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The captain and Mr King were then led to another division of the morai, where, in a sunk space, three or four feet deep, they took their seats between two wooden idols, Koah holding up one of the captain's arms, and King the other. While here another procession arrived, with a baked hog and vegetables. Cook put an end to the ceremony as soon as he could, and returned on board.
Chief among the visitors to the ship was Koah, a little, old, emaciated, shifty-eyed priest with a wry neck and a scaly, leprous skin, who at once led the small boats ashore, driving the throngs back with a magic wand and drawing a mystic circle with his wizard stick round a piece of ground near the Morai, or burying-place, where the white men could erect their tents beside the cocoanut groves.
He was met by the little leprous priest Koah, swimming halfway out. Though tears of sorrow were in Koah's treacherous red-rimmed eyes as he begged that Clerke and King might come ashore to parley. King judged it prudent to hold tightly on the priest's spear handle while the two embraced. Night after night for a week, the conch-shells blew their challenge of defiance to the white men.
We were here met by a tall young man with a long beard, who presented Captain Cook to the images, and after chanting a kind of hymn, in which he was joined by Koah, they led us to that end of the Morai where the five poles were fixed.
Soon after Koah came off with a pig, but was not admitted to either ship; he then went off to the waterers, who sent him away. So he amused himself by throwing stones at a small party of sailors on the Morai, and drew a couple of shots from them, but escaped unhurt.
Soon after the Resolution had gotten into her station, Pareea and Kaneena brought on board a third chief, named Koah, who was represented as being a priest, and as having, in his early youth, been a distinguished warrior. In the evening, Captain Cook attended by Mr. Bayley and Mr. King, accompanied Koah on shore.
The on admire ici of the well-bound Itineraire, the elaborate descriptions of Vasi, and the Ecco Signore of your obliging cicerone, produce the same effect upon the mind, which the mistaken attentions of Koah, the South Sea priest, did on the stomach of Captain Cook.
In answer to King's demand some of the chiefs promised that the bodies should be delivered the next day, and Koah, swimming off to one of the boats, explained that they could not be given up at once as they had already been taken some distance up country.
The two savages were former friends of Cook's and warned the whites not to be allured on land, nor to trust Koah, the leper priest, on the ships. Again the conch-shells blew their challenge all night through the darkness. Again the war fires danced; but next morning the guns of the Discovery were trained on Koah, when he tried to come on board.
King says that Parea was a particularly cleanly person, so he did not so much mind this feeding, but Cook, remembering how Koah had handled the putrid hog, was unable to swallow a mouthful, "and his reluctance, as may be supposed, was not diminished, when the old man, according to his own mode of civility, had chewed it for him."
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