The sun had just set when I found myself swinging in the accursed smoke, a prey to reflections which assumed the form of a horrid phantasmagoria, owing to the blood rushing to my head, and the stifling heat of the baleful exhalations. After the lapse of a few seconds I became incapable of clear thought. My brain thumped and bounded, and I shrieked aloud. Once, after terrible struggling, I reached the rope with my hands, and endeavoured to haul myself into an endurable position, but my nerveless fingers lost their hold, and I fell back in a swoon—an inert mass swinging to and fro in the smoky glare. I must have fainted when I had been suspended two or three minutes, though it seemed as many hours, for I felt as if my head were bursting all the time.
When I recovered consciousness I was lying on the ground in the hut, a few paces from the fire. Lolóma stood by, emptying a pipkin of water over me.
On my way to the place of torture I had learned from the conversation of Shark and Bent-Axe that its locality had been kept secret. Lolóma, watched by her relatives, had great difficulty in getting away until it was thought that sufficient time had elapsed for the ordeal by smoke to be accomplished. Then she tracked my executioners to the house. With her light step and lithe figure she was able to elude them in the gloom, and enter the building through a small aperture in the side, used as a window, and which was only closed by a mat. To cut the rope of sinnet with a bamboo knife was the work of a moment, and I fell to the ground in her arms.
“Run for your life,” were her first words to me as soon as she saw that I had regained consciousness.
I recovered myself quickly. My eyes were blinded and smarting with the smoke, but I snatched up a club which lay on the floor, and ran, as near as I could guess, after the retreating form of the girl through the doorway. Outside the hut a man emerged from the smoke and gloom and seized me by the left shoulder. It was Bent-Axe. With one blow from the club I felled him, and darted up a ravine towards the hills. In an hour’s time I was safe in my old cave, where there was some food, for Lolóma and I had kept up the habit of making festival excursions there, and the existence of the bower was still known only to us two.
The trees and shrubs around the entrance to the cave were spangled with a cloud of dancing fireflies, though I had never seen these insects in the locality before. Capturing three or four, I contrived an excellent lantern by placing them in a cocoanut cup, covering the top with a film of fine masi, through which the light shone. I found that by shaking the bowl violently I could excite these interesting insects to increase the light they emit from the luminous discs on each side of their bodies. Subsequent experience proved to me that with a little sugar-cane for food they would live in captivity for weeks. Furnished with my new-made lamp, I explored at leisure the long aisles and fretted vaults of my picturesque cell, which was beautiful beyond the dreams of architecture.
CHAPTER XVI.
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES.
In the course of an hour’s time I was rejoined by Lolóma, who told me that any thought of return to the town was out of the question, and that, as search would certainly be made for us, we must gain the protection of another tribe. There was a powerful chief on the coast, she added, to whose family she was vasu, and whose protection she would be sure of if she could once reach his dominions.
We set out in the moonlight, hand in hand, like another Adam and Eve, leaving our garden of Eden behind us, and not feeling very confident in regard to the adventures in store.
As we rambled on in the direction of the coast, Lolóma, whose natural gaiety of heart had returned, prattled of many things, but was often beguiled into silence by the splendour of the firmament. It is not surprising when one calls to mind the wondrous beauty of the calm, cloudless nights in Fiji, and the length of time the natives spend in the open air after the sun has set, that they pay some attention to the Heavenly bodies, and have names for them, and theories in regard to them, though bearing no resemblance to those of Copernicus or Galileo.