KARA! KARA! KARA!

There was a girl of the islands, Nalia by name, who, living under the tabu of taminan and pursued by a lover, found refuge in the sea. Swimming far out, she could not return, for the place of refuge had in some way, by association, linked itself with the spell and she could not leave it. She was swept away and drowned. Katafa, crouching amidst the ferns, heard the wind in the matamata leaves, the flutter of birds, the murmur of the reef, muted by the woods. Then a voice faint and far away, the voice of Taori:

“Katafa, hai, amonai, Katafa.”

She listened—nothing more. Nothing but the wind, the reef murmur and the birds.

Time passed, sunset bloomed and the dusk rose, and then, as the starlight fell, silvering the lagoon and the sea, she came gliding through the trees.

Dividing the leaves, she looked and saw the sward and the house with the starlight upon it. There in the house, with the little ships above him, Taori was sleeping, far from her as any star.

She could no more leave the protection of the trees than Nalia could have left the sea. The open space repelled her as it might have repelled an agoraphobiac, only with infinitely greater power. She was bound to the woods for ever.

In the old romances we read of women spell-bound by witches and black magic. Le Juan had used no black magic; working with no material but Katafa’s self, she had moulded into it a law that had become part of self. Passion could not fight with or break that law; nothing could break it but something higher than self, something not yet fully existent in her still nebulous soul.

Like an animal held from its mate, she crouched now, her eyes fixed on the house, the very depth of her passion forging her bonds more securely in so far as it destroyed reason. Dead to thought, her senses were yet acutely alive.

She heard with miraculous clearness the thousand little noises of the night, the moving of leaves, the faint creak of branches, the rustle of a lizard. She heard the surf on the outer beach and the far-off splash of a fish from the lagoon water. Then, as the wind from the sea died to the faintest stirring of air, the moon rising across the eastern trees struck the house, and the air, as though some crystal door had been closed, grew still. Not a leaf moved. Katafa, crouched amidst the leaves, seemed part of the silence that had taken the world, a silence reaching from the furthest sea stars to the trees, a silence suddenly broken by a sound more terrible than the voice of any beast. Suddenly through the utter silence of the night it came, howling, bubbling, bellowing, echoing through the trees from the distant eastern beach, raising the birds in screaming flocks, waking roosting gulls on the reef.

She knew that sound. It was the blowing of a lambai shell, the great conch shell of Karolin, blown only for war.

“We have come!” cried the shell. “The long canoes have come from the south, from the south, from the south! Kara! Kara! Kara! War! War! War!”