On this particular occasion, as he reached the Frenchman’s plot, Tu-Kila-Kila stepped forward across the white taboo-line with a suspicious and peering eye.  “The King of the Rain has been here,” he said, in a pompous tone, as the Frenchman rose and saluted him ceremoniously.  “Tu-Kila-Kila’s eyes are sharp.  They never sleep.  The sun is his sight.  He beholds all things.  You cannot hide aught in heaven or earth from the knowledge of him that dwells in heaven.  I look down upon land and sea, and spy out all that takes place or is planned in them.  I am very holy and very cruel.  I see all earth and I drink the blood of all men.  The King of the Rain has come this morning to visit the King of the Birds.  Where is he now?  What has your divinity done with him?”

He spoke from under the sheltering cover of his veiled umbrella.  The Frenchman looked back at him with as little love as Tu-Kila-Kila himself would have displayed had his face been visible.  “Yes, you are a very great god,” he answered, in the conventional tone of Polynesian adulation, with just a faint under-current of irony running through his accent as he spoke.  “You say the truth.  You do, indeed, know all things.  What need for me, then, to tell you, whose eye is the sun, that my brother, the King of the Rain, has been here and gone again?  You know it yourself.  Your eye has looked upon it.  My brother was indeed with me.  He consulted me as to the showers I should need from his clouds for the birds, my subjects.”

“And where is he gone now?” Tu-Kila-Kila asked, without attempting to conceal the displeasure in his tone, for he more than half suspected the Frenchman of a sacrilegious and monstrous design of chaffing him.

The King of the Birds bowed low once more.  “Tu-Kila-Kila’s glance is keener than my hawk’s,” he answered, with the accustomed Polynesian imagery.  “He sees over the land with a glance, like my parrots, and over the sea with sharp sight, like my albatrosses.  He knows where my brother, the King of the Rain, has gone.  For me, who am the least among all the gods, I sit here on my perch and blink like a crow.  I do not know these things.  They are too high and too deep for me.”

Tu-Kila-Kila did not like the turn the conversation was taking.  Before his own attendants such hints, indeed, were almost dangerous.  Once let the savage begin to doubt, and the Moral Order goes with a crash immediately.  Besides, he must know what these white men had been talking about.  “Fire and Water,” he said in a loud voice, turning round to his two chief satellites, “go far down the path, and beat the tom-toms.  Fence off with flood and flame the airy height where the King of the Birds lives; fence it off from all profane intrusion.  I wish to confer in secret with this god, my brother.  When we gods talk together, it is not well that others should hear our converse.  Make a great Taboo.  I, Tu-Kila-Kila, myself have said it.”

Fire and Water, bowing low, backed down the path, beating tom-toms as they went, and left the savage and the Frenchman alone together.