rong was cast up upon this island by the waves
of the sea, much as you and I have been in the present generation. By
accident, says the story, or else, as others aver, through the
indiscretion of a native woman who fell in love with him, and who worried
the taboo out of her husband, the stranger became acquainted with the
secret of Tu-Kila-Kila. As the natives themselves put it, he learned the
Death of the High God, and where in the world his Soul was hidden.
Thereupon, in some mysterious way or other, he became Tu-Kila-Kila
himself, and ruled as High God for ten years or more here on this island.
Now, up to that time, the legend goes on, none but the men of the island
knew the secret; they learned it as soon as they were initiated in the
great mysteries, which occur before a boy is given a spear and admitted
to the rank of complete manhood. But sometimes a woman was told the
secret wrongfully by her husband or her lover; and one such woman,
apparently, told the strange Korong, and so enabled him to become
Tu-Kila-Kila."

"But where does the parrot come in?" Felix asked, with still profounder
excitement than ever. Something within him seemed to tell him
instinctively he was now within touch of the special key that must sooner
or later unlock the mystery.

"Well," the Frenchman went on, still stroking the parrot affectionately
with his hand, and smoothing down the feathers on its ruffled back, "the
strange Tu-Kila-Kila, who thus ruled in the island, though he learned to
speak Polynesian well, had a language of his own, a language of the
birds, which no man on earth could ever talk with him. So, to beguile his
time and to have someone who could converse with him in his native
dialect, he taught this parrot to speak his own tongue, and spent most of
his days in talking with it and fondling it. At last, after he had
instructed it by slow degrees how to repeat this long sermon or
poem--which I have often heard it recite in a sing-song voice from
beginning to end--his time came, as they say, and he had to give way to
another Tu-Kila-Kila; for the Bouparese have a proverb like our own about
the king, 'The High God is dead; may the High God live forever!' But
before he gave up his Soul to his successor, and was eaten or buried,
whichever is the custom, he handed over his pet to the King of the Birds,
strictly charging all future bearers of that divine office to care for
the parrot as they would care for a son or a daughter. An