One might have said,
merely to look at him, he was a being debased by all forms of brutal and
hateful self-indulgence. A baleful light burned in his keen gray eyes.
His lips were thick, full, purple, and wistful.
"My people may look upon me," he said, in a strangely affable
voice, standing forward and smiling with a curious half-cruel,
half-compassionate smile upon his awe-struck followers. "On every day
of the sun's course but this, none save the ministers dedicated to the
service of Tu-Kila-Kila dare gaze unhurt upon his sacred person. If
any other did, the light from his holy eyes would wither them up, and
the glow of his glorious countenance would scorch them to ashes." He
raised his two hands, palm outward, in front of him. "So all the year
round," he went on, "Tu-Kila-Kila, who loves his people, and sends
them the earlier and the later rain in the wet season, and makes their
yams and their taro grow, and causes his sun to shine upon them
freely--all the year round Tu-Kila-Kila, your god, sits shut up in his
own house among the skeletons of those whom he has killed and eaten, or
walks in his walled paddock, where his bread-fruit ripens and his
plantains spring--himself, and the ministers that his tribesmen have
given him."
At the sound of their mystic deity's voice the savages, bending lower
still till their foreheads touched the ground, repeated in chorus, to the
clapping of hands, like some solemn litany: "Tu-Kila-Kila speaks true.
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