“It is well,” Tu-Kila-Kila murmured once more, half aloud.  “You have given me the free-will offering.  Now for the trespass!  Where is the woman who dared to approach too near the temple-home of the divine Tu-Kila-Kila?  Bring the criminal forward!”

The men divided, and made a lane down their middle.  Then one of them, a minister of the man-god’s shrine, led up by the hand, all trembling and shrinking with supernatural terror in every muscle, a well-formed young girl of eighteen or twenty.  Her naked bronze limbs were shapely and lissome; but her eyes were swollen and red with tears, and her face strongly distorted with awe for the man-god.  When she stood at last before Tu-Kila-Kila’s dreaded face, she flung herself on the ground in an agony of fear.

“Oh, mercy, great God!” she cried, in a feeble voice.  “I have sinned, I have sinned.  Mercy, mercy!”

Tu-Kila-Kila smiled as before, a smile of imperial pride.  No ray of pity gleamed from those steel-gray eyes.  “Does Tu-Kila-Kila show mercy?” he asked, in a mocking voice.  “Does he pardon his suppliants?  Does he forgive trespasses?  Is he not a god, and must not his wrath be appeased?  She, being a woman, and not a wife sealed to Tu-Kila-Kila, has dared to look from afar upon his sacred home.  She has spied the mysteries.  Therefore she must die.  My people, bind her.”

In a second, without more ado, while the poor trembling girl writhed and groaned in her agony before their eyes, that mob of wild savages, let loose to torture and slay, fell upon her with hideous shouts, and bound her, as they had bound their comrade before, with coarse native ropes of twisted plantain fibre.

“Lay her head on the stone,” Tu-Kila-Kila said, grimly.  And his votaries obeyed him.

“Now light the sacred fire to make our feast, before I slay the victims,” the god said, in a gloating voice, running his finger again along the edge of his huge hatchet.

As he spoke, two men, holding in their hands hollow bamboos with coals of fire concealed within, which they kept aglow meanwhile by waving them up and down rapidly in the air, laid these primitive matches to the base of a great pyramidal pile of wood and palm-leaves, ready prepared beforehand in the yard of the temple.  In a second, the dry fuel, catching the sparks instantly, blazed up to heaven with a wild outburst of flame.  Great red tongues of fire licked up the mouldering mass of leaves and twigs, and caught at once at the trunks of palm and li wood within.  A huge conflagration reddened the sky at once like lightning.  The effect was magical.  The glow transfigured the whole island for miles.  It was, in fact, the blaze that Felix Thurstan had noted and remarked upon as he stood that evening on the silent deck of the Australasian.

Tu-Kila-Kila gazed at it with horrid childish glee.  “A fine fire!” he said, gayly.  “A fire worthy of a god.  It will serve me well.  Tu-Kila-Kila will have a good oven to roast his meal in.”