The Red One | Page 8

For which Bassett was thankful.
The taboo might have been water.
For himself, he fabricated a special taboo. Only could he marry, he explained, when the
Southern Cross rode highest in the sky. Knowing his astronomy, he thus gained a
reprieve of nearly nine months; and he was confident that within that time he would
either be dead or escaped to the coast with full knowledge of the Red One and of the
source of the Red One's wonderful voice. At first he had fancied the Red One to be some
colossal statue, like Memnon, rendered vocal under certain temperature conditions of
sunlight. But when, after a war raid, a batch of prisoners was brought in and the sacrifice
made at night, in the midst of rain, when the sun could play no part, the Red One had
been more vocal than usual, Bassett discarded that hypothesis.
In company with Balatta, sometimes with men and parties of women, the freedom of the
jungle was his for three quadrants of the compass. But the fourth quadrant, which
contained the Red One's abiding place, was taboo. He made more thorough love to
Balatta-- also saw to it that she scrubbed herself more frequently. Eternal female she was,
capable of any treason for the sake of love. And, though the sight of her was provocative
of nausea and the contact of her provocative of despair, although he could not escape her
awfulness in his dream-haunted nightmares of her, he nevertheless was aware of the
cosmic verity of sex that animated her and that made her own life of less value than the
happiness of her lover with whom she hoped to mate. Juliet or Balatta? Where was the
intrinsic difference? The soft and tender product of ultra- civilization, or her bestial
prototype of a hundred thousand years before her?--there was no difference.
Bassett was a scientist first, a humanist afterward. In the jungle-heart of Guadalcanal he
put the affair to the test, as in the laboratory he would have put to the test any chemical
reaction. He increased his feigned ardour for the bushwoman, at the same time increasing
the imperiousness of his will of desire over her to be led to look upon the Red One face to
face. It was the old story, he recognized, that the woman must pay, and it occurred when
the two of them, one day, were catching the unclassified and unnamed little black fish, an
inch long, half-eel and half-scaled, rotund with salmon-golden roe, that frequented the
fresh water, and that were esteemed, raw and whole, fresh or putrid, a perfect delicacy.
Prone in the muck of the decaying jungle-floor, Balatta threw herself, clutching his
ankles with her hands kissing his feet and making slubbery noises that chilled his
backbone up and down again. She begged him to kill her rather than exact this ultimate

love- payment. She told him of the penalty of breaking the taboo of the Red One--a week
of torture, living, the details of which she yammered out from her face in the mire until
he realized that he was yet a tyro in knowledge of the frightfulness the human was
capable of wreaking on the human.
Yet did Bassett insist on having his man's will satisfied, at the woman's risk, that he
might solve the mystery of the Red One's singing, though she should die long and
horribly and screaming. And Balatta, being mere woman, yielded. She led him into the
forbidden quadrant. An abrupt mountain, shouldering in from the north to meet a similar
intrusion from the south, tormented the stream in which they had fished into a deep and
gloomy gorge. After a mile along the gorge, the way plunged sharply upward until they
crossed a saddle of raw limestone which attracted his geologist's eye. Still climbing,
although he paused often from sheer physical weakness, they scaled forest-clad heights
until they emerged on a naked mesa or tableland. Bassett recognized the stuff of its
composition as black volcanic sand, and knew that a pocket magnet could have captured
a full load of the sharply angular grains he trod upon.
And then holding Balatta by the hand and leading her onward, he came to it--a
tremendous pit, obviously artificial, in the heart of the plateau. Old history, the South
Seas Sailing Directions, scores of remembered data and connotations swift and furious,
surged through his brain. It was Mendana who had discovered the islands and named
them Solomon's, believing that he had found that monarch's fabled mines. They had
laughed at the old navigator's child-like credulity; and yet here stood himself, Bassett, on
the rim of an excavation for all the world like the diamond pits of South Africa.
But no diamond this that he gazed down upon. Rather was it a