Being once more assured that Waylao had been sent by the artful old Mrs Ranjo, off he tottered again.
Suddenly he paused and said: “You never tells white peoples that Rimbo got great tiki [idol] if I take you to it?”
“Oh, priest, I promise to never say one word to a living soul,” said Waylao earnestly, with a look in her eyes that convinced the old tattooed witchman that she had no thought of betraying him to the missionaries.
In a moment he stooped and divided the thickets of dwarf bamboos and squeezed through a kind of stockade. Waylao followed, her heart thumping with the mystery and wonder of it all.
As they both emerged into the cleared space of that arena of idol worship, the girl looked about with awestruck eyes. There it stood, six feet ten inches in height, broad-shouldered, and hideous enough to express the hopes of dead and living men, its gigantic, one-toothed wooden mouth agape with laughter. It was a wonderful sight. The mystery of life and death seemed to hang about that mighty cathedral of the ages, a cathedral supported by colonnades of giant bread-fruit trees towering majestically to the great crystal dome of eternity. As Rimbo prostrated himself before that graven deity, Waylao stood in the hush that pervaded the dim light. She looked as though she was petrified with fright. She might have been the emblematical figure of some frightened angel in mortal realms. But her eyes were alive with terror, and no insensate figure ever had such a glorious crown of hair falling over the brow of so fair a face.
Night was fast approaching. A little wind crept down those mighty heathen halls, stirring, uplifting the wide carpet pattern of exotic flowers. The vaulted dome of eternity was faintly darkened, ready to receive the first etherealised impression of the stars.
It was wonderful how much of the wild mystery of those hushed temple halls was visible in the dim, magical light of the dying day. From the roof tropical festoons of Nature’s wonderful handiwork hung in the perfect stillness of brooding silence. The bent, gnarled columns of that solemn edifice looked like massive, twisted lava-stone and broken marble, as though some cataclysm of volcanic passion had passed that way, leaving mighty architectural ruins that had mysteriously burst into leaf. A few small images were half hidden in the green bowers of those elevated branches. In the dim light it seemed as though small goddesses, emblematical figures, holding in their unseen hands twining red and blue vine-flowers, had hastily climbed those gnarled columns and clung there, midway up, staring down in sculptured silence.
Far away through the shoreward columns of those primeval halls glimmered God’s old mythological stained-glass window—the dying day—the emblazoned hopes, the legendary beauty and faith of paganistic dreams, past and future, ebbing like a tide. Nothing in Nature’s transcendent art could outvie the beauty of those glimmering, ineffable, faint, greenish and vermilion dyes, that like unto Scriptural daubs blushed between miles of leaden stained lines of that remote window—sunset on the Western Seas.
Only a faint tinge of the day’s death-blood struck the dim light of that heathen temple. With staring, awestruck eyes, Waylao crept up those mossy aisles and knelt before that altar with her hands lifted in appeal to that hideous effigy. Its enormous, bulging glass eyes seemed to stare sidelong at the western glory, ever watching, ever listening with alert, unwearied, deaf wooden ears. Waylao looked like some cursed, pleading fallen angel at the feet of Hate, as she knelt there, the faded flowers in her bronzed hair, the Islamic carpet bag’s pink and blue ribbon fluttering at her throat, as the incense from decaying tropical flowers came creeping through the moistened glooms. Not the faintest semblance of her dark lineage was visible in that hushed, dim light as she lifted her face. She appeared some beautiful white girl, it might have been Pauline herself, kneeling there in heathen prayer at those monstrous wooden feet. While the half-demented girl repeated the heathenish phrases that Rimbo uttered as he stood by the idol in the shadows, it suddenly seemed that those awful glass eyes moved! It seemed that they stared half in wonder on this new, beautiful white worshipper. Suddenly out of the huge, grinning, one-black-toothed mouth flew a disturbed little bird! It gave a tiny wail: “Wailo, tu-loo! Wailo, to-loo!” as it fluttered away, low down, into the forest shadows.
Full of faith, the superstitious girl was chanting some song of Rimbo’s wretched belief when, lo! that monstrous, wooden-lipped, tongueless mouth spoke! A hollow, windy voice said: