Standing on the summit of Palm Tree Island and gazing sou’west, one saw above the horizon line something that was not land; the sky just then altered in colour, as though dimmed by a fingerprint, and sometimes, just before sunset, this mysterious spot in the sky took on a vague glow.

Any old South Sea man would have known at once that this spot was the mirror blaze from a great lagoon reflected in the sky. Kearney recognised the fact at once when he saw it. “There’s a big low island somewheres down there,” had been his verdict, and he was right.

Karolin was the name of this atoll island; even the whalemen called it by its native name instead of dubbing it with some outlandish term of their own after their custom with islands not on the chart. But they never entered the lagoon. The place had a bad name, wood and water being scarce and the natives untrustable.

But the birds of Palm Tree cared nothing for the scarcity of wood or water or the trustability of the natives, and the great gulls, when fancy took them, would spread their wings for the south, thinking little of the journey of fifty miles. League after league they would lay behind them with nothing in view but the blaze of the sea till, like a trace of pale smoke, the birds of Karolin showed circling in the sky. Then the line of the reef sent its murmur to meet them, but, unheeding reef or surf, they would pass over to poise above the lagoon before slanting down to rest and fish.

The lagoon was forty miles in circumference and the containing reef nowhere higher than six feet; standing on the reef, you could not see the opposite shore, except when mirage lifted it, showing across the great pond brimming with light a line dotted with palm clumps. There was no water source on Karolin, only ponds cut in the coral and filled by the rains; no taro, only puraka; no bread-fruit; cocoanuts, puraka, pandanus-fruit and fish were the main support of the inhabitants, and though Palm Tree, with all its vegetation lay within reach, they never went there for food.

The fishing canoes, in the bad seasons when fish were poisonous at Karolin, would push out with the northward-running current and sometimes even skirt the reef of the northern island, but they never landed, and for three reasons. The high island, with its dense trees and narrow lagoon, was an abomination to the minds of the atoll-bred people. In the remote past, for some reason, they had emigrated en masse, but had returned in less than three months, broken in spirit and yearning for the great spaces and the sun blaze on the lagoon. Again, years ago there had been a tribal war and the remnants of the defeated tribe had made north and had been pursued and killed on the beach of Palm Tree to a man^[1], and their ghosts were supposed still to haunt the beach. Lastly, Palm Tree, though invisible from Karolin by direct vision, was sometimes at long intervals raised by the witchery of mirage, showing as a picture in the sky, and an island that could raise itself like this was a place to be avoided. Katafa had only seen this vision twice, though she was thirteen years of age.

Eleven years ago a ship had come into the lagoon of Karolin, a Spanish ship, the Pablo Poirez, Spanish-owned and out of Valparaiso. Valores was the captain’s name, and he had his wife and little daughter on board, a child two years old, named Chita.

He came in for water. There had been a drought, and the wells of Karolin were low, and Le Juan, the sorceress and rain expert, in a temper, and Uta Matu, the chief man of the northern tribe, spoiling for a fight. When the wells were low there was always trouble on Karolin—offerings to the god Nanawa, rejuvenations of old vendettas and the general nerve-tension and gloom of a people who feel that the Fates are against them.

In the middle of all this the Spaniards came on shore with their water barrels and were met by Le Juan and Uta Matu, who barred the way to the wells only to be pushed aside by Valores and his men. In a moment the beach was in a turmoil; daggers and shark’s-teeth spears were whipped from beneath mats and from clefts in the rock; attacked on all sides, and with the fury of a typhoon, the Spaniards fell, butchered like sheep—slaughtered to a man.

Then the canoes put out for the ship, Uta Matu boarding her to starboard and his son Laminai to port. There were six Spaniards on board. They had knocked the shackle off the anchor chain and were trying to handle the sails, forgetting that the tide was flooding and that the wind was coming from the break—working like maniacs and falling like cattle before the spearmen. The wife of Valores fell defending her child. Stricken on the back with a coral-headed club, she fell with it in her arms, covering it so that they had to turn her over to tear it from her.

Now the ship, free of the anchor, had been drifting with the flood and wind, and just as Laminai was holding the child aloft before dashing it on the deck, the keel took a submerged reef that rose from the lagoon floor just there. The shock made him slip on the blood-soaked deck and as he fell Uta caught the child.

His blood lust was satiated and the gods had spoken, at least so it seemed to Uta Matu, and when Laminai got on his feet again and tried to seize his prey he received a clip on the side of the head from the old man’s right fist, strong to save as to kill.

But the chief had reckoned without Le Juan. The sight of the rescued Chita filled the priestess of Nanawa with the most dismal forebodings. It was a girl-child, belonging to the murdered papalagi whose spirits, through it, would surely find revenge. Le Juan, despite her devotion to sorcery or maybe because of it, was a very clever woman. She foresaw in the growing up and mating of this alien with some young man of the tribe danger to the people of Karolin. It might be that the ghosts of the murdered ones would work through her and the children she bore; Le Juan could not tell, she only knew that there was danger in the thing, and that night, squatting in Uta Matu’s house whilst the rest of the tribe lay about on the beach drunk with carnage and kava, she so worked on the mind of the chief that he was about to assent to the strangling of Chita, when of a sudden a noise filled the air, first a whisper, then a murmur, then a roar—the rain, the long deferred rain, beating the lagoon to foam and washing the coral free of blood-stains.

“How now about the ill luck?” asked Uta Matu. “The child is lucky; it has brought us rain. Take her and do what you will with her, put spells upon her or what you like, but if you injure one hair of her head I will have you choked with a wedge of raw puraka and I will cast your body to the sharks, Le Juan.”

“As you please,” said the old woman; “I will do what I can.”

She did.

She christened Chita, Katafa, or the “Frigate Bird,” a creature associated with wanderings and great distances, and then gradually and year by year she isolated Katafa from the tribe, absolutely and in all but speech.

Now, how can you isolate human beings from their fellows so that whilst living, talking, eating and moving amongst them they are as much apart as though ringed round with a barrier of steel? It seems impossible, but it was not impossible to Le Juan. She imposed upon Chita the rarest of all the forms of tabu, taminan. There were men and women on Karolin tabued from touching the skin of a shark, from eating certain forms of shell-fish, and so forth, and so on, but the terrible tabu of taminan debarred its victims from touching any human creature or being touched.

From her earliest infancy the mind of the Spanish child had been worked upon by Le Juan until the tabu had taken a firm hold and become part and parcel of her brain processes, and evasion an instantaneous reflex act. You might suddenly have put out your hand to grasp or touch Katafa—you would have touched nothing but air; like an expert fencer, she would have evaded you if only by the twentieth part of an inch. To understand the tremendous grasp of this thing upon the mind, it is enough to say that had she wished you to touch her, desired with all her heart that you should touch her, wish or desire would have been fruitless before the impassable barrier erected by the subliminal mind.

On no grown person could the tabu of taminan be imposed. Only on the plastic mind of childhood could it obtain its grip strong as hypnotism and lasting till death.

At six years of age Le Juan’s work was accomplished and Katafa was immune, isolated for ever from her kind. The work had been helped by the fact that every creature on Karolin had avoided her, but on the day when Le Juan proclaimed her free, she was taken into the tribe, men, women and children no longer held apart, and she mixed with them, played with them, fished with them, talked with them, a ghost in everything but speech.