The Great Taboo | Page 7

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