, eat; let us feast Tu-Kila-Kila! To-morrow the man and woman I have
sent from the sun will come ashore on the reef, and reach Boupari."
At the words, he stepped forward and raised that heavy tomahawk. With
one blow each he brained the two bound and defenceless victims on the
altar-stone of his fathers. The rest, a European hand shrinks from
revealing. The orgy was too horrible even for description.
And that was the land toward which, that moment, Felix Thurstan was
struggling, with all his might, to carry Muriel Ellis, from the myriad
clasping arms of a comparatively gentle and merciful ocean!