She did.
She christened Chita, Katafa, or the “Frigate Bird,” a creature associated with wanderings and great distances, and then gradually and year by year she isolated Katafa from the tribe, absolutely and in all but speech.
Now, how can you isolate human beings from their fellows so that whilst living, talking, eating and moving amongst them they are as much apart as though ringed round with a barrier of steel? It seems impossible, but it was not impossible to Le Juan. She imposed upon Chita the rarest of all the forms of tabu, taminan. There were men and women on Karolin tabued from touching the skin of a shark, from eating certain forms of shell-fish, and so forth, and so on, but the terrible tabu of taminan debarred its victims from touching any human creature or being touched.
From her earliest infancy the mind of the Spanish child had been worked upon by Le Juan until the tabu had taken a firm hold and become part and parcel of her brain processes, and evasion an instantaneous reflex act. You might suddenly have put out your hand to grasp or touch Katafa—you would have touched nothing but air; like an expert fencer, she would have evaded you if only by the twentieth part of an inch. To understand the tremendous grasp of this thing upon the mind, it is enough to say that had she wished you to touch her, desired with all her heart that you should touch her, wish or desire would have been fruitless before the impassable barrier erected by the subliminal mind.
On no grown person could the tabu of taminan be imposed. Only on the plastic mind of childhood could it obtain its grip strong as hypnotism and lasting till death.
At six years of age Le Juan’s work was accomplished and Katafa was immune, isolated for ever from her kind. The work had been helped by the fact that every creature on Karolin had avoided her, but on the day when Le Juan proclaimed her free, she was taken into the tribe, men, women and children no longer held apart, and she mixed with them, played with them, fished with them, talked with them, a ghost in everything but speech.
[1]. See “Blue Lagoon”
CHAPTER VII
BLOWN TO SEA