On, on he hurried. The tropic moon cast a weird light over the barbarian world that was framed by distant mountains. Nothing but mighty brooding forest haunted with mystery and uncouth sounds came into view for miles and miles as Gabrielle was hustled along. And still she heard the low chanting salutations of “Cowan le soo!” floating to her ears. Then came the weird sounds of the tribal bone flutes and beating drums, and the sudden hush as she passed beneath the rows of hanging coco-nut-oil lamps of some festival ceremony. Those wild people had often seen the Rajah arrive from his blackbirding schooner with many a trembling victim looking up into his eyes for mercy, but never had they seen such a one as they saw that night. They marvelled at the glory of her eyes, the cataract of dishevelled hair, like the sunset on their mountains off Tumba-Tumba (so they said). Besides, all the previous victims were tawny-hued like themselves and had dark eyes, eyes that shone, delightedly sometimes, to hear the acclamations of admiring chiefs in the slave markets. But the girl before them looked wildly beautiful with some fright that they knew nothing of.
As Gabrielle Everard saw their repulsive, blubbery lips, the yellowish, hot-looking eyes, the animalistic bodies of the huge, pendulous-breasted, over-fed chiefesses, she felt a tremendous pang strike her heart, in the thought that somewhere back in the past she had kinship with them. As she heard the distant drums in the mountains a strange feeling came over her. She even clutched the man’s hand beside her: she half fancied that those beating drums were the drums that she had heard in the bungalow away in Bougainville when the shadow crept into her bedroom.
As they passed under the banyan groves they came to a large group of huts of various shapes and sizes. It was the Rajah’s native village.
“Helaka!” murmured the taubadus (chiefs), and when they saw Gabrielle they looked with surprise and said: “Dimdim Wovou!” (“White foreigner!”).
Gabrielle’s bare feet were bleeding through contact with the sharp shingle by the shore reefs. But that didn’t worry the Rajah, his only response to her appeal that he would go slower was to hurry faster than ever. He crossed the cleared village space and took the girl straight to his domestic tambu temple. “Tepiake!” grunted the taubadas as he passed through the thickly overgrown bamboo stockade. He had now arrived at his parental residence, a kind of palatial heathen hall, where his own people resided and held semi-Malayan fetishes and all that would remind them of their past in the Malay Archipelago. As Gabrielle stood before that big wooden building her heart sank. She was too weary to say much to the man beside her. She hardly noticed the fiendish-looking children about her and the ape-like being who ran out from the palms and danced with glee before her. She trembled as she looked at the Rajah’s flushed face and noticed the change in his manner. She saw a look of command in his eyes, that she had only vaguely felt was there before. His walk had become majestic. The pleading obeisance she had received from him aboard the vessel had disappeared. He behaved like one who had complete authority over all around him and over her also. Her feminine instincts awoke, came to her assistance immediately. She felt that she was utterly alone in that awful haunt of barbarism.
“I’ll die first!” was the secret resolution of her heart. She half hated herself to think she had once had her arms about him and had returned his embrace. He had looked so handsome, so god-like, as he swore by the Christian apostles and Jesus Christ. The tears started to her eyes as she looked at that sinister heathen homestead as it loomed before her by the light of a hundred tiny hanging coco-nut lamps. She thought of her father, the old bungalow in Bougainville and of Hillary.
The sounds of the barbarian drums seemed to make her realise with terrible vividness the almighty simplicity of the apprentice’s love for her. She instinctively felt that, though the stranded apprentice had never mentioned the apostles or Christ’s name, or even God, that he did not do so because God and Christ spoke for him in the great silence of his own actions. And as she remembered these things she stood still, her thoughts far away across the seas. She forgot the presence of the wild, staring people around her. Her spirit leapt into Hillary’s arms, she looked into his eyes and asked him to die with her. The hordes of savages, the pagan huts, the feathery palms and distant moon-lit mountains slowly dissolved, vanishing like the fabric of a dream. She did not hear the voice of the heathen missionary beside her as he spoke in his own tongue to the clamouring hordes, so intense were her thoughts as she dreamed of Hillary and all that she had lost.
Her despair was so bitter that she hardly cared what might happen as, like one awakening from a dream into the light of miserable reality, she mechanically turned her head as Koo Macka spoke to her.
“Solan putih bunga, my Gabri-ar-le,” he muttered. Then he gripped her by the arm and led her under the thatched verandah and into his wooden ancestral halls.
A hideous, baboon-like woman fell on her knees before the Rajah and moaned out: “Solan, soo wa eala!” Then she gazed upon the girl and lifted her claw-like hands as though in approval. It was Macka’s old mother. Then a ferocious-looking half-caste (Malayo Papuan) mop-headed old man rose from his stinking squatting-mat, hobbled forward and stared keenly at the girl as she stood beneath the tiny hanging lamps. He made hideous grimaces as he inspected her, touched her smooth arms, smelt her golden hair, put his dirty fingers between the folds of her torn blue blouse and stared at the whiteness revealed to his eyes through the divided material. And all the time that he gazed his mouth emitted betel-nut juice that dropped down on to his tattooed, hairy breast.