Just outside the taboo-line the captain halted.  The gray-headed old chief, who had accompanied his fellows to the shore, spoke out in Polynesian.  “Do not resist them,” he said, “my people.  If you do, you will be blasted by their lightning like a bare bamboo in a mighty cyclone.  They carry thunder in their hands.  They are mighty, mighty gods.  The white-faced Korong spoke no more than the truth.  Let them do as they will with us.  We are but their meat.  We are as dust beneath their sole, and as driven mulberry-leaves before the breath of the tempest.”

The defenders hesitated still a little.  Then, suddenly losing heart, they broke rank at last at a point close by where the captain of the Australasian stood, one man after another falling aside slowly and shamefacedly a pace or two.  The captain, unhesitatingly, overstepped the white taboo-line.  Next instant, Felix and Muriel were grasping his hand hard, and M. Peyron was bowing a polite Parisian reception.

Forthwith, the sailors crowded round them in a hollow square.  Muriel and Felix, half faint with relief from their long and anxious suspense, staggered slowly down the seaward path between them.  But there was no need now for further show of defence.  The islanders, pressing near and flinging away their weapons, followed the procession close, with tears and lamentations.  As they went on, the women, rushing out of their huts while the fugitives passed, tore their hair on their heads, and beat their breasts in terror.  The warriors who had come from the shore recounted, with their own exaggerative additions, the miracle of the six-shooter and the dynamite cartridge.  Gradually they approached the landing-place on the beach.  There the third officer sat waiting in the gig to receive them.  The lamentations of the islanders now became positively poignant.  “Oh, my father,” they cried aloud, “my brother, my revered one, you are indeed the true Tu-Kila-Kila.  Do not go away like this and desert us!  Oh, our mother, great queen, mighty goddess, stop with us!  Take not away your sun from the heavens, nor your rain from the crops.  We acknowledge we have sinned; we have done very wrong; but the chief sinner is dead; the wrong-doer has paid; spare us who remain; spare us, great deity; do not make the bright lights of heaven become dark over us.  Stay with your worshippers, and we will give you choice young girls to eat every day, we will sacrifice the tenderest of our children to feed you.”

It is an awful thing for any race or nation when its taboos fail all at once, and die out entirely.  To the men of Boupari, the Tu-Kila-Kila of the moment represented both the Moral Order and the regular sequence of the physical universe.  Anarchy and chaos might rule when he was gone.  The sun might be quenched, and the people run riot.  No wonder they shrank from the fearful consequence that might next ensue.  King and priest, god and religion, all at one fell blow were to be taken away from them!