took the hint with charming docility.

"In the high godship," he went on, mechanically, where he had stopped.
"And this here is the manner whereby I obtained it. The Too-Keela-Keela
from time to time doth generally appoint any castaway stranger that comes
to the island to the post of Korong--that is to say, an annual god or
victim. For, as the year doth renew itself at each change of seasons, so
do these carribals in their gentilisme believe and hold that the gods of
the seasons--to wit, the King of the Rain, the Queen of the Clouds, the
Lord of Green Leaves, the King of Fruits, and others--must needs be
sleain and renewed at the diverse solstices. Now, it so happened that I,
on my arrival in the island, was appointed Korong, and promoted to the
post of King of the Rain, having a native woman assigned me as Queen of
the Clouds, with whom I might keep company. This woman being, after her
kind, enamored of me, and anxious to escape her own fate, to be sleain by
my side, did betray to me that secret which they call in their tongue the
Great Taboo, and which had been betrayed to herself in turn by a native
man, her former lover. For the men are instructed in these things in the
mysteries when they coom of age, but not the women.

"And the Great Taboo is this: No man can becoom a Too-Keela-Keela unless
he first sleay the man in whom the high god is incarnate for the moment.
But in order that he may sleay him, he must also himself be a full
Korong, only those persons who are already gods being capable for the
highest post in their hierarchy; even as with ourselves, none but he that
is a deacon may become a priest, and none but he that is a priest may be
made a bishop. For this reason, then, the Too-Keela-Keela prefers to
advance a stranger to the post of Korong, seeing that such a person will
not have been initiated in the mysteries of the island, and therefore
will not be aware of those sundry steps which must needs be taken of him
that would inherit the godship.

"Furthermore, even a Korong can only obtain the highest rank of
Too-Keela-Keela if he order all things according to the forms and
ceremonies of the Taboo parfectly. For these gentiles are very careful of
the levitical parts of their religion, deriving the same, as it seems to
me, from the polity of the Hebrews, the fame of whose tabernacle must
sure have gone forth through the ends of the woorld, and the knowledge of
whose temple must have been yet more wide dispe