ake men fight. We had no rum, but we had
great love for Letya and his wife, and his two children, and great hate
for Charlik. So we said, 'If this is death, it is death,' and every man
went to his post--some to the barrier at the foot of the cliff, and some
to the thicket of _oap_ on the summit. Cerita, the wife of Letya the
Englishman, was weeping. She was weeping because Nena, the chief of
Mout, was waiting in the house to kill her if her husband should be
slain. But she did not weep because of the fear of death; it was for her
children she wept. That is the way of women. What is the life of a child
to the life of a man?

"Nena was my father's brother. He was a brave man, but was too old to
fight, for his eyes were dimmed by many years. So he sat beside Cerita
and her two children, with a long knife in his hand and waited. He
covered his face with a mat and waited. It was right for him to do this,
for Letya was a great man; and his wife, although she was a foreigner,
was an honoured woman. Therefore though Nena might not look upon her
face at other times, he could kill her if Letya said she must die. This
was quite right and correct. A wife must be guided by her husband and do
what is right and correct, and avoid scandal.

"For many hours the women in the houses waited in silence. Then suddenly
they heard the thunder of two hundred guns, and the roaring of voices,
then more muskets. They ran out of the houses and looked up to the
cliff, and lo! the sky was bright as day, for when Charlik's people and
the white men walked into the trap in the darkness, Letya and our people
set alight great heaps of dry leaves and scrub, which were placed all
along the barrier of logs. This was done so that they could see better
to shoot. There were thirty or forty of Charlik's men killed by that
volley. The white man who was leading them was very brave; he tried to
climb over the barrier, but fell back dead, for a man named Sru thrust a
whale-lance into his heart. All this time the other white men and the
rest of Charlik's people were firing their muskets, but their bullets
only hit the heavy logs of the barrier, and Letya and our people killed
them very easily by putting their muskets through the spaces. When the
sailors saw their captain fall, they tried to run away, and the Lele
warriors ran with them. But when they reached the path which led up
between the cliff, it too was blocked, and many of them became jammed
together between