tely one terrible truth had been forced by slow
degrees upon Felix's mind; whatever else Korong meant, it implied at
least some fearful doom in store, sooner or later, for the persons who
bore it. How awful that doom might be, he could hardly imagine; but he
must devote himself henceforth to the task of discovering what its nature
was, and, if possible, of averting it.

Yet how to reconcile this impending terror with the other obvious facts
of the situation? the fact that they were considered divine beings and
treated like gods; and the fact that the whole population seemed really
to regard them with a devotion and kindliness closely bordering on
religious reverence? If Korongs were gods, why should the people want to
kill them? If they meant to kill them, why pay them meanwhile such
respect and affection?

One point at least was now, however, quite clear to Felix. While the
natives, especially the women, displayed toward both of them in their
personal aspect a sort of regretful sympathy, he could not help noticing
at the same time that the men, at any rate, regarded them also largely
in an impersonal light, as a sort of generalized abstraction of the
powers of nature--an embodied form of the rain and the weather. The
islanders were anxious to keep their white guests well supplied, well
fed, and in perfect health, not so much for the strangers' sakes as for
their own advantage; they evidently considered that if anything went
wrong with either of their two new gods, corresponding misfortunes might
happen to their crops and the produce of their bread-fruit groves. Some
mysterious sympathy was held to subsist between the persons of the
castaways and the state of the weather. The natives effusively thanked
them after welcome rain, and looked askance at them, scowling, after long
dry spells. It was for this, no doubt, that they took such pains to
provide them with attentive Shadows, and to gird round their movements
with taboos of excessive stringency. Nothing that the new-comers said or
did was indifferent, it seemed, to the welfare of the community; plenty
and prosperity depended upon the passing state of Muriel's health, and
famine or drought might be brought about at any moment by the slightest
imprudence in Felix's diet.

How stringent these taboos really were Felix learned by slow degrees
alone to realize. From the very beginning he had observed, to be sure,
that they might only eat and drink the food provided for th