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Updated: June 14, 2025
As they went, the cry rose louder and louder than before, "Taboo! Taboo!" People who met them fell on their faces at once, as the chief cried out in a loud tone, "The King of the Rain! The Queen of the Clouds! Korong! Korong! They are coming! They are coming!" At last they reached a second cleared space, standing in a large garden of manilla, loquat, poncians, and hibiscus-trees.
Tu-Kila-Kila listened with lively interest, then he said, very decisively, with great bravado, "It was I who made the big wave wash your sister overboard. I sent it to your ship. I wanted a Korong just now in Boupari. It was I who brought you." "You are mistaken," Felix said, simply, not thinking it worth while to contradict him further. "It was a purely natural accident."
And for some minutes more she continued to make much of him in the fulsome strain of Polynesian flattery. At last the kava had clearly got into Tu-Kila-Kila's head. Then Ula bent forward once more and again attacked him. "Now I know you will tell me," she said, coaxingly, "why you make them Korong. As long as I live, I will never speak or hint of it to anybody anywhere.
And yet suppose this hateful new-comer, the King of the Rain, whom he had himself made Korong on purpose to get rid of him the more easily, and so had elevated into his own worst potential enemy suppose this new-comer, the King of the Rain, were by chance to speak that other dialect of the bird-language, which the King of the Birds himself knew not, but which the parrot had learned from his old master, the ancient Tu-Kila-Kila of other days, and in which the bird still recited the secret of the sacred tree and the Death of the Great God ah, then he might still have to fight hard for his divinity.
"It is even as he said," they cried. "These gods are his ministers! The white-faced Korong is a very great deity! He is indeed the true Tu-Kila-Kila. These gods have come for him. They are very mighty. Thunder and lightning and waterspouts are theirs. The waves do as they bid. The sea obeys them. They are here to take away our Tu-Kila-Kila from our midst.
I dispose the course of nature in heaven and earth. If I look at a cocoa-nut tree, it dies; if I glance at a bread-fruit, it withers away. We will see before long whether or not you are afraid of me. Meanwhile, O Korong, I have come to claim my dues at your hands. Prepare for your fate. To-morrow the Queen of the Clouds must be sealed my bride. Fetch her out, that I may speak with her.
Toko stood trembling on the far side; none might pass that mystic line unbidden and live, save the Korong alone who could succeed in breaking off the bough "with yellow leaves, resembling a mistletoe," of which Methuselah, the parrot, had told Felix and Muriel, and so earn the right to fight for his life with the redoubted and redoubtable Tu-Kila-Kila.
The gray-headed old chief, who had accompanied his fellows to the shore, spoke out in Polynesian. "Do not resist them," he said, "my people. If you do, you will be blasted by their lightning like a bare bamboo in a mighty cyclone. They carry thunder in their hands. They are mighty, mighty gods. The white-faced Korong spoke no more than the truth. Let them do as they will with us.
The poor girl, trembling in every limb, shook her head also in the same unintentional fashion. The chief regarded her with still more complacent eyes. "It is well," he observed once more to his companions, smiling. "She, too, gives the sign of acceptance. Korong! Korong! Heaven is well pleased with both. See how her body trembles!"
When once a Korong had crossed that fatal line, unbidden and unwelcomed by Tu-Kila-Kila, he came as Tu-Kila-Kila's foe and would-be successor; the duty of every guardian of the temple was then to see fair play between the god that was and the god that might be the Tu-Kila-Kila of the hour and the Tu-Kila-Kila who might possibly supplant him.
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