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Updated: June 7, 2025
The captain, unhesitatingly, overstepped the white taboo-line. Next instant, Felix and Muriel were grasping his hand hard, and M. Peyron was bowing a polite Parisian reception. Forthwith, the sailors crowded round them in a hollow square. Muriel and Felix, half faint with relief from their long and anxious suspense, staggered slowly down the seaward path between them.
He hardly knew; but he had no time to debate the abstract question. Bursting into their midst, he seized the child with a rush in his circling arms, and tried to hurry back with it within the protecting taboo-line. Quick as lightning he was surrounded and almost cut down by a furious and frantic mob of half-naked savages. "Kill him! Tear him to pieces!" they cried in their rage.
"Yes, I saw them among the other islanders," Felix answered, half-smiling, but prudently remaining within the taboo-line, as his Shadow advised him. Toko kept his hand still on his master's shoulder. "Oh, king," he said, beseechingly, and with great solemnity, "I am doing wrong to warn you; I am breaking a very great Taboo. I don't know what harm may come to me for telling you.
No more of words between us two. It is as between gods. The fire! the fire!" Tu-Kila-Kila replaced his mask. They proceeded from the hut to the open space within the taboo-line. The people still lay all flat on their faces. "Fire and Water," Tu-Kila-Kila said, in a commanding tone, "come forward and screen me!"
Holding the child in one arm, and striking wildly out with his knife with the other, he tried to hack his way back by main force to the shelter of the taboo-line in frantic lunges. The distance was but a few feet, but the savages pressed round him, half frightened still, yet gnashing their teeth and distorting their faces with anger. "He has broken the Taboo," they cried in vehement tones.
"Half the warriors to the shore to repel the enemy; half to watch round the taboo-line, lest the Korongs escape us! Let Breathless Fear, our war-god, go before the face of our troops, invisible!"
Felix rose from his seat with very little ceremony, indeed, as the great god crossed the white taboo-line of his precincts, followed only beyond the limit by Fire and Water. Tu-Kila-Kila was in his most insolent vein. He glanced around with a horrid light of triumph dancing visibly in his eyes. It was clear he had come, intent upon some grand theatrical coup.
It was the shelter of that temporary barrier alone, no doubt, that had preserved their huts last night from the full fury of the gale, and that had allowed the natives to congregate in such numbers prone on their faces in the mud and rain, upon the unconsecrated ground outside their taboo-line. But now not an islander was to be seen within ear-shot.
If for three days after the end of this storm, which Tu-Kila-Kila has sent Fire and Water to pray and vow against, you or the Queen of the Clouds show yourselves outside your own taboo-line why, then, the people are clear of sin; whoever takes you may rend you alive; they will tear you limb from limb and cut you into pieces." "Why so?" Felix asked, aghast at this discovery.
The captain and sailors had no idea what their words meant. But just then, from the midst of the circle, an English voice cried out in haste, "Don't fire! Do nothing rash! We're safe. Don't be frightened. The natives are disposed to parley and palaver. Take care how you act. They're terribly afraid of you." Just outside the taboo-line the captain halted.
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