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.

As soon as they were gone, Tu-Kila-Kila laid aside his umbrella with a
positive sigh of relief. Now his fellow-countrymen were well out of the
way, his manner altered in a trice, as if by magic. Barbarian as he was,
he was quite astute enough to guess that Europeans cared nothing in their
hearts for all his mumbo-jumbo. He believed in it himself, but they did
not, and their very unbelief made him respect and fear them.

"Now that we two are alone," he said, glancing carelessly around him, "we
two who ar