a, their
prince, had slain and eaten; they were the trophies of the cannibal
man-god's hateful prowess.

Tu-Kila-Kila raised his right hand erect and spoke again. "I am a great
god," he said, slowly. "I am very powerful. I make the sun to shine, and
the yams to grow. I am the spirit of plants. Without me there would be
nothing for you all to eat or drink in Boupari. If I were to grow old and
die, the sun would fade away in the heavens overhead; the bread-fruit
trees would wither and cease to bear on earth; all fruits would come to
an end and die at once; all rivers would stop forthwith from running."

His worshippers bowed down in acquiescence with awestruck faces. "It is
true," they answered, in the same slow sing-song of assent as before.
"Tu-Kila-Kila is the greatest of gods. We owe to him everything. We hang
upon his favor."

Tu-Kila-Kila started back, laughed, and showed his pearly white teeth.
They were beautiful and regular, like the teeth of a tiger, a strong
young tiger. "But I need more sacrifices than all the other gods," he
went on, melodiously, like one who plays with consummate skill upon some
difficult instrument. "I am greedy; I am thirsty; I am a hungry god. You
must not stint me. I claim more human victims than all the other gods
beside. If you want your crops to grow, and your rivers to run, the
fields to yield you game, and the sea fish--this is what I ask: give me
victims, victims! That is our compact. Tu-Kila-Kila calls you."

The men bowed down once more and repeated humbly, "You shall have victims
as you will, great god; only give us yam and taro and bread-fruit, and
cause not your bright light, the sun, to grow dark in heaven over us."

"Cut yourselves," Tu-Kila-Kila cried, in a peremptory voice, clapping his
hands thrice. "I am thirsting for blood. I want your free-will offering."

As he spoke, every man, as by a set ritual, took from a little skin
wallet at his side a sharp flake of coral-stone, and, drawing it
deliberately across his breast in a deep red gash, caused the blood to
flow out freely over his chest and long grass waistband. Then, having
done so, they never strove for a moment to stanch the wound, but let
the red drops fall as they would on to the dust at their feet, without
seeming even to be conscious at all of the fact that they were flowing.

Tu-Kila-Kila smiled once more, a ghastly self-satisfied smile of
unquestioned power. "It is well," he went on. "My people love me.