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Updated: September 4, 2025
It was she who broke the silence. "Can you find the way to the long-house where my father is?" she asked. Bulan, startled at the question, looked up from his reverie. The thing must be faced, then, sooner than he thought. How was he to tell her of his intention? It occurred to him to sound her first possibly she would make no objection to the plan. "You are anxious to return?" he asked.
For a moment the two stood in silence; Bulan tortured by thoughts of the bitter humiliation that he must suffer when the girl should learn his identity; Virginia wondering at the sad lines that had come into the young man's face, and at his silence. It was the girl who first spoke. "Who are you," she asked, "to whom I owe my safety?" The man hesitated.
"Leave the beasts alone, as I told you," replied Bulan. "Human beings hate us also," persisted Number Twelve. "Then let us live by ourselves," suggested Number Three. "We hate each other," retorted the pessimistic Number Twelve. "There is no place for us in the world, and no companionship. We are but soulless things." "Stop!" cried Bulan. "I am not a soulless thing.
These manangs, being as it were the priests of Dyak superstitions, and getting their living by pretended cures, interpretations of omens and the voices of birds, were of course the natural enemies of truth and enlightenment. Bulan, however, had tried to be an honest manang, and finding it impossible had turned with all his heart to Christianity.
"And you think that regardless of their physical appearance the fact that they were without souls would have been apparent?" asked Bulan. "I am sure of it," cried Virginia. "I would know the moment I set my eyes upon a creature without a soul."
"The commanders of this party were yclept poetically by their own people, as noms de guerre, the Sun and the Moon, i. e., Bulan, for moon, and Matari for sun.
His mind was crazed with dwelling upon the wonderful discovery he had made, and if he wronged them he contemplated a still more terrible wrong to be inflicted upon me, his daughter." "I do not understand," said Bulan. "It was his intention to give me in marriage to one of his soulless monsters to the one he called Number Thirteen.
Bulan saw that he would get into deep water if he attempted to explain too much, and, as is ever the way, discovered that one deception had led him into another; so he determined to forestall future embarrassing queries by concocting a story immediately to explain his presence and his knowledge. "I lived upon the island near your father's camp," he said. "I knew you all by sight."
So it was that as Bulan advanced he found the long-houses in his path deserted, and came to the larger river and turned up toward its head without meeting with resistance or even catching a glimpse of the brown-skinned people who watched him from their hiding places in the brush.
Missile after missile Bulan rained down upon the struggling, howling Dyaks, until, seized by panic, they turned and fled incontinently down into the depths of the canyon and back along the narrow trail they had come, and then superstitious fear completed the rout that the flying rocks had started, for one whispered to another that this was the terrible Bulan and that he had but lured them on into the hills that he might call forth all his demons and destroy them.
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