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Updated: June 14, 2025
Does he not need divine silence and slumber?" Tu-Kila-Kila pouted. "I could sleep more soundly," he said, with a snort, "if I knew what my enemy, the Korong, is doing. I have set my Eyes to watch him, yet I do not feel secure. They are not to be trusted. I shall be happier far when I have killed and eaten him." He passed his hand across his bosom with a reflective air.
Let us kill and eat the white-faced stranger at once, by wager of battle; and let whosoever fights and overcomes him receive his honors, and take to wife the fair woman, the Queen of the Clouds, the sun-faced Korong, whom he brought from the sun with him." "But who will then be Tu-Kila-Kila?" Felix asked, turning round upon him quickly.
If the great god says the Taboo holds good, we will not hurt or offend the strangers. But if the great god says the Taboo is broken, and we are all without sin then, Korong! Korong! we will kill them! We will eat them!" As the two parties thus stood glaring at one another, across that narrow imaginary wall, another cry went up to heaven at the distant sound of a peculiar tom-tom.
The girl nodded an easy assent. "Yes, while your time last," she answered, laying a small bundle of palm-leaves at Muriel's back by way of a cushion. "For now you Korong. By and by, Korong pass to somebody else. This year, you Korong. So people worship you." But nothing that Muriel could say would induce the girl further to explain her meaning. She shook her head and looked very wise.
"He is very much afraid of you. You are Korong. You may any day supplant him. He would like to get rid of you, if he could see his way. But till your time comes he dare not touch you." "When will my time come?" Felix asked, with that dim apprehension of some horrible end coming over him yet again in all its vague weirdness. The Shadow shook his head.
"Monsieur," the older arrival answered, with a reflective air, "there comes in the mystery. If we could solve that, we could find out also the way of escape for you. For there is a way of escape for every Korong: I know it well; I gather it from all the natives say; it is a part of their mysteries; but what it may be, I have hitherto, in spite of all my efforts, failed to discover.
"Monsieur," the Frenchman answered, "I hardly know whether I do right or not to say the truth to you. Each Korong is a god for one season only; when the year renews itself, as the savages believe, by a change of season, then a new Korong must be chosen by Heaven to fill the place of the old ones who are to be sacrificed. This they do in order that the seasons may be ever fresh and vigorous.
And so the natives make much of the parrot to the present day, saying he is greater than any, save a Korong or a god, for he is the Soul of a dead race, summing it up in himself, and he knows the secret of the Death of Tu-Kila-Kila." "But you can't tell me what language he speaks?" Felix asked with a despairing gesture.
"It is a great pleasure to us to find we are not really alone on this barbarous island. But you were going to explain to me, I believe, the exact nature of this peril in which we both stand the precise distinction between Korong and Tula?"
Then he turned to his attendants. "The spirit shakes his head," he said, with a deeply convinced air. "All is well. Heaven has chosen him. Korong! Korong! He is accepted for his purpose. It is well! It is well! Let us try the other one." He raised the calabash once more, and poured a few drops in like manner on Muriel's dark hair.
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