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Updated: June 4, 2025
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."
The King of Fire and the King of Water, tried guardians of the etiquette of Tu-Kila-Kila's court, made answer at once with one accord, "It is so, O King of the Rain. Your lips have said it. Tu-Kila-Kila speaks the solemn truth. He is a very great god. Such is the custom of Boupari." Tu-Kila-Kila laughed his triumph in harsh, savage outbursts. But Felix drew back for a second, irresolute.
When I was young, our people killed three sailing gods who came ashore in a small canoe, built of thin split logs; and within a month an awful earthquake devastated Boupari, and fire burst forth from a mouth in the ground, and the people knew that the spirits of the sailing gods were very angry. Wait, therefore, till Tu-Kila-Kila himself comes, and then ask of him, and of Fire and Water.
And what will then become of the island of Boupari? Will it not sink in the waves of the sea and disappear? Will not the sun in heaven grow dark, and the moon cease to shed its benign light on the earth, when Tu-Kila-Kila the Great returns at last to his own far country?" "That lot'll do for 'em, I expect," the captain said cheerily, with a confident smile. "Now forward all, boys.
"If Boupari man catch me," she said, in her simple, graphic, Polynesian way, "Boupari man kill me, and lay me in leaves, and cook me very nice, and make great feast of me, like him do with Jani." From that untimely end both Felix and Muriel promised faithfully, as far as in them lay, to protect her.
Anger not the gods. Don't ruin Boupari. If the Taboo is not indeed broken, then how dare we break it? They are gods. Fear their vengeance. They are, indeed, terrible. See what happened to us when they merely ate of the storm-apple! What might not happen if we were to break taboo without due cause and kill them?" One old, gray-bearded warrior, in particular, held his countrymen back.
He stood close by the parrot with itching fingers. "It is very, very old," he went on to himself, musingly. "It can't live long. And then none but Boupari men will know the secret." As he spoke he darted a strange glance of hatred toward the unconscious bird, the innocent repository, as he firmly believed, of the secret that doomed him.
In the first place, the Boupari dialect, though agreeing in all essentials with the Polynesian of Fiji, nevertheless contained a great many words and colloquial expressions unknown to the Fijians; this being particularly the case, as Felix soon remarked, in the whole vocabulary of religious rites and ceremonies.
"If it be, indeed, the custom of Boupari," he answered back, with pale and trembling lips, "and if I, one man, am powerless to prevent it, I will give your message, myself, to the Queen of the Clouds, and you may send, as you say, your wedding decorations. But come what will mark this you shall not see her yourself to-day. You shall not speak to her.
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.
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