[Gutenberg 13876] • The Great Taboo

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to [www.million-books.com](http://www.million-books.com) where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and woman I have sent from the sun will come ashore on the reef, and reach Boupari. At the words, he stepped forward and raised that heavy tomahawk. With one blow each he brained the two bound and defenceless victims on the altar-stone of his fathers. The rest, a European hand shrinks from revealing. The orgy was too horrible even for description. And that was the land towards which, that moment, Felix Thurstan was struggling, with all his might, to carry Muriel Ellis, from the myriad clasping arms of a comparatively gentle and merciful ocean ! CHAPTER III. LAND: BUT WHAT LAND? As the last glimmering lights of the Australasian died away to seaward, Felix Thurstan knew in his despair there was nothing for it now but to strike out boldly, if he could, for the shore of the island. By this time the breakers had subsided greatly. Not, indeed, that the sea itself was really going down. On the contrary, a brisk wind was rising sharper from the east, and the waves on the open Pacific were growing each moment higher and loppier. But the huge mountain of water that washed Muriel Ellis overboard was not a regular ordinary wave; it was that far more powerful and dangerous mass, a shoal-water breaker. The Australasian had passed at that instant over a submerged coral-bar, quite deep enough, indeed, to lether cross its top without the slightest danger of grazing, but still raised so high towards the surface as to produce a considerable constant ground-swell, which broke in windy weather into huge sheets of surf, like the one that had just struck and washed over the Aus- tralasian, carrying Muriel with it. The very same cause that produced the breakers, however, bore Felix on their summit rapidly landward; and once he had got well beyond the region of the bar that begot them, ...