Next morning the day broke bright and calm, as if the tempest had been but an evil dream of the night, now past forever. The birds sang loud; the lizards came forth from their holes in the wall, and basked, green and gold, in the warm, dry sunshine. But though the sky overhead was blue and the air clear, as usually happen after these alarming tropical cyclones and rainstorms, the memorials of the great wind that had raged all night long among the forests of the island were neither few nor far between. Everywhere the ground was strewn with leaves and branches and huge stems of cocoa-palms. All nature was draggled. Many of the trees were stripped clean of their foliage, as completely as oaks in an English winter; on others, big strands of twisted fibres marked the scars and joints where mighty boughs had been torn away by main force; while, elsewhere, bare stumps alone remained to mark the former presence of some noble drac?na or some gigantic banyan. Bread-fruits and cocoanuts lay tossed in the wildest confusion on the ground; the banana and plantain-patches were beaten level with the soil or buried deep in the mud; many of the huts had given way entirely; abundant wreckage strewed every corner of the island. It was an awful sight. Muriel shuddered to herself to see how much the two that night had passed through.
What the outer fringing reef had suffered from the storm they hardly knew as yet; but from the door of the hut Felix could see for himself how even the calm waters of the inner lagoon had been lashed into wild fury by the fierce swoop of the tempest. Round the entire atoll the solid conglomerate coral floor was scooped under, broken up, chewed fine by the waves, or thrown in vast fragments on the beach of the island. By the eastern shore, in particular, just opposite their hut, Felix observed a regular wall of many feet in height, piled up by the waves like the familiar Chesil Beach near his old home in Dorsetshire. It was the shelter of that temporary barrier alone, no doubt, that had preserved their huts last night from the full fury of the gale, and that had allowed the natives to congregate in such numbers prone on their faces in the mud and rain, upon the unconsecrated ground outside their taboo-line.
But now not an islander was to be seen within ear-shot. All had gone away to look after their ruined huts or their beaten-down plantain-patches, leaving the cruel gods, who, as they thought, had wrought all the mischief out of pure wantonness, to repent at leisure the harm done during the night to their obedient votaries.
Felix was just about to cross the taboo-line and walk down to the shore to examine the barrier, when Toko, his Shadow, laying his hand on his shoulder with more genuine interest and affection than he had ever yet shown, exclaimed, with some horror, “Oh, no! Not that! Don’t dare to go outside! It would be very dangerous for you. If my people were to catch you on profane soil just now, there’s no saying what harm they might do to you.”
“Why so?” Felix exclaimed, in surprise. “Last night, surely, they were all prayers and promises and vows and entreaties.”
The young man nodded his head in acquiescence. “Ah, yes; last night,” he answered. “That was very well then. Vows were sore needed. The storm was raging, and you were within your taboo. How could they dare to touch you, a mighty god of the tempest, at the very moment when you were rending their banyan-trees and snapping their cocoanut stems with your mighty arms like so many little chicken-bones? Even Tu-Kila-Kila himself, I expect, the very high god, lay frightened in his temple, cowering by his tree, annoyed at your wrath; he sent Fire and Water among the worshippers, no doubt, to offer up vows and to appease your anger.”
Then Felix remembered, as his Shadow spoke, that, as a matter of fact, he had observed the men who usually wore the red and white feather cloaks among the motley crowd of grovelling natives who lay flat on their faces in the mud of the cleared space the night before, and prayed hard for mercy. Only they were not wearing their robes of office at the moment, in accordance with a well-known savage custom; they had come naked and in disgrace, as befits all suppliants. They had left behind them the insignia of their rank in their own shaken huts, and bowed down their bare backs to the rain and the lightning.
“Yes, I saw them among the other islanders,” Felix answered, half-smiling, but prudently remaining within the taboo-line, as his Shadow advised him.
Toko kept his hand still on his master’s shoulder. “Oh, king,” he said, beseechingly, and with great solemnity, “I am doing wrong to warn you; I am breaking a very great Taboo. I don’t know what harm may come to me for telling you. Perhaps Tu-Kila-Kila will burn me to ashes with one glance of his eyes. He may know this minute what I’m saying here alone to you.”
It is hard for a white man to meet scruples like this; but Felix was bold enough to answer outright: “Tu-Kila-Kila knows nothing of the sort, and can never find out. Take my word for it, Toko, nothing that you say to me will ever reach Tu-Kila-Kila.”
The Shadow looked at him doubtfully, and trembled as he spoke. “I like you, Korong,” he said, with a genuinely truthful ring in his voice. “You seem to me so kind and good—so different from other gods, who are very cruel. You never beat me. Nobody I ever served treated me as well or as kindly as you have done. And for your sake I will even dare to break taboo—if you’re quite, quite sure Tu-Kila-Kila will never discover it.”
“I’m quite sure,” Felix answered, with perfect confidence. “I know it for certain. I swear a great oath to it.”
“You swear by Tu-Kila-Kila himself?” the young savage asked, anxiously.
“I swear by Tu-Kila-Kila himself,” Felix replied at once. “I swear, without doubt. He can never know it.”
“That is a great Taboo,” the Shadow went on, meditatively, stroking Felix’s arm. “A very great Taboo indeed. A terrible medicine. And you are a god; I can trust you. Well, then, you see, the secret is this: you are Korong, but you are a stranger, and you don’t understand the ways of Boupari. If for three days after the end of this st............