At last she told the officer to call a halt, and on no account to make the slightest noise or advance his men until he should see a blue light burning about half a mile ahead. Then she vanished into the darkness, lithe and noiseless as a lizard, and silence, dead and oppressive, settled down upon the bush.
* * * * *
Lieutenant Tempest was a man and a British sailor, and he was not afraid of death. But he thought there might be pleasanter ways of dying than that which actually stared him in the face.
Memory plays strange tricks when the dark is closing down about her doors. Lying there on the damp earth, bound hand and foot to a pole, with the hideous howls of the cannibal dancers in his ears and the glare of the cooking-pits in his eyes. Tempest could think of nothing but a fragment of verse out of a half-forgotten poem read somewhere long ago:
"It isn't the fact that you're dead that counts.
But only—how did you die?"
How was he dying? Not as an English officer might gladly die in the cause of his country and in loyal obedience to orders. Not even as a man, with a sword in his hand, facing the foe. He was dying an unfaithful servant, false to his trust, and suffering because of that falseness, as a slaughtered brute struck down with a club like a bullock, and afterwards....
The red remains of the luckless Aki, jointed and piled in a ghastly heap, told the rest.
Tempest did not look at that ugly pile any more than he could help. He wanted all the nerve he could muster for he was haunted by a deadly fear that he might cry out for mercy when it came to the last, and he did not want to add cowardice to the tale of his many shortcomings. If he could have died here as a prisoner of war—as a captured scout, a fighting enemy, taken in a skirmish—the death, hideous as it was, would have been honourable, and his pride of country would have upheld him. But it seemed as if his courage had nothing to stand on now, and he was almost—almost, but, thank God! not quite—afraid.
The Malekulans had been dancing for full two hours, ever since they had brought him to the valley and flung him down upon the ground. In the middle of the open village square were three huge idols, carved out of entire tree-trunks set upright. They had black, empty sockets for eyes; their mouths were curved upwards into a ghastly wrinkled grin, and their tongues hung mockingly out. On the head of each was perched a huge black wooden bird, with beak bent down and gloomy wings outspread—the very spirit of Nightmare herself. Round and round these devilish things, in the red glow of the fires, danced the cannibals ceaselessly and untiringly, fleeing with heads down and outspread hands, wheeling and turning, circling with measured steps; and all the time the huge hollow idols, beaten with heavy clubs "to make the spirits speak," thundered death and doom. It was plainly a religious ceremony which must be fully enacted down to the last detail; but Tempest thought, as clearly as he could think in such a place and at such a time, that it could not last much longer.
"A fellow ought to say his prayers," he thought; but the thunder of the drums and the wild, shrieking song of the dancers bewildered him, and his swollen wrists and ankles hurt him so much as almost to confuse his mind.... What could he say? Only one prayer remained clear in the turmoil of his brain—just the old, old prayer that he had prayed at his mother's knee. Well, it would serve—and up above he hoped they'd understand how sorry he was ... for lots of things....