n
you were only Lavita, the son of Sami--but I know your tricks. Hands off
from my birds, say I. A curse is on the head of the Soul of dead parrots.
You tried to hurt him, and see how the curse has worked itself out! The
blood of the great god, the Pillar of Heaven, has stained the gray dust
of the island of Boupari."

Tu-Kila-Kila stood sucking his finger, and looking the very picture of
the most savage sheepishness.

CHAPTER XIX.

DOMESTIC BLISS.

Tu-Kila-Kila went home that day in a very bad humor. The portent of the
bitten finger had seriously disturbed him. For, strange as it sounds to
us, he really believed himself in his own divinity; and the bare thought
that the holy soil of earth should be dabbled and wet with the blood of a
god gave him no little uneasiness in his own mind on his way homeward.
Besides, what would his people think of it if they found it out? At all
hazards almost, he must strive to conceal this episode of the bite from
the men of Boupari. A god who gets wounded, and, worse still, gets
wounded in the very act of trying to break a great taboo laid on by
himself in a previous incarnation--such a god undoubtedly lays himself
open to the gravest misapprehensions on the part of his worshippers.
Indeed, it was not even certain whether his people, if they knew, would
any longer regard him as a god at all. The devotion of savages is
profound, but it is far from personal. When deities pass so readily from
one body to another, you must always keep a sharp lookout lest the great
spirit should at any minute have deserted his earthly tabernacle, and
have taken up his abode in a fresh representative. Honor the gods by all
means; but make sure at the same time what particular house they are just
then inhabiting.

It was the hour of siesta in Tu-Kila-Kila's tent. For a short space in
the middle of the day, during the heat of the sun, while Fire and Water,
with their embers and their calabash, sat on guard in a porch by the
bamboo gate, Tu-Kila-Kila, Pillar of Heaven and Threshold of Earth, had
respite for a while from his daily task of guarding the sacred banyan,
and could take his ease after his meal in his own quarters. While that
precious hour of taboo lasted, no wandering dragon or spirit of the air
could hurt the holy tree, and no human assailant dare touch or approach
it. Even the disease-making gods, who walk in the pestilence, could not
blight or wither it. At all other times Tu-Kila-Kila