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His worshippers have to lay their account with this sad necessity and to meet it as best they can. The danger is a formidable one; for if the course of nature is dependent on the man-god's life, what catastrophes may not be expected from the gradual enfeeblement of his powers and their final extinction in death? There is only one way of averting these dangers.
Ula pooh-poohed the mighty man-god's fears. "No, no," she cried, with confidence; "he can never have told them. If he had, would not your Eyes that watch ever for all that happens on heaven or earth, have straightway reported it to you? The parrot died without yielding up the tale. Were it otherwise, Toko, who loves and worships you, would surely have told me."
When they were outside again she put on her sunglasses so as to counter these feelings of "tenderness" which could misdirect her down a long and dark labyrinth of tight one-way back-alley actions leading further into her own obscurity and to prostate positions at a man-god's feet.
They were the skeletons of the victims Tu-Kila-Kila, their prince, had slain and eaten; they were the trophies of the cannibal man-god's hateful prowess. Tu-Kila-Kila raised his right hand erect and spoke again. "I am a great god," he said, slowly. "I am very powerful. I make the sun to shine, and the yams to grow. I am the spirit of plants.
It was only by slow degrees that this system of espionage grew clear to the strangers; but as soon as they had learned its reality and ubiquity, they felt at once how undesirable it would be for them to excite the terrible man-god's jealousy and suspicion by being observed too often in close personal intercourse with their fellow-exile and victim, the Frenchman.
Blood was dropping on the ground from the man-god's finger. He hardly knew what strange evil this omen of harm might portend for the world. The Soul of all dead parrots had carried out the curse, and had drawn red drops from the sacred veins of Tu-Kila-Kila. One must be a savage one's self, and superstitious at that, fully to understand the awful significance of this deadly occurrence.
Where is the woman who dared to approach too near the temple-home of the divine Tu-Kila-Kila? Bring the criminal forward!" The men divided, and made a lane down their middle. Then one of them, a minister of the man-god's shrine, led up by the hand, all trembling and shrinking with supernatural terror in every muscle, a well-formed young girl of eighteen or twenty.
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