“And where is he gone now?” Tu-Kila-Kila asked, without attempting to conceal the displeasure in his tone, for he more than half suspected the Frenchman of a sacrilegious and monstrous design of chaffing him.
The King of the Birds bowed low once more. “Tu-Kila-Kila’s glance is keener than my hawk’s,” he answered, with the accustomed Polynesian imagery. “He sees over the land with a glance, like my parrots, and over the sea with sharp sight, like my albatrosses. He knows where my brother, the King of the Rain, has gone. For me, who am the least among all the gods, I sit here on my perch and blink like a crow. I do not know these things. They are too high and too deep for me.”
Tu-Kila-Kila did not like the turn the conversation was taking. Before his own attendants such hints, indeed, were almost dangerous. Once let the savage begin to doubt, and the Moral Order goes with a crash immediately. Besides, he must know what these white men had been talking about. “Fire and Water,” he said in a loud voice, turning round to his two chief satellites, “go far down the path, and beat the tom-toms. Fence off with flood and flame the airy height where the King of the Birds lives; fence it off from all profane intrusion. I wish to confer in secret with this god, my brother. When we gods talk together, it is not well that others should hear our converse. Make a great Taboo. I, Tu-Kila-Kila, myself have said it.”
Fire and Water, bowing low, backed down the path, beating tom-toms as they went, and left the savage and the Frenchman alone together.
As soon as they were gone, Tu-Kila-Kila laid aside his umbrella with a positive sigh of relief. Now his fellow-countrymen were well out of the way, his manner altered in a trice, as if by magic. Barbarian as he was, he was quite astute enough to guess that Europeans cared nothing in their hearts for all his mumbo-jumbo. He believed in it himself, but they did not, and their very unbelief made him respect and fear them.
“Now that we two are alone,” he said, glancing carelessly around him, “we two who are gods, and know the world well—we two who see everything in heaven or earth—there is no need for concealment—we may talk as plainly as we will with one another. Come, tell me the truth! The new white man has seen you?”
“He has seen me, yes, certainly,” the Frenchman admitted, taking a keen look deep into the savage’s cunning eyes.
“Does he speak your language—the language of birds?” Tu-Kila-Kila asked once more, with insinuating cunning. “I have heard that the sailing gods are of many languages. Are you and he of one speech or two? Aliens, or countrymen?”
“He speaks my language as he speaks Polynesian,” the Frenchman replied, keeping his eye firmly fixed on his doubtful guest, “but it is not his own. He has a tongue apart—the tongue of an island not far from my country, which we call England.”
Tu-Kila-Kila drew nearer, and dropped his voice to a confidential whisper. “Has he seen the Soul of all dead parrots?” he asked, with keen interest in his voice. “The parrot that knows Tu-Kila-Kila’s secret? That one over there—the old, the very sacred one?”