Tu-Kila-Kila interpreted the facts at once, however, in his own way.  “See,” he said, pointing with his plump forefinger once more, and encouraging with his words his terrified followers, “I am sending back a light again from the sun to my island.  I am doing my work well.  I am taking care of my people.  Fear not for your future.  In the light is yet another victim.  A man and a woman will come to Boupari from the sun, to make up for the man and woman whom we eat in our feast to-night.  Give me plenty of victims, and you will have plenty of yam.  Make haste, then; kill, eat; let us feast Tu-Kila-Kila!  To-morrow the man and woman I have sent from the sun will come ashore on the reef, and reach Boupari.”

At the words, he stepped forward and raised that heavy tomahawk.  With one blow each he brained the two bound and defenceless victims on the altar-stone of his fathers.  The rest, a European hand shrinks from revealing.  The orgy was too horrible even for description.

And that was the land toward which, that moment, Felix Thurstan was struggling, with all his might, to carry Muriel Ellis, from the myriad clasping arms of a comparatively gentle and merciful ocean!

CHAPTER III.

Land; but what land?

As the last glimmering lights of the Australasian died away to seaward, Felix Thurstan knew in his despair there was nothing for it now but to strike out boldly, if he could, for the shore of the island.

By this time the breakers had subsided greatly.  Not, indeed, that the sea itself was really going down.  On the contrary, a brisk wind was rising sharper from the east, and the waves on the open Pacific were growing each moment higher and loppier.  But the huge mountain of water that washed Muriel Ellis overboard was not a regular ordinary wave; it was that far more powerful and dangerous mass, a shoal-water breaker.  The Australasian had passed at that instant over a submerged coral-bar, quite deep enough, indeed, to let her cross its top without the slightest danger of grazing, but still raised so high toward the surface as to produce a considerable constant ground-swell, which broke in windy weather into huge sheets of surf, like the one that had just struck and washed over the Australasian, carrying Muriel with it.  The very same cause that produced the breakers, however, bore Felix on their summit rapidly landward; and once he had got well beyond the region of the bar that begot them, he found himself soon, to his intense relief, in comparatively calm shoal water.

Muriel Ellis, for her part, was faint with terror and with the buffeting of the waves; but she still floated by his side, upheld by the life-belts.  He had been able, by immense efforts, to keep unseparated from her amid the rending surf of the breakers.  Now that they found themselves in easier waters for a while, Felix began to strike out vigorously through the darkness for the shore.  Holding up his companion with one hand, and swimming with all his might in the direction where a vague white line of surf, lit up by the red glare-of some fire far inland, made him suspect the nearest land to lie, he almost thought he had succeeded at last, after a long hour of struggle, in feeling his feet, after all, on a firm coral bottom.