H. De Vere Stacpoole

“ Then the dead were buried in the lagoon—Maru refusing to help because of his tabu—and the three newly married couples settled down to live their lives, leaving Maru out in the cold. He was no longer king. The women despised him because he hadn’t fought for one of them and the men because he had failed in brutality and leadership. They were a hard lot, true survivals of the fittest, and Maru, straight as a palm tree, dark-eyed, gentle, and a dreamer, seemed, among them, like a man of another tribe and time. ”

“ He picked fruits and ate them like an animal and without knowing that he ate, torn toward the beach by the passionate desire to embrace once more the form that he loved, but held from the act by a grip ten thousand years old and immutable as gravity or the spirit that lives in religions.
He must not handle the dead. Through all his grief came a weird touch of comfort. She had not been dead when he carried her ashore. He had not touched the dead.
Then terrible thoughts came to him of what would happen to Talia if he left her lying there. Of what predatory gulls might do. ”

“ Some day they will come," said Talia. She knew her people, those sea rovers, inconsequent as the gulls. Some day for some reason or none one of the fishing canoes would fish as far as this island or be blown there by some squall. She would take Maru back with her. She told him this.
The thought began to trouble Maru. Then he grew gloomy. He was in love. Love had hit him suddenly. Somehow and in some mysterious manner she had changed to a girl of flesh and blood. She knew it, and at the same moment he turned for her into a man. ”

“ The hatch cover was sweeping with a four-knot current, moving with a whole world of things concealed or half seen or hinted at. A sea current is a street, it is more, it is an escalator—a moving pavement for the people of the sea. ”

“ Also his stomach was full, he had been eating biscuits while the Portsoy’s canvas was being stripped away, and though the wind was strong enough almost to whip the food from his hands.
The peaceful swell that followed the cyclone was a thing enough to have driven an ordinary man mad with terror. Now lifted hill high on a glassy slope the whole wheel of the horizon came to view under the breezing wind and blazing sun, then gently down—sliding the hatch cover would sink to a valley bottom only to climb again a glassy slope and rise again hill high into the wind and sun. ”

“ He was son of Malemake, King of Fukariva, a kingdom the size of a soup plate, nearly as round and without a middle, an atoll island in short; just a ring of coral, sea-beaten and circling, like a bezel, a sapphire lagoon.
Fukariva lies in the Paumotus or Dangerous Archipelago where the currents run every way and the trades are unaccountable. The underwriters to this day fight shy of a Paumotus trader, and in the ’60’s few ships came here, and the few that came were on questionable business. Maru, up to the time he was twenty years of age, only remembered three. ”

“ It blew everything away and then took them into its calm heart where, dancing like giants in dead, still air and with the sea for a ballroom floor, the hundred-foot high waves broke the Portsoy to pieces. ”

“ Yet tabu is universal. You find men here who daren’t touch an artu tree because artu trees are tabu to them, or eat turtle or touch a dead body. Well, look at the Jews, a dead body is tabu to a Cohen, India is riddled with the business, so’s English society—it’s all the same thing under different disguises.”
“Funny that talking of ghosts we should have touched on this, for when I asked you did you believe in ghosts I had a ghost story in mind and tabu comes into it. ”