The Garden of God

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

Here, high above the world as the birds, they could see a thousand square leagues of the blue Pacific from the limitless north to the far pale sky trace that was Karolin, the world of the sea-gulls ever clanging and clanging about the reef, the lagoon, and, rising up towards them from the lagoon, the trees. Not a trunk, not a stem, nothing but the glory of the foliage; the dancing, feathery palm fronds, the still dark spread of the bread-fruits, the piercing green of the new-leaved artus, and here and there lords of the forest and the groves, the matamatas striking boldly to the sky.

Over all, the breeze dancing light-footed as a faun, and coloured birds like blossoms blown from the trees.

Some drinking nuts had been blown right from the mid-zone of trees up to the sward; he had fetched them and they had drunk the contents. Neither of them had eaten since the day before, but Dick, who had not the sure instinct for safety that possessed Katafa, had no idea of returning to the house till he was sure that the enemy was gone. He wanted to explore and see. The wrecked canoe filled his mind with a thrill. From it came a waft of the battle of the night before, bringing up the vision of Ma, the man he had speared like a fish, and with the recollection his nostrils broadened as the sound of pursuit came again to his ears, and the feel of the branches he had dashed aside in his escape; he tripped again on the sward, and again he faced Laminai and death; again he thrust the spear into the gaping mouth.

He almost forgot Katafa; love and passion were nothing for a moment as the blaze of anger broke up again in his mind—the fury of the man who has been attacked and who has killed his attacker, the rage of the defenceless man who, being unarmed, has had to run.

Telling Katafa not to move from the hill-top till his return, he slipped down from the rock and ran towards the groves. Laminai, spear and all, had been blown by a last gust of the great wind in amongst the trees. Dick, coming on the body, disengaged the spear and, carrying it slanted over his shoulder, came along down, taking the track that Manua, Leopa and Talia had taken the night before as they raced howling with terror and driven by imagination to their death.

Nothing could be more peaceful than the woods this morning. The great wind, broken by the hill, had left scarcely a trace, the morning breeze left scarcely a sound louder than the rainy patter of leaf on leaf. Bursting from beneath the great apron leaves of a bread-fruit, Dick suddenly found his path barred by a brown, naked man on all fours.

The man seemed crawling on hands and knees. In the merry dancing lights that showered as the breeze footed it in the foliage overhead, he seemed to move, but he was dead, and supported in his position by a decayed tree stump across which he had fallen.

The rigor mortis, setting in instantly from the poison of some spear or dagger, had turned his limbs stiff as the legs of a table. On his back the siftings of the forest had already fallen, the white droppings of a bird, a leaf, a single, gummy, coloured petal of the hootoo.

Beyond this man who crawled, yet never moved, stood a man clasping a tree bole tightly with head thrown back and a light, wand-light spear through his shoulder. He had caught at the tree before falling and clung; still clinging in the death rigour, his face, turned back, with eyes wide open and mouth agape, seemed gazing wildly in search of the man who had struck him, yet there was nothing in his line of sight but an orchid swinging in the perfumed air on a loop of liantasse.

Beyond, men were lying in heaps, singly, in pairs, on their backs with arms outspread, clasped together in a deadly embrace, petrified by the poison that kills like a pole-axe, half hidden, half revealed by the trees and the brambles and the still green beauty of the ferns.