The Great Taboo | Page 9

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!


CHAPTER III.
LAND; BUT WHAT LAND?

As the last glimmering lights of the Australasian died away to seaward,
Felix Thurstan knew in his despair there was nothing for it now but to
strike out boldly, if he could, for the shore of the island.
By this time the breakers had subsided greatly. Not, indeed, that the sea
itself was really going down. On the contrary, a brisk wind was rising
sharper from the east, and the waves on the open Pacific were growing
each moment higher and loppier. But the huge mountain of water that
washed Muriel Ellis overboard was not a regular ordinary wave; it was
that far more powerful and dangerous mass, a shoal-water breaker. The
Australasian had passed at that instant over a submerged coral-bar,
quite deep enough, indeed, to let her cross its top without the slightest
danger of grazing, but still raised so high toward the surface as to
produce a considerable constant ground-swell, which broke in windy
weather into huge sheets of surf, like the one that had just struck and
washed over the Australasian, carrying Muriel with it. The very same
cause that produced the breakers, however, bore Felix on their summit
rapidly landward; and once he had got well beyond the region of the
bar that begot them, he found himself soon, to his intense relief, in
comparatively calm shoal water.
Muriel Ellis, for her part, was faint with terror and with the buffeting of
the waves; but she still floated by his side, upheld by the life-belts. He
had been able, by immense efforts, to keep unseparated from her amid
the rending surf of the breakers. Now that they found themselves in
easier waters for a while, Felix began to strike out vigorously through
the darkness for the shore. Holding up his companion with one hand,
and swimming with all his might in the direction where a vague white
line of surf, lit up by the red glare-of some fire far inland, made him
suspect the nearest land to lie, he almost thought he had succeeded at
last, after a long hour of struggle, in feeling his feet, after all, on a firm
coral bottom.
At the very moment he did so, and touched the ground underneath,
another great wave, curling resistlessly behind him, caught him up on
its crest, whirled him heavenward like a cork, and then dashed him
down once more, a passive burden, on some soft and yielding

substance, which he conjectured at once to be a beach of finely
powdered coral fragments. As he touched this beach for an instant, the
undertow of that vast dashing breaker sucked him back with its ebb
again, a helpless, breathless creature; and then the succeeding wave
rolled him over like a ball, upon the beach as before, in quick
succession. Four times the back-current sucked him under with its wild
pull in the self-same way, and four times the return wave flung him up
upon the beach again like a fragment of sea-weed. With frantic efforts
Felix tried at first to cling still to Muriel--to save her from the
irresistible force of that roaring surf--to snatch her from the open jaws
of death by sheer struggling dint of thews and muscle. He might as well
have tried to stem Niagara. The great waves, curling irresistibly in huge
curves landward, caught either of them up by turns on their arched
summits, and twisted them about remorselessly, raising them now aloft
on their foaming crest, beating them back now prone in their hollow
trough, and flinging them fiercely at last with pitiless energy against the
soft beach of coral. If the beach had been hard, they must infallibly
have been ground to powder or beaten to jelly by the colossal force of
those gigantic blows. Fortunately it was yielding, smooth, and clay-like,
and received them almost as a layer of moist plaster of Paris might
have