put the telescope down, but clenched his teeth, staring hard. How he hated the man! He could count the very eyelashes on the lids that he so much wished would close. What a broad, ruggedly handsome face, a calm face shielding burning thoughts! Those eyes – C’Zarcke’s black eyes – turning an intense blue-black, icily staring, growing larger but as if a glaze were obliterating earth-life to enable him to absorb unseen things. A sickly hair-raising sensation touched Jakara’s consciousness. Despairingly he covered his face just as C’Zarcke turned and strode thoughtfully into the Zogo-house.
C’Zarcke, the searcher after knowledge, had become aware that Jakara the white Lamar was spying upon him, and with evil wishes. He had felt it! And by this, as in years past, C’Zarcke was disturbed, for this Lamar of the seas possessed a power unknown to him. C’Zarcke had watched this alien and learned new things, but this power, apparently similar to his own, the priest had not solved. He knew where Jakara was, and that from the distance, when even his form would be indistinct, Jakara could bring his face to him, and by a different process from his own. C’Zarcke was deeply moved to know how.
Jakara hid the telescope. This was his private ground – “Jakara’s Lookout.” Here for one day in every week he talked to himself, thinking and arguing of all things he had learned before the shipwreck, lest when he should be rescued his mental state might have sunk to savagery. Here also he pondered over the mysterious learning of the Zogo-le and by disdaining the mummery of the people his brain had grown quick and shrewd, alert with the white man’s sense combined with that of the savage. The natives, though curious, seldom troubled him here. One was coming now, a tall young man proudly nodding as he smiled to the salutes called to him while walking through the village. With swinging arms he strode through the manioc gardens and on up the slope of the hill. Beizam, son of Boga the Mamoose of Mer, a bashful smile on his handsome face, coming eagerly to show Jakara the head-mai which flaunted upon his neck.
The friends met with a smile and clasping of hands upon shoulders.
“Beizam is a warrior now, and the head-mai becomes him well,” congratulated Jakara warmly.
Beizam’s teeth gleamed with pleasure. “It was a perfect stroke,” he said quickly, “and in the raid I caught him by myself. He was a warrior too, and had killed his men.”
“It behoved the son of a Mamoose to take the head of a warrior as his first kill,” replied Jakara gravely. “Bogo, your father, is a noted fighter, but even he did not make such a beginning as you have done. It is a good omen.”
Beizam’s face shone. “Why don’t you become a warrior, Jakara?” he asked quickly. “You are a brave man, and for your wonderful cunning the Zogo-le have made of you a chief. Yet you will not drink of the blood of any that you have slain.”
With admiration Beizam raised his sinewy hand and touched the pearl-shell circlet round Jakara’s neck. It was of similar design to Beizam’s head-mai, except that it lacked the carved skull, the final badge of warriorhood. Instead, Jakara’s circlet had little nicks, and each represented the life of a man.
“I cannot,” he replied gravely. “My religion forbids, as the men of Mer know, otherwise I would have done so long ago!”
Beizam gazed quizzically seaward. “Truly we call you ‘Jakara the Strange,’ ” he said, “the greatest honour that man can earn has lain before your sword time and again yet you have let it lie there and rot rather than drink. Truly you are ‘strange.’ And your gods! How can they possibly be greater than our Au-gud, who knows the very courses that the stars take!” Smilingly he faced Jakara. “Only, Jakara, that we know you breathe the cunning of the serpent in the councils of war, I should count you brave; but a fool!”
Jakara laughed heartily. “Only,” he said, “that I know I should have no chance against Beizam, I would take the maid.”
He pointed downwards to a banana-garden from the broad leaves of which a brown-limbed girl gazed up at the men.
Beizam laughed gleefully, and with joking farewell hurried down the hill. Jakara kept a smiling face until the two met and, waving to him, disappeared among the banana-leaves.
Jakara scowled. His steel-grey eyes, the tight-pressed lips, gave his face an instant savagery. The determined jaw but particularly the slightly hooked nose, made him strikingly like the clean-built men of Las; the likeness would have been more evident if his brown skin had been tinged with the chocolate colour of theirs.
“Murderer,” he whispered, “burning to make others dance the Dance. How many will you make quiver? And will there be any poor wretches of whites amongst them? How I should love to slit that big full throat of yours, if only I could keep my own head too.”
Gloweringly he leaned against the boulder and gazed towards invisible Tutu. Gradually his face softened to a tender sympathy, for on blood-stained Tutu there dwelt another Lamar, and, a girl!
To these Torres Strait Islanders every white person was believed to be a “Lamar,” a human spirit of the dead, to be instantly killed. Shipwrecked people in boats were thought to be Lamars, that is, spirits given up by the sea itself, and were especially feared, for, if they were once allowed to breathe the air of land, they inhaled the power to wreak catastrophe upon all humans. Very rarely, because of some fancied resemblance, an Islander claimed a shipwrecked person as his dead son or daughter returned to earth-life in spirit-form, and such were spared. Thus had Jakara been spared, and also a few, a very few, men and women who had survived shipwreck among the superstitious natives of those islands.*
(*Thus had Mrs Barbara Thompson been spared after the wreck of the cutter America on the distant Prince of Wales Group. She was claimed by the chief of Entrance as the spirit of his deceased daughter, Gi-’om. Boroto, chief of Murralug (Prince of Wales Island), took the white woman to wife. After five years she was rescued by H.M.S. Rattlesnake and restored to her friends in Sydney.)
Jakara blamed C’Zarcke that he had never met Eyes of the Sea, as the natives called the Lamar of Tutu. Though he had voyaged to Tutu Island, he had never seen the girl who had been taken from a shipwrecked vessel when five years old. She had been claimed as the Lamar of a Tutu girl. Jakara had often pondered upon the white girl’s plight. Reared as a savage, she had been forced to take part in all their dreadful ceremonies. Jakara shuddered as he thought of the Waiat rites, but she had so far escaped the “Wedding of the Virgins.” He knew her age; she must be twenty now, just the age at which a white girl would be dreaming of the glories of life.
Jakara sighed, and walked thoughtfully down the slope. Hilly Mer is very pretty. The foliage screened villages below, each facing its own tiny beach, with a fleet of big fighting-canoes drawn right up to the front avenues of palms. Each village was flanked by steep grassy headlands, or deep green of tangled jungle, with the intense green of banana-patches away behind. Behind, and farther back still, were the well-kept vegetable and fruit gardens climbing up the little hills, and towards the centre of the island the green-grey of the Wongais surrounding the Sacred Grove. And, brooding high over all, the sombre mass of Gelam, its dead crater-rim circular and glassy, miles in circumference, its great maw now supporting grassy slopes. The island was so markedly different from the Great South Land; in its people, its rocks, its trees, its birds, its corals and fishes. Seven hundred feet above the sea, in the lava rocks of that old crater, are huge chunks of dead coral, proving how in ages past the volcano pushed Mer right up through the bottom of the sea. The Miriam-le were vastly different from the nomadic Australian aboriginal. They were expert navigators, canny traders, and keen agriculturists, and had conquered, explored, and colonized all Torres Strait.
The village houses were plentiful and neat and clean, adroitly thatched with grasses and mats of plaited palm-leaves. Before every house there stood a Sarokag pole, sometimes adorned with big spiral shells, which showed that the man within was initiated into manhood, but was not yet a warrior. On other poles were skulls, the number of which denoted the fighting-power and honour of the master within.
Over Jakara’s house also there stood a pole, and it bore a strange device. This consisted simply of wings of palm-branches topping a bamboo and turned by the wind like a windmill. In answer to questions, in this matter as in numerous