The Garden of God

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

Here there was nothing that did not date from the remote past, nothing that was not of use in the immediate present.

So is it with the beavers and the ants and the bees, whose work ever advances from the time of Nineveh and beyond, yet never advances to the future, who build as they built, who live as they lived, who die as they died, and as first they built and lived and died in the garden of God, which is Nature.

Only man can change, only man can live for ages without change, yet remain capable of change, only man can be sealed away in the land of instinct, yet remain capable of entering the land of reason.

So was it with the people of Karolin gathered together this morning on the beach by the gridiron of coral where for ages past victims had been sacrificed to Nanawa, the shark-toothed one, by his priests and through the agency of his servants, the sharks.

Le Juan, after the death of Uta Matu, had temporised. She did not in the least mind sacrificing the half-witted girl Ooma, but she greatly dreaded barren results.

Including the king’s wives, there were over two hundred women on Karolin, all wanting their men back, and close on three hundred children, more than half of which were boys. Of these boys a large number were over twelve and a good number over fourteen, all ripe for mischief, without much fear of Nanawa, and with the antagonism of all boys towards old women of Le Juan’s type.

Le Juan had sent the fathers and husbands of this terrible population to a war from which they had not returned, and, worse than that, she had made herself responsible, under Nanawa, for their return.

She had declared that they were “held” by Nanawa till the great sacrifice of a woman had been offered to him, yet, feeling that the tricky shark god had played her another trick, she simply dared not make the sacrifice. She knew what would happen if it failed; she felt the temper of the people as a man feels the sharp point of a dagger against his breast, so, as before said, she temporised, fell into pretended trances, had pretended visions, declared that nothing was to be done until it was absolutely sure that the mother of Ooma would not return, and sweated consumedly at night as she lay in her shack listening to the sounds of the village and the shouting of the ribald boys and the boom of the surf on the reef, whilst Ooma, half-witted and happy, slept protected from death by the ferocious beast that was the soul of Le Juan and whose one dread was extinction—through failure.

But the time had come, and the death warrant was sealed by the far red speck of light on the northern sky caused by the burning of the schooner.

A boy had seen it, two minutes later the whole village was watching it, and next day it had got into the minds of the people. It was looked on as a sign—of what, no one could say—but it was an angry sign, and that night Nalia, the chief wife of the dead Uta, had a dream.