Since the night when he had cried to her in his sleep for help, everything else had ceased to matter, and her light-thinking mind had become the wrestling-ground of two opposing forces.
The impulse to destroy Dick came at times in great waves up from the darkest recesses of her mind, like the rollers from the storm that had destroyed the Ranatonga. Yet the impulse always just failed of effect. The terrible desire to destroy, and destroy with her own hand, had less relationship to hatred than to irritation. Dick vexed her soul, or the something dark that lay in her soul, and time and again she would almost stretch out her hand towards the fish spear or the knife that, once clasped, would have been driven into his heart.
Taminan cried to her, “Seize it and destroy him!” and then the voice of taminan would turn into the voice of Dick: “Hai, amonai, Katafa! Help!” and her hand would lose its power.
One day, when Dick was off hunting for turtle on the reef, the crisis came and the evil thing in her heart triumphed.
The fear of Nanawa and danger to herself vanished and, rising up from where she had been sitting beside the house, she put fresh fuel on the cooking fire they had used for the midday meal and which had not been put out.
Then, swift as Atalanta, she crossed the sward, dived amongst the leaves and, fetching the skull from where she had hidden it, close to her shack, returned with it, placed it on the ground before the fire, and, piling on more fuel, stood like a beautiful priestess, her eyes on the skull and her lips moving, repeating the old formula. “Come now, Nanawa, powerful to kill or save, come now and fulfil the wish of my heart—the wish of my heart—the wish of my heart—”
The formula ran from her lips, a string of meaningless words. The something that had checked her hand was checking now her thinking power. She could not put into thought the wish to destroy; just as yesterday, she could not put the will into action.
Nanawa, that figment of a Kanaka’s fancy, was powerless against a real god more terrible and cruel than any deity of man’s imagination—a god that held Katafa now in his grip.
She put the fire out and hid the skull in the leaves. Then casting herself down in the shadow of the trees, she lay balked, demagnetised, impotent, looking at the lagoon water, the far-off reefs and the sky beyond.
Above the house two birds were building, two blue parua birds, exquisite in colour and form, fearless of man, and making their house again in the same position they had chosen for numberless years.