 THE HEATHEN BY JACK LONDON READING BY GREG MARGARETT THE HEATHEN BY JACK LONDON I met him first in a hurricane, and though we had gone through the hurricane on the same schooner, it was not until the schooner had gone to pieces under us that I first laid eyes on him. Without doubt I had seen him with the rest of the Kanaka crew on board, but I had not consciously been aware of his existence for the Petit Jean was rather overcrowded. In addition to her eight or ten Kanaka seamen, her white captain, mate, and supercargo, and her six cabin passengers she sailed from Rangaroa with something like eighty-five deck passengers, Pomotons and Tahitians, men, women, and children, each with a trade box to say nothing of sleeping mats, blankets, and clothes bundles. The purling season in the Pomotas was over, and all hands were returning to Tahiti. The six of us cabin passengers were pearl buyers. Two were Americans, one was Ah Chun, the whitest Chinese I have ever known. One was German, one was a Polish Jew, and I completed the half-dozen. It had been a prosperous season. Not one of us had cause for complaint, nor one of the eighty-five deck passengers either. All had done well, and all were looking forward to a rest-off and a good time in Papiti. Of course the Petit Jean was overloaded. She was only seventy tons, and she had no right to carry a tithe of the mob she had on board. Beneath her hatches she was crammed and jammed with pearl shell and cobra. Even the trade room was packed full of shell. It was a miracle that the sailors could work her. There was no moving about the decks. They simply climbed back and forth along the rails. In the night-time they walked upon the sleepers who carpeted the deck, I'll swear too deep. Oh, and there were pigs and chickens on deck and sacks of yams, while every conceivable place was festooned with strings of drinking coconuts and bunches of bananas. On both sides between the four and main shrouds, guys had been stretched, just low enough for the fore-boom to swing clear, and from each of these guys at least fifty bunches of bananas were suspended. It promised to be a messy passage, even if we did make it in the two or three days it would have been required if the southeast trades had been blowing fresh. But they weren't blowing fresh. After the first five hours the trade died away in a dozen or so gasping fans. The calm continued all that night and the next day. One of those glaring glassy calms when the very thought of opening one's eyes to look at it is sufficient to cause a headache. The second day a man died, an Easter Islander, one of the best divers that season in the lagoon. Smallpox. That is what it was. Though how smallpox could come on board when there had been no known cases as sure when we left Rangaroa is beyond me. There it was though, smallpox, a man dead, and three others down on their backs. There was nothing to be done. We could not segregate the sick, nor could we care for them. We were packed like sardines. There was nothing to do but rot or die. That is, there was nothing to do after the night that followed the first death. On that night the mate, the supercargo, the Polish Jew and four native divers, sneaked away in the large whale-boat. They were never heard of again. In the morning the captain promptly scuttled the remaining boats and there we were. That day there were two deaths. The following day three. Then it jumped to eight. It was curious to see how we took it. The natives, for instance, fell into a condition of dumb, stolid fear. The captain, Audus, his name was, a Frenchman, became very nervous and voluble. He actually got the twitches. He was a large, fleshy man, weighing at least two hundred pounds and he quickly became a faithful representation of a quivering jelly mountain of fat. The German, the two Americans and myself bought up all the Scotch whiskey and proceeded to stay drunk. The theory was beautiful, namely if we kept ourselves soaked in alcohol every smallpox germ that came into contact with us would immediately be scorched to a cinder. And the theory worked, though I must confess that neither Captain Audus or Achun were attacked by the disease either. The Frenchman did not drink at all while Achun restricted himself to one drink daily. It was a pretty time. The sun going into northern declination was straight overhead. There was no wind except for frequent squalls which blew fiercely for from five minutes to half an hour and wound up by deluging us with rain. After each squall the awful sun would come out, drawing clouds of steam from the soaked decks. The steam was not nice. It was the vapor of death, freighted with millions and millions of germs. We always took another drink when we saw it going up from the dead and dying and usually we took two or three more drinks, mixing them exceptionally stiff. Also we made it a rule to take an additional several each time they hoved the dead over to the sharks that swarmed about us. We had a week of it and then the whiskey gave out. It is just as well or I shouldn't be alive now. It took a sober man to pull through what followed as you will see when I mentioned the little fact that only two men did pull through. The other man was a heathen. At least that was what I heard Captain Audus call him at the moment I first became aware of the heathen's existence. But to come back, it was at the end of the week with the whiskey gone and the pearl-buyer's sober that I happened to glance at the barometer that hung in the cabin companion way. Its normal register in the palmotus was 2990 and it was even quite customary to see it vacillate between 2985 and 30 or even 3005. But to see it as I saw it, down to 2962 was sufficient to sober the most drunken pearl-buyer that ever incinerated smallpox microbes in Scotch whiskey. I called Captain Audus' attention to it only to be informed that he had watched it going down for several hours. There was little to do, but that little he did very well considering the circumstances. He took off the light sails, shortened right down to a storm canvas, spread lifelines and waited for the wind. His mistake lay in what he did after the wind came. He hoved to on the port-tag, which was the right thing to do south of the equator, if—and there was the rub—if one were not in the direct path of a hurricane. We were in the direct path. I could see that by the steady increase of the wind and the equally steady fall of the barometer. I wanted him to turn and run with the wind on the port-quarter until the barometer ceased falling, and then to heave too. We argued till he was reduced to hysteria, but budge he would not. The worst of it was that I could not get the rest of the pearl-buyers to back me up. Who was I anyway to know more about the sea in its ways than a properly qualified captain was what was in their minds I knew. Of course the sea rose with the wind frightfully, and I shall never forget the first three seas that Petit Jean shipped. She had fallen off as vessels do at times when hoved too, and the first sea made a clean breach. The lifelines were only for the strong and well, and little good were they even for them when the women and children, the bananas and coconuts, the pigs and trade-boxes, the sick and dying, were swept along in a solid screeching, groaning mass. The second sea filled the Petit Jean's decks flush with the rails, and as her stern sank down and her bow tossed skyward all the miserable donage of life and luggage poured aft. It was a human torrent. They came head-first, feet-first, sideways, rolling over and over, twisting, squirming, writhing, and crumpled up. Now and again one caught a grip on a stanchion or a rope, but the weight of the bodies behind tore such grips loose. One man I noticed fetch up, head-on, and square-on with a starboard bit. His head cracked like an egg. I saw what was coming, sprang on top of the cabin and from there into the mainsail itself. Achoon and one of the Americans tried to follow me, but I was one jump ahead of them. The American was swept away and over the stern like a piece of chaff. Achoon caught a spoke of the wheel and swung in behind it, but a strapping ratatongan vaheen, a woman, she must have weighed 250, brought up against him and got an arm around his neck. He clutched the Kanaka Steersman with the other hand, and just at that moment the schooner flung down to starboard. The rush of bodies and sea that was coming along the port runway between the cabin and the rail turned abruptly and poured to starboard. Away they went, vaheen, Achoon, and Steersman, and I swear I saw Achoon grin at me with philosophic resignation as he cleared the rail and went under. The third sea, the biggest of the three, did not do so much damage. By the time it arrived nearly everybody was in the rigging. On deck perhaps a dozen gasping half-drowned and half-stunned wretches were rolling about or attempting to crawl into safety. They went by the board, as did the wreckage of the two remaining boats. The other pearl-buyers and myself between seas managed to get about fifteen women and children into the cabin and battened down. Little good it did the poor creatures in the end. Wind? Out of all my experience I could not have believed it possible for the wind to blow as it did. There is no describing it. How can one describe a nightmare? It was the same way with that wind. It tore the clothes off our bodies. I say, tore them off, and I mean it. I am not asking you to believe it. I am merely telling something that I saw and felt. There are times when I do not believe it myself. I went through it, and that is enough. One could not face that wind and live. It was a monstrous thing, and the most monstrous thing about it was that it increased and continued to increase. Imagine countless millions and billions of tons of sand. Imagine this sand tearing along at ninety of hundred, a hundred and twenty, or any other number of miles per hour. Imagine further this sand to be invisible, impalpable, yet to retain all the weight and density of sand. Do all this, and you may get a vague inkling of what that wind was like. Perhaps sand is not the right comparison. Consider it mud, invisible, impalpable, but heavy as mud. Nay, it goes beyond that. Consider every molecule of air to be a mud-bank in itself. Then try to imagine the multitudinous impact of mud-banks. No, it is beyond me. Language may be adequate to express the ordinary conditions of life, but it cannot possibly express any of the conditions of so enormous a blast of wind. It would have been better had I stuck by my original intention of not attempting a description. I will say this much. The sea, which had risen at first, was beaten down by that wind. More, it seemed as if the whole ocean had been sucked up in the maw of the hurricane and hurled on through that portion of space which previously had been occupied by the air. Of course, our canvas had gone long before, but Captain Audaus had on the Petit Jean something I had never before seen on a South Sea schooner—a sea anchor. It was a conical canvas bag, the mouth of which was kept open by a huge hoop of iron. The sea anchor was bridled, something like a kite, so that it bit into the water as a kite bites into the air, but with a difference. The sea anchor remained just under the surface of the ocean in a perpendicular position. A long line in turn connected it with the schooner. As a result, the Petit Jean rode bow on to the wind and to what sea there was. The situation really would have been favorable had we not been in the path of the storm. True, the wind itself tore our canvas out of the gaskets, jerked out our top masts, and made a raffle of our running gear. But still, we would have come through nicely had we not been square in front of the advancing storm-center. That was what fixed us. I was in a state of stunned, numbed, paralyzed collapse from enduring the impact of the wind, and I think I was just about ready to give up and die when the center smote us. The blow we received was an absolute lull. There was not a breath of air. The effect on one was sickening. Remember that for hours we had been at terrific muscular tension, withstanding the awful pressure of that wind, and then suddenly the pressure was removed. I know that I felt as though I was about to expand, to fly apart in all directions. It seemed as if every atom composing my body was repelling every other atom and was on the verge of rushing off irresistibly into space. But that lasted only for a moment. Destruction was upon us. In the absence of the wind and pressure the sea rose. It jumped, it leaped, it soared straight toward the clouds. Remember from every point of the compass that inconceivable wind was blowing in toward the center of calm. The result was that the seas sprang up from every point of the compass. There was no wind to check them. They popped up like quarks released from the bottom of a pail of water. There was no system to them, no stability. They were hollow, maniacal seas. They were eighty feet high at the least. They were not seas at all. They resembled no sea a man has ever seen. They were splashes, monstrous splashes, that is all. Splashes that were eighty feet high. Eighty? They were more than eighty. They went over our mast heads. They were spouts, explosions. They were drunken. They fell anywhere, anyhow. They jostled one another. They collided. They rushed together and collapsed upon one another, or fell apart like a thousand waterfalls all at once. It was no ocean any man had ever dreamed of, that hurricane center. It was confusion thrice confounded. It was anarchy. It was a hell pit of sea water gone mad. The petite jean? I don't know. They even told me afterward that he did not know. She was literally torn apart, ripped wide open, beaten into a pulp, smashed into kindling wood, annihilated. When I came to, I was in the water swimming automatically, though I was about two-thirds drowned. How I got there I had no recollection. I remembered seeing that petite jean fly to pieces at what must have been the instant that my own consciousness was buffeted out of me. But there I was with nothing to do but make the best of it. And in that best there was little promise. The wind was blowing again. The sea was much smaller and more regular, and I knew that I had passed through the center. Fortunately there were no sharks about. The hurricane had dissipated the ravenous hoard that had surrounded the death ship and fed off of the dead. It was about midday when the petite jean went to pieces, and it must have been two hours afterward when I picked up with one of her hatch covers. The thick rain was driving at the time, and it was the merest chance that flung me and the hatch cover together. A short length of line was trailing from the rope handle, and I knew that I was good for a day, at least if the sharks did not return. Three hours later, possibly a little longer, sticking close to the cover and with closed eyes concentrating my whole soul upon the task of breathing in enough air to keep me going, and at the same time of avoiding breathing in enough water to drown me, it seemed to me that I heard voices. The rain had ceased, and the wind and sea were easing marvelously. Knocked twenty feet away from me on another hatch cover were Captain Aldous and the heathen. They were fighting over the possession of the cover, at least the Frenchman was. Be ennoir! I heard him scream, and at the same time I saw him kick the canaca. Now Captain Aldous had lost all his clothes, except his shoes, and they were heavy slogans. It was a cruel blow, for it caught the heathen on the mouth and the point of the chin, half stunning him. I looked for him to retaliate, but he contented himself with swimming about forlornly, a safe ten feet away. Whenever a fling of the sea threw him closer, the Frenchman hanging on with his hands kicked out at him with both feet. Also at the moment of delivering each kick he called the canaca a black heathen. For two son teams I'd come over there and drown you, you white beast! I yelled. The only reason I did not go was that I felt too tired. The very thought of the effort to swim over was nauseating, so I called to the canaca to come to me and proceeded to share the hatch cover with him. O'Toole, he told me his name was. Also he told me that he was a native of Bora Bora, the most westerly of the society group. As I learned afterward he had got the hatch cover first and after some time encountering Captain Aldous had offered to share it with him and had been kicked off for his pains. And that was how O'Toole and I first came together. He was no fighter. He was all sweetness and gentleness, a love creature, though he stood nearly six feet tall and was muscled like a gladiator. He was no fighter, but he was also no coward. He had the heart of a lion, and in the years that followed I have seen him run risks that I would never dream of taking. What I mean is that while he was no fighter and while he always avoided precipitating a row, he never ran away from trouble when it started. And it was where O'Toole went into action. I shall never forget what he did to Bill King. It occurred in German Samoa. Bill King was held the champion heavyweight of the American Navy. He was a big brute of a man, a veritable guerrilla, one of those hard-hitting rough-housing chaps and clever with his fists as well. He picked the quarrel and he kicked O'Toole twice and struck him once before O'Toole felt it necessary to fight. I don't think it lasted four minutes, at the end of which time Bill King was the unhappy possessor of four broken ribs, a broken forearm, and a dislocated shoulder blade. O'Toole knew nothing of scientific boxing. He was merely a manhandler. And Bill King was something like three months in recovering from the bit of manhandling he received that afternoon on Appiah Beach. But I am running ahead of my yarn. We shared the hatch cover between us. We took turn and turn about, one lying flat on the cover and resting while the other submerged to the neck merely held on with his hands. For two days and nights, spell and spell, on the cover and in the water we drifted over the ocean. Toward the last I was delirious most of the time and there were times too when I heard O'Toole babbling and raving in his native tongue. Our continuous immersion prevented us from dying of thirst, though the sea water and the sunshine gave us the prettiest imaginable combination of salt prickle and sunburn. In the end O'Toole saved my life, for I came too lying on the beach twenty feet from the water, sheltered from the sun by a couple of coconut leaves. No one but O'Toole could have dragged me there and stuck up the leaves for shade. He was lying beside me. I went off again, and the next time I came around it was a cool and starry night, and O'Toole was pressing a drinking coconut to my lips. We were the sole survivors of the Petite Jean. Captain Audouse must have succumbed to exhaustion for several days later his hatch cover drifted ashore without him. O'Toole and I lived with the natives of the Atoll for a week when we were rescued by a French cruiser and taken to Tahiti. In the meantime, however, we had performed the ceremony of exchanging names. In the south seas such a ceremony binds two men closer together than blood-brothership. The initiative had been mine, and O'Toole was rapturously delighted when I suggested it. It is well, he said in Tahitian, for we have been mates together for two days on the lips of death. But death stuttered, I smiled. It was a brave deed you did, master, he replied, and death was not vile enough to speak. Why do you master me, I demanded, with a show of hurt feelings. We have exchanged names. To you I am O'Toole. To me you are Charlie. And between you and me, forever and forever, you shall be Charlie, and I shall be O'Toole. It is the way of the custom. And when we die, if it does happen that we live again somewhere beyond the stars and the sky, still shall you be Charlie to me, and I, O'Toole, to you." Yes, master, he answered, his eyes luminous and soft with joy. There you go! I cried indignantly. What does it matter what my lips utter? he argued. They are only my lips. But I shall think O'Toole always. Whenever I think of myself, I shall think of you. Whenever men call me by name, I shall think of you. And beyond the sky and beyond the stars, always and forever, you shall be O'Toole to me. Is it well, master? I hid my smile and answered that it was well. He parted at Papiti. I remained ashore to recuperate and he went on in a cutter to his own island Bora Bora. Six weeks later he was back. I was surprised for he had told me of his wife and said that he was returning to her and would give over sailing on far voyages. Where do you go, master? He asked after our first greeting. I shrugged my shoulders. It was a hard question. All the world was my answer. All the world, all the sea, and all the islands that are in the sea. I will go with you, he said simply. My wife is dead. I never had a brother, but from what I have seen of other men's brothers I doubt if any man ever had a brother that was to him what O'Toole was to me. He was brother and father and mother as well. And this I know. I lived a straighter and better man because of O'Toole. I cared little for other men, but I had to live straight in O'Toole's eyes. Because of him I dared not tarnish myself. He made me his ideal, compounding me I fear chiefly out of his own love and worship. And there were times when I stood close to the steep pitch of Hades and would have taken the plunge had not the thought of O'Toole restrained me. His pride in me entered into me until it became one of the major rules in my personal code to do nothing that would diminish that pride of his. Naturally I did not learn right away what his feelings were toward me. He never criticized, never censured, and slowly the exalted place I held in his eyes dawned upon me, and slowly I grew to comprehend the hurt I could inflict upon him by being anything less than my best. For seventeen years we were together. For seventeen years he was at my shoulder, watching while I slept, nursing me through fever and wounds, eye and receiving wounds in fighting for me. He signed on the same ships with me, and together we ranged the Pacific from Hawaii to Sydney Head and from Torres Straits to the Galapagos. We black-birded from the New Hebrides and the Line Islands over to the westward clear through Louisiates, New Britain, New Ireland, and New Hanover. We were wrecked three times, in the Gilbert's, in the Santa Cruz group, and in the Fiji's. And we traded and solved wherever a dollar promised in the way of pearl and pearl-shell, copra, bech de mer, hawk-bill, turtle-shell, and stranded wrecks. It began in Papiti, immediately after his announcement that he was going with me over all the sea and the islands in the midst thereof. There was a club in those days in Papiti where the pearlers, traders, captains in riff-raff of South Sea adventurers foregathered. The play ran high and the drink ran high, and I am very much afraid that I kept later hours than were becoming or proper. No matter what the hour was when I left the club, there was Otuo waiting to see me safely home. At first I smiled. Next I chided him. Then I told him flatly that I stood in need of no wet nursing. After that I did not see him when I came out of the club. Quite by accident, a week or so later, I discovered that he still saw me home, lurking across the street among the shadows of the mango trees. What could I do? I know what I did do. Insensibly I began to keep better hours. On wet and stormy nights in the thick of the folly and the fun, the thought would persist in coming to me of Otuo keeping his dreary vigil under the dripping mangoes. Truly he had made a better man of me. Yet he was not straight-laced, and he knew nothing of common Christians morality. All the people on Bora Bora were Christians, but he was a heathen. The only unbeliever on the island, a gross materialist who believed that when he died, he was dead. He believed merely in fair play and square dealing. Petty meanness in his code was almost as serious as wanton homicide. And I do believe that he respected a murderer more than a man given to small practices. Otuo had my welfare always at heart. He thought ahead for me, weighed my plans, and took a greater interest in them than I did myself. At first, when I was unaware of this interest of his in my affairs, he had to divine my intentions. As, for instance, at Papiti, when I contemplated going partners with a navish fellow countrymen on a guano venture, I did not know he was a nave, nor did any white man in Papiti. Neither did Otuo know, but he saw how thickly we were getting and found out for me, and without my asking him. Native sailors from the ends of the seas knock about on the beach in Tahiti, and Otuo, suspicious merely, went among them till he had gathered sufficient data to justify his suspicions. Oh, it was a nice history that of Randolph Waters. I couldn't believe it when Otuo first narrated it. But when I sheeded it home to Waters, he gave in without a murmur and got away on the first steamer to Auckland. At first I am free to confess I couldn't help but resenting Otuo's poking his nose into my business. But I knew that he was wholly unselfish and soon I had to acknowledge his wisdom and discretion. He had his eyes open always to my main chance, and he was both keen-sighted and farsighted. In time he became my counselor until he knew more of my business than I did myself. He really had my interest at heart more than I did. Mine was the magnificent carelessness of youth, for I preferred romance to dollars and adventure to a comfortable billet with all night in. So it was well that I had someone to look out for me. I know that if it had not been for Otuo I should not be here today. Of numerous instances let me give one. I had had some experience in black-burding before I went purling in the Palmotus. Otuo and I were in Samoa. We really were on the beach and hard aground when my chance came to go as recruiter on a black-burred brig. Otuo signed on before the mast. And for the next half dozen years in as many ships we knocked about the wildest portions of Melanesia. Otuo saw to it that he always pulled stroke ore in my boat. Our custom in recruiting labor was to land the recruiter on the beach. The covering boat always lay on its oars several hundred feet offshore, while the recruiter's boat also lying on its oars kept afloat on the edge of the beach. When I landed with my trade goods leaving my steering sweep up peak, Otuo left his stroke position and came into the stern sheets where a winchester lay ready to hand under a flap of canvas. The boat's crew was also armed. These snipers concealed under canvas flaps that ran the length of the gun walls. While I was busy arguing and persuading the woolly-headed cannibals to come and labor on the Queensland plantations, Otuo kept watch. And often and often his low voice warned me of suspicious actions and impending treachery. Sometimes it was the quick shot from his rifle, knocking a savage over that was the first warning I received. And in my rush to the boat his hand was always there to jerk me flying aboard. Once I remember on Santa Ana the boat grounded just as the trouble began. The covering boat was dashing to our assistants, but the several score of savages would have wiped us out before it arrived. Otuo took a flying leap ashore, dug both hands into the trade goods and scattered tobacco, beads, tomahawks, knives, and calicoes in all directions. This was too much for the woolly heads. While they scrambled for the treasure the boat was shoved clear and we were aboard and forty feet away. And I got thirty recruits off that very beach in the next four hours. The particular instance I have in mind was on Malaita, the most savage island in the easterly Solomon's. The natives had been remarkably friendly to and how were we to know that the whole village had been taking up a collection for over two years with which to buy a white man's head. The beggars are all headhunters and they especially esteem a white man's head. The fellow who captured the head would receive the whole collection. As I say, they appeared very friendly and on this day I was fully a hundred yards down the beach from the boat. Otuo had cautioned me and as usual when I did not heed him, I came to grief. The first I knew, a cloud of spears sailed out of the mangrove swamp at me. At least a dozen were sticking into me. I started to run but tripped over one that was fast in my calf and went down. The woolly heads made a run for me, each with a long-handled fantail tomahawk with which to hack off my head. They were so eager for the prize that they got in one another's way. In the confusion I had to take several hacks by throwing myself right and left on the sand. Then Otuo arrived. Otuo the manhandler. In some way he had got hold of a heavy war-club and at close quarters it was a far more efficient weapon than a rifle. He was right in the thick of them so that they could not spear him while their tomahawks seemed worse than useless. He was fighting for me and he was in a true berserker race. He was in a true berserker rage. The way he handled that club was amazing. Their skulls squashed like overripe oranges. It was not until he had driven them back, picked me up in his arms and started to run that he received his first wounds. He arrived in the boat with four spear-thrusts, got his winchester and with it got a man for every shot. Then we pulled aboard the schooner and doctored up. So Otuo the manhandler. Then we pulled aboard the schooner and doctored up. Seventeen years we were together. He made me. I should today be a supercargo, a recruiter, or a memory if it had not been for him. You spend your money and you go out and get more, he said one day. It is easy to get money now, but when you get old your money will be spent and you will not be able to go out and get more. I know, master, I have studied the ways of white men. On the beaches are many old men who were young once and who could get money just like you. Now they are old and they have nothing and they wait about for the young men like you to come ashore and buy drinks for them. The black boy is a slave on the plantations. He gets twenty dollars a year. He works hard. The overseer does not work hard. He rides a horse and watches the black boy work. He gets twelve hundred dollars a year. I am a sailor on the schooner. I get fifteen dollars a month. That is because I am a good sailor. I work hard. The captain has a double awning and drinks beer out of a long bottle. I have never seen him haul a rope or pull an ore. He gets one hundred and fifty dollars a month. I am a sailor. He is a navigator. Master, I think it would be very good for you to know the navigation. Otoo spurred me on to it. He sailed with me as second mate on my first schooner and he was far prouder of my command than I was myself. Later on it was the captain is well paid, master, but the ship is in his keeping and he is never free from the burden. It is the owner who is better paid, the owner who sits ashore with many servants and turns his money over. True, but a schooner costs five thousand dollars. An old schooner at that, I objected. I should be an old man before I saved five thousand dollars. There be short ways for white men to make money, he went on, pointing ashore at the coconut fringed beach. We were in the Solomon's at the time picking up a cargo of ivory nuts along the east coast of Guadalcanar. Between this river-mouth and the next it is two miles, he said. The flat land runs far back. It is worth nothing now. Next year, who knows, or the year after, men will pay much money for that land. The anchorage is good. Big steamers can lie close up. You can buy the land four miles deep from the old chief for ten thousand sticks of tobacco, ten bottles of square face and a snider, which will cost you maybe one hundred dollars. Then you place the deed with the commissioner and the next year or the year after you sell and become the owner of a ship. I followed his lead and his words came true, though in three years instead of two. Next came the grasslands deal on Guadalcanar, twenty thousand acres on a governmental nine hundred ninety-nine years lease at a nominal sum. I owned the lease for precisely ninety days when I sold it to a company for half a fortune. Always it was O'Toole who looked ahead and saw the opportunity. He was responsible for the solving of the Doncaster, brought in at auction for a hundred pounds and clearing three thousand after every expense was paid. He led me into the Savai plantation and the Coco venture on Upalu. We did not go seafaring so much as in the old days. I was too well off. I married and my standard of living rose, but O'Toole remained the same old time O'Toole moving about the house or trailing through the office, his wooden pipe in his mouth, a shilling undershirt on his back and a foreshilling lava-lava about his loins. I could not get him to spend money. There was no way of repaying him except with love, and God knows he got that in full measure from all of us. The children worshipped him, and if he had been spoilable my wife would surely have been his undoing. The children. He really was the one who showed them the way of their feet in the practical. He began by teaching them to walk. He sat up with them when they were sick. One by one when they were scarcely toddlers he took them down to the lagoon and made them into amphibians. He taught them more than I ever knew of the habits of fish and the ways of catching them. In the bush it was the same thing. At seven Tommy knew more woodcraft than I ever dreamed existed. At six Mary went over the sliding rock without a quiver and I have seen strong men balk at that feet. And when Frank had just turned six he could bring up shillings from the bottom in three fathoms. My people in Bora Bora do not like heathen. They are all Christians. And I do not like Bora Bora Christians. He said one day when I with the idea of getting him to spend some of the money that was rightfully his had been trying to persuade him to make a visit to his own island in one of our schooners. A special voyage which I had hoped to make a record-breaker in the matter of prodigal expense. I say one of our schooners though legally at the time they belong to me. I struggled long with him to enter into partnership. We have been partners from the day that Petit Schaum went down, he said at last. But if your heart so wishes then shall we become partners by law. I have no work to do yet are my expenses large. I drink and eat and smoke in plenty. It costs much. I know. I do not pay for the playing of billiards for I play on your table but still the money goes. Fishing on the reef is only a rich man's pleasure. It is shocking the cost of hooks and cotton line. Yes, it is necessary that we be partners by law. I need the money. I shall get it from the head clerk in the office. So the papers were made and sorted. A year later I was compelled to complain. Charlie said I, you are a wicked old fraud, a miserly skin-flint, a miserable land-crab. Behold, your share for the year in all our partnership has been thousands of dollars. The head clerk has given me this paper. It says that in the year you have drawn just eighty-seven dollars and twenty cents. Is there any owing me? He asked anxiously. I tell you thousands and thousands, I answered. His face brightened as with an immense relief. It is well, he said. See that the head clerk keeps good account of it. When I want it I shall want it and there must not be a cent missing. If there is, he added fiercely after a pause, it must come out of the clerk's wages. And all the time as I afterward learned his will drawn up by Carothers and making me sole beneficiary lay in the American consul's safe. But the end came, as the end must come to all human associations. It occurred in the Solomon's, where our wildest work had been done in the wild young days and where we were once more principally on holiday. Incidentally to look after our holdings on Florida Island and to look over the purling possibilities of the Miboli Pass. We were lying at Savo, having run into trade for curios. Now, Savo is alive with sharks. The custom of the woolly heads of burying their dead in the sea did not tend to discourage the sharks from making the adjacent wooders a hangout. It was my luck to be coming aboard in a tiny overloaded native canoe when the thing capsized. There were four woolly heads in myself in it or rather hanging to it. The schooner was a hundred yards away. I was just hailing for a boat when one of the woolly heads began to scream. Holding on to the end of the canoe, both he and that portion of the canoe were dragged under several times. Then he loosed his clutch and disappeared. A shark had got him. The three remaining savages tried to climb out of the water upon the bottom of the canoe. I yelled and struck at the nearest with my fist, but it was no use. They were in a blind funk. The canoe could barely have supported one of them. Under the three it upended and rolled sideways, throwing them back into the water. I abandoned the canoe and started to swim toward the schooner, expecting to be picked up by the boat before I got there. One of the savages elected to come with me and we swam along silently, side by side, now and again putting our faces into the water and peering about for sharks. The screams of the man who stayed by the canoe informed us that he was taken. I was peering into the water when I saw a big shark pass directly beneath me. He was fully sixteen feet in length. I saw the whole thing. He got the woolly head by the middle and away he went, the poor devil, head, shoulders, and arms out of the water all the time, screeching in a heart rending way. He was carried along in this fashion for several hundred feet when he was dragged beneath the surface. I swam doggedly on, hoping that that was the last unattached shark. But there was another. Whether it was the one that had attacked the natives earlier or whether it was one that had made a good meal elsewhere, I do not know. At any rate, he was not in such haste as the others. I could not swim so rapidly now, for a large part of my effort was devoted to keeping track of him. I was watching him when he made his first attack. By good luck I got both hands on his nose, and though his momentum nearly shoved me under, I managed to keep him off. He veered clear and began circling about again. A second time I escaped him by the same maneuver. The third rush was a miss on both sides. He sheared at the moment my hands should have landed on his nose, but his sandpaper hide, I had on a sleeveless undershirt, scraped the skin off one arm from elbow to shoulder. By this time I was played out and gave up hope. The schooner was still two hundred feet away. My face was in the water and I was watching him maneuver for another attempt when I saw a brown body pass between us. It was Otuo. Swim for the schooner master, he said, and he spoke gaily as though the affair were a mere lark. I know sharks, the shark is my brother. I obeyed, swimming slowly on while Otuo swam about me, keeping always between me and the shark, foiling his rushes and encouraging me. The davit tackle carried away and they are rigging the falls, he explained a minute or so later, and then went under to head off another attack. By the time the schooner was thirty feet away I was about done for. I could scarcely move. They were heaving lines at us from on board, but they continually fell short. The shark finding that it was receiving no hurt had become bolder. Several times it nearly got me, but each time Otuo was there just the moment before it was too late. Of course, Otuo could have saved himself any time, but he stuck by me. Good-bye, Charlie. I'm finished. I just managed to gasp. I knew that the end had come and that the next moment I should throw up my hands and go down. But Otuo laughed in my face, saying, I will show you a new trick. I will make that shark feel sick. He dropped in behind me where the shark was preparing to come at me. A little more to the left, he next called out. There was a line there, on the water, to the left master, to the left. I changed my course and struck out blindly. I was by that time barely conscious. As my hand closed on the line I heard an exclamation from on board. I turned and looked. There was no sign of Otuo. The next instant he broke the surface. Both hands were off at the wrists, the stumps spouting blood. Otuo, he called softly, and I could see in his gaze the love that thrilled in his voice. Then, and only then, at the very last of all our years, he called me by that name. Goodbye, Otuo! he called. Then he was dragged under, and I was hauled aboard where I fainted in the captain's arms. And so passed Otuo, who saved me and made me a man, and who saved me in the end. We met in the maw of a hurricane and parted in the maw of a shark, with seventeen intervening years of comradeship, the like of which I dare to assert has never befallen two men, the one brown and the other white. If Jehovah be from his high place watching every sparrow fall, not least in his kingdom shall be Otuo, the one heathen of Bora Bora. End of The Heathen by Jack London The House of Mapui. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Note from Reader. One fathom is equal to six English feet or a bit less than two meters. The House of Mapui by Jack London. Despite the heavy clumsiness of her lines, the Aorai handled easily in the light breeze, and her captain ran her well in before he hoeved to just outside the suck of the surf. The atal of Hiku-eiru lay low on the water, a circle of pounded coral sand a hundred yards wide, twenty miles in circumference and from three to five feet above high water mark. On the bottom of the huge and glassy lagoon was much pearl shell and from the deck of the schooner, across the slender ring of the atal, the divers could be seen at work. But the lagoon had no entrance for even a trading schooner. With a favoring breeze, cutters could win in through the torturous and shallow channel, but the schooners lay off and on outside and sent in their small boats. The Aorai swung out a boat smartly into which sprang half a dozen brown-skinned sailors clad only in scarlet and scarlet-line cloths. They took the oars, while in the stern sheets at the steering sweep, stood a young man garbed in the tropic white that marks the European. The golden strain of Polynesia betrayed itself in the sun-glint of his fair skin and cast up golden sheens and lights through the glimmering blue of his eyes. Ra'ol he was, Alexander Ra'ol, youngest son of Marie Ra'ol, the wealthy quarter-caste who owned and managed half a dozen trading schooners similar to the Aorai. Across the eddy just outside the entrance and in and through and over a boiling riptide, the boat fought its way to the mirrored column of the lagoon. Young Ra'ol leaped out onto the white sand and shook hands with a tall native. The man's chest and shoulders were magnificent, but the stump of a right arm, beyond the flesh of which the aged white-and-bone projected several inches, attested the encounter with a shark that had put an end to his diving days and made him a fauna and an intriguer for small favors. Have you heard, Alec? Were his first words. Mapuhi has found a pearl, such a pearl. Never was there one like it ever fished up in Iku'eru nor in all of Pa'umotus nor in all the world. Buy it from him. He has it now. And remember that I told you first. He is a fool and you can get it cheap. Have you any tobacco? Straight up the beach to a shack under a pandanus tree, Ra'ol headed. He was his mother's supercargo and his business was to comb all the Pa'umotus for the wealth of cobra, shell, and pearls that they yielded up. He was a young supercargo. It was the second voyage in such capacity and he suffered much secret worry from his lack of experience in pricing pearls. But when Mapuhi exposed the pearl to his sight, he managed to suppress the startle it gave him and to maintain a careless commercial expression on his face. For the pearl had struck him a blow. It was as large as a pigeon egg, a perfect sphere of a whiteness that reflected fluorescent lights from all colors about it. It was alive. Never had he seen anything like it. When Mapuhi dropped it into his hand he was surprised by the weight of it. That showed that it was a good pearl. He examined it closely through a pocket magnifying glass. It was without flaw or blemish. The purity of it seemed almost to melt into the atmosphere out of his hand. In the shade it was softly luminous, gleaming like a tender moon. So translucently white was it that when he dropped it into a glass of water he had difficulty in finding it. So straight and swiftly had it sunk to the bottom that he knew its weight was excellent. Well, what do you want for it? He asked with a fine assumption of nonchalance. I want, Mapuhi began, and behind him framing his own dark face, the dark faces of two women and a girl knotted concurrence in what he wanted. Their heads were bent forward. They were animated by a suppressed eagerness, their eyes flashed avariciously. I want a house, Mapuhi went on. It must have a roof of galvanized iron and an octagon drop clock. It must be six fathoms long with a porch all around. A big room must be in the center, with a round table in the middle of it and the octagon drop clock on the wall. There must be four bedrooms, two on each side of the big room, and in each bedroom must be an iron bed, two chairs, and a washstand. And back of the house must be a kitchen, a good kitchen with pots and pans and a stove. And you must build the house on my island, which is Fakarava. Is that all, Raul asked incredulously. There must be a sewing machine, spoke up to Farah, Mapuhi's wife. Not forgetting the octagon drop clock, added Nauri, Mapuhi's mother. Yes, that is all, said Mapuhi. Young Raul laughed. He laughed long and heartily. But while he laughed, he secretly performed problems in mental arithmetic. He had never built a house in his life, and his notions concerning house-building were hazy. While he laughed, he had the cost of the voyage to Tahiti for the materials, of the materials themselves, of the voyage back again to Fakarava, and the cost of landing the materials and of building the house. It would come to four thousand French dollars, allowing a margin for safety. Four thousand French dollars were equivalent to twenty thousand francs. It was impossible. How was he to know the value of such a pearl? Twenty thousand francs was a lot of money, and of his mother's money, at that. Mapuhi, he said, you are a big fool. Set a money price. But Mapuhi shook his head, and the three heads behind him shook with his. I want the house, he said. It must be six fathoms along with the porch all around. Yes, yes, Raul interrupted. I know all about your house, but it won't do. I'll give you a thousand chilly dollars. Four heads chorus to silent negative. And a hundred chilly dollars in trade. I want the house, Mapuhi began. What good will the house do you, Raul demanded? The first hurricane that comes along will wash it away. You ought to know. Captain Rafi says it looks like a hurricane right now. Not on Fakarava, said Mapuhi. The land is much higher there. On this island, yes. Any hurricane can sweep Hiku-eru. I will have the house on Fakarava. It must be six fathoms along with the porch all around. And Raul will listen again to the tale of the house. Several hours he spent in the endeavor to hammer the house obsession out of Mapuhi's mind. But Mapuhi's mother, and wife, and Naka'ura, Mapuhi's daughter, bolstered him and his resolve for the house. Through the open doorway, while he listened for the 20th time to the detailed description of the house that was wanted, Raul saw his schooner's second boat draw up on the beach. The sailors rested on the oars, advertising haste to be gone. The first maid of the A'u Rai sprang ashore, exchanged a word with the one-armed native, then hurried towards Raul. The day grew suddenly dark, as a squall obscured the face of the sun. Across the lagoon, Raul could see approaching the ominous line of the puff of wind. Captain Rafi says you've got to get to hell out of here, was the maids greeting. If there's any shell, we've got to run the risk of picking it up later on. So he says. The barometers dropped to twenty-nine seventy. The gust of wind struck the pen and us tree overhead and tore through the palms beyond, flinging half a dozen ripe coconuts with heavy thuds to the ground. Then came the rain out of the distance, advancing with the roar of a gale of wind and causing the water of the lagoon to smoke and driven windrows. The sharp rattle of the first drops was on the leaves, when Raul sprang to his feet. A thousand chilly dollars cashed down Mapui, he said, and two hundred chilly dollars in trade. I want a house, the other began. Mapui, Raul yelled, in order to make himself heard, you are a fool. He flung out of the house and side by side with the mate, fought his way down the beach toward the boat. They could not see the boat. The traffic rain sheeted about them so that they could see only the beach under their feet and the spiteful little waves from the lagoon that snapped and bit at the sand. A figure appeared through the deluge. It was Hooroo Hooroo, the man with the one arm. Did you get the pearl? He yelled in Raul's ear. Mapui is a fool, was the answer, and yelled, and the next moment they were lost to each other in the descending water. Half an hour later, Hooroo Hooroo, watching from the seaward side of the atal, saw the two boats hoisted in, and the Aorai pointed her nose out to sea. And there her just came in from the sea on the wings of the squall. He saw another schooner hove to and dropping a boat into the water. He knew her. It was the Aorohaina, owned by Toriki, the half-caste trader who served as his own supercargo, and doubtlessly was even then in the stern sheets of the boat. Hooroo Hooroo chuckled. He knew that Mapui owed Toriki for trade goods advance the year before. The squall had passed. The hot sun was blazing down, and the lagoon was once more a mirror. But the air was sticky like mucilage, and the weight of it seemed to burden the lungs and make breathing difficult. Have you heard the news, Toriki? Hooroo Hooroo asked. Mapui has found a pearl. Never was there a pearl like it ever fished up in Hiku Eiru, nor anywhere in the Paumotus, nor anywhere in all the world. Mapui is a fool. Besides, he owes you money. Remember that I told you first. Have you any tobacco? And to the grass-shack of Mapui went Toriki. He was a masterful man, with all a fairly stupid one. Carelessly, he binsted at the wonderful pearl, glanced for a moment only, and carelessly he dropped it into his pocket. You're a lucky, he said. It is a nice pearl. I will give you credit on the books. I want a house. Mapui began in consternation. It must be six fathoms. Six fathoms your grandmother was the trader's retort. You want to pay up your debts, that's what you want. You owed me twelve hundred dollars chili. Very well. You owe them no longer. The account is squared. Besides, I will give you credit for two hundred chili. If when I get to Tahiti the pearl sells well, I will give you credit for another hundred. That will make three hundred. But mind only if the pearl sells well. I may even lose money on it. Mapui folded his arms and sorrow and sat with bowed head. He had been robbed of his pearl. In place of the house he had paid the debt. There was nothing to show for the pearl. You are a fool, said Tafara. You are a fool, said Nauri, his mother. Why did you let the pearl into his hand? What was I to do, Mapui protested? I owed him the money. He knew I had the pearl. You heard him yourself ask to see it. I had not told him. He knew someone else told him, and I owed him the money. Mapui is a fool, mimicked Nagarua. She was twelve years old and did not know any better. Mapui relieved his feelings by sending her reeling from a box on the ear, while Tafara and Ura burst in the tears and continued to upgrade him after the manner of women. Ura Ura, watching on the beach, saw a third schooner that he knew heave to outside the entrance and drop a boat. It was the Hira, well-named, for she was owned by Levy, the German Jew, the greatest pearl buyer of them all, and, as well known, Hira was the Tahitian god of fishermen and thieves. Have you heard the news, Ura Ura asked, as Levy, a fat man with massive asymmetrical features, stepped out onto the beach. Mapui has found the pearl. There was never a pearl like it in Haiku Eiru, in all the Pa'umotus, in all the world. Mapui is a fool. He has sold it to Toriki for fourteen hundred shelly. I listened outside and heard. Toriki is likewise a fool. You can buy it from him cheap. Remember that I told you first. Have you any tobacco? Where is Toriki? In the house of Captain Lynch, drinking absence. He has been there an hour. And while Levy and Toriki drank absence and shaffered over the pearl, Hura Hura listened and heard the stupendous price of twenty-five thousand francs agreed upon. It was at this time that both the Oroheina and the Hira, running in close to shore, began firing guns and signalling frantically. The three men stepped outside in time to see the two schooners go hastily about and head offshore, dropping mainsails and flying jibs on the run in the teeth of the squall that healed them far over on the whitened water. Then the rain blotted them out. They'll be back after it's over, said Toriki. We'd better be getting out of here. I reckon the glass is falling some more, said Captain Lynch. He was a white-bearded sea-captain, too old for service, who had learned that the only way to live on comfortable terms with his asthma was on Hikureiru. He went inside to look at the barometer. Great God, they heard him exclaim, and rushed in to join him at Staring at a Dial, which marked 29-20. Again they came out, this time anxiously, to consult sea and sky. The squall had cleared away, but the sky remained overcast. The two schooners, under all sail, and joined by a third, could be seen making back. A veer in the wind induced them to slack off sheets in five minutes afterwards. A sudden veer from the opposite quarter caught all three schooners aback, and those on shore could see the boom-tackles being slacked away or cast off on the jump. The sound of the surf was loud, hollow, and menacing, and a heavy swell was setting in. A terrible sheet of lightning burst before their eyes, illuminating the dark day, and the thunder rolled wildly about them. Toriki and Levi broke into a run for their boats, the latter ambling along like a panic-stricken hippopotamus. As their two boats swept out the entrance, they passed the boat of the Aorahi coming in. In the stern sheets, encouraging that rowers was Raoul, unable to shake the vision of the pearl from his mind, he was returning to accept Mapuhi's price of a house. He landed on the beach in the midst of a driving thunder squall that was so dense that he collided with Hurra Hurra before he saw him. Too late yelled Hurra Hurra. Mapuhi sold it to Toriki for 1,400 chili, and Toriki sold it to Levi for 25,000 francs, and Levi will sell it in France for 100,000 francs. Have you any tobacco? Raoul felt relieved. His troubles about the pearl were over. He did not worry any more, even if he had not got the pearl. But he did not believe Hurra Hurra. Mapuhi might well have sold it for 1,400 chili, but that Levi, who knew pearls should have paid 25,000 francs was too wide a stretch. Raoul decided to interview Captain Lynch on the subject, but when he arrived at that ancient mariner's house he found him looking wide-eyed at the barometer. What do you read it, Captain Lynch asked anxiously, rubbing his spectacles and staring again at the instrument? 2910 said Raoul. I have never seen it so well before. I should say not, snorted the captain. Fifty years, boy and man, on all the seas, and I've never seen it go down to that. Listen. They stood for a moment while the surf rumbled and shook the house. Then they went outside. The squall had passed. They could see the Aorahi lying be calmed a mile away and pitching and tossing madly in the tremendous seas that rolled in stately procession down out of the northeast and flung themselves furiously upon the coral shore. One of the sailors from the boat pointed at the mouth of the passage and shook his head. Raoul looked and saw a white anarchy of foam and surge. I guess I'll stay with you tonight, Captain, he said, then turned to the sailor and told him to haul the boat out and to find shelter for himself and fellows. 29 Flat, Captain Lynch reported, coming out from another look at the barometer, a chair in his hand, he sat down and stared at the spectacle of the sea. The sun came out increasing the sultriness of the day while the column still held. The seas continued to increase in magnitude. What makes that sea is what gets me, Raoul muttered petulantly. There is no wind, yet look at it. Look at that fellow there. Miles in length, carrying tens of thousands of tons in weight, its impact shook the frail at all like an earthquake. Captain Lynch was startled. Gracious, he bellowed half rising from his chair, then said, but there is no wind, Raoul persisted. I could understand it if there was wind along with it. You'll get the wind soon enough without worrying for it, was the grim reply. The two men sat on in silence. The sweat stood out on their skin and myriads of tiny drops that ran together, forming blotches of moisture rich and turned coalesced into rivulets that dripped to the ground. They panted for breath of the wind's efforts being especially painful. A sea swept up the beach, licking around the trunks of the coconuts and subsiding almost at their feet. Way past High Watermark, Captain Lynch remarked, and I've been here eleven years. He looked at his watch. It is three o'clock. A man and woman at their heels, a motley following of brats and currs, trailed disconsolently by. They came to the beach, irresolution, sat down in the sand. A few minutes later another family trailed in from the opposite direction, the men and women carrying a heterogeneous assortment of possessions. And soon several hundred persons of all ages and sexes were congregated about the captain's dwelling. He called to one new arrival, a woman with a nursing babe in her arms, and an old man who had just been swept into the lagoon. This was the highest spot of land and miles and already, in many places on either hand, the great seas were making a clean breach of the slender ring of the atoll and surging into the lagoon. Twenty miles around stretched the ring of the atoll and in no place was it more than fifty fathoms wide. It was the height of the diving season and from all the islands around Haiti the natives had gathered. There are twelve hundred men, women and children here, said Captain Lynch. I wonder how many will be here tomorrow morning. But why don't it blow? That's what I want to know, Raoul demanded. Don't worry, young man, don't worry. You'll get your troubles fast enough. Even as Captain Lynch spoke a great watery mass smote the atoll. The seawater churned about them three inches deep under the chairs. A low wail of fear went up from the many women. The children with clasped hands stared at the immense rollers and cried piteously. Chickens and cats, waiting perturbably in the water, as if by common consent, with flight and scramble, took refuge on the roof of the captain's house. A poa motin with the litter of newborn puppies in the basket climbed into a coconut tree and twenty feet above the ground made the basket fast. The mother floundered about in the water beneath, whining and yelping, and still the sun shone brightly and the dead calm continued. They sat and watched the seas in the insane pitching of the A. Aurea. Captain Lynch gazed at the huge mountains of water sweeping in until he could gaze no more. He covered his face with his hands to shut out the sight, then went into the house. Twenty-eight sixty, he said quietly, when he returned. In his arm was a coil of small rope. He cut it into two fathom lengths, giving one to Raoul and retaining one for himself distributed the remainder among the women with the advice to pick out a tree and climb. A light air began to blow out of the northeast and the fan of it on his cheeks seemed to cheer Raoul up. He could see the A. Aurea trimming her sheets and seeing offshore, and he regretted that he was not on her. She would get away at any rate, but as for the A. Aoul, as he breached across, almost sweeping him off his feet, and he selected a tree. Then he remembered the barometer and ran back to the house. He encountered Captain Lynch on the same air end, and together they went in. Twenty-eight twenty, said the old Mariner. It's going to be fair hell filled with the rush of something. The house quivered and vibrated, and they heard the thrumming of a mighty note of sound. The windows rattled. Two panes crashed, a draft of wind tore in, striking them and making them stagger. The door opposite banged shut, shattering the latch. The white door knob crumpled in fragments to the floor. The room's walls bulged like a gas balloon in the process of sudden inflation. Then came the new sound like the rattle of musketry, as the spray from the sea struck the wall of the house. Captain Lynch looked at his watch. It was four o'clock. He put on a coat of pilot cloth, unhooked the barometer, and stowed it away in a capacious pocket. Again the sea struck the house with a heavy thud, and the light building tilted, twisted, quartered around on its foundation, down its floor at an angle of ten degrees. Raoul went out first. The wind caught him and whirled him away. He noted that it had hauled around to the east, with a great effort he threw himself on the sand, prouching and holding his own. Captain Lynch, driven like a wisp of straw, sprawled over him. Two of the aoris, sailors, leaving a coconut tree to which they had been clinging, came to their land, leaning against the wind at impossible angles and fighting and clawing every inch of the way. The old man's joints were stiff and he could not climb so the sailors, by means of short ends of rope tied together, hoisted him up the trunk a few feet at a time, till they could make him fast, at the top of the tree, fifty feet from the ground. Raoul passed his length of rope around the base of an adjacent tree and stood the wind was frightful. He had never dreamed it could blow so hard as he breached across the atoll, wedded him to the knees, arid subsided into the lagoon. The sun had disappeared and a lead-colored twilight settled down. A few drops of rain, driving horizontally, struck him. The impact was like that of lead and pellets. A splash of salt spray struck his face. It was like the slap of man's hand. His cheeks stung and involuntary tears of pain were in his smarty eyes. Several hundred natives had taken to the trees and he could have left at the bunches of human fruit clustering in the tops. Then, being dehesion-born, he doubled his body at the waist, clasped the trunk of his tree with his hands, pressed the soles of his feet against the near-surface of the trunk and clasped the tree. At the top he found two women, two children, and a man. One little girl clasped a house cat at her arms. From his airy he waved his hand to Captain Lynch and that dowdy patriarch waved back. Raoul was appalled at the sky. It had approached much nearer. In fact, it seemed just over his head and it had turned from lead to black. Many people were still on the ground, grouped at the trees and holding on. Several such clusters were praying and in one the Mormon missionary was exhorting. A weird sound, rhythmical, faint as the faintest chirp of a far cricket, enduring but for a moment, but in the moment suggested to him vaguely the thought of heaven and celestial music came to his ears. He glanced about him and saw at the base of another tree a large cluster of people holding ropes and by one another. He could see their faces working and their lips moving in unison. No sound came to him, but he knew they were singing hymns. Still the wind continued to blow harder. By no conscious process could he measure it, for it had long since passed beyond all his experience of wind, but he knew somehow, nevertheless, that it was blowing harder. Not far away a tree was uprooted flinging its load of human beings to the ground. A sea washed across the strip of land and they were gone. Things were happening quickly. He saw a brown shoulder and a black head silhouetted against the churning white of the lagoon. The next instant that too had vanished. Other trees were going, falling and crisscrossing like matches. He was amazed at the power of the wind. His own tree was swaying periously. One woman was catching the little girl who in turn still hung on to the cat. The man, holding the other child, touched Raoul's arm and pointed. He looked and saw the Mormon church careening drunkenly a hundred feet away. It had been torn from his foundations and wind and sea were heaving and shoving it toward the lagoon. A frightful wall of water caught it, tilted it, and flung it against a half-dozen coconut trees. The bunches of human fruit fell like ripe coconuts. The subsiding wave showed them on the ground, some lying motionless, others squirming and writhing. They reminded him strangely of ants. He was not shocked. He had risen above horror. Quite as a matter, of course, he noted the succeeding wave sweeped the sand clean to the human wreckage. A third wave, more colossal than any he had yet seen, hurled the church into the lagoon where it floated off into the obscurity to Leeward. Half submerged, reminding him for all the world of a Noah's Ark. He looked for Captain Lynch's house and was surprised to find it gone. Things certainly were happening quickly. He noticed that many of the people in the trees that still held had descended to the ground. The wind had yet again increased. His own tree showed that. It no longer swayed or bent over and back. Instead, it remained practically stationary, curved in a rigid angle from the wind and merely vibrating. But the vibration was sickening. It was like that of a turning fork or the tongue of a Jew's harp. It was the rapidity of the vibration that made it so bad. Even though its roots held, it could not stand the strain for long. Something would have to break. Ah, there was one that had gone. He had not seen it go, but there it stood, the remnant, broken off halfway up the trunk. One did not know what happened unless he saw it. The mere crashing of trees and whales of human despair occupied no place in that mighty volume of sound. He chanced to be looking in Captain Lynch's direction when it happened. He saw the trunk of the tree halfway up splinter in part without noise. The head of the tree with three sailors of the Aeora and the old captain sailed off over the lagoon. It did not fall to the ground but drove through the air like a piece of shaft. For a hundred yards he followed its flight when it struck the water. He strained his eyes and was sure that he saw Captain Lynch wave farewell. Raoul did not wait for anything more. He touched the native and made signs to descend to the ground. The man was willing but his women were paralyzed from terror and he elected to remain with them. Raoul passed his rope around the tree and slid down. A rush of salt water went over his head. He held his breath and clung desperately to the rope. The water subsided and in the shoulder of the trunk he breathed once more. He fastened the rope more securely and then was put under by another sea. One of the women slid down and joined him, the native remaining by the other woman, the two children, and the cat. The supercargo had noticed other groups clinging at the bases of the other trees continually diminished. Now he saw the process work out alongside him. It required all his strength to hold on and the woman who had joined him was growing weaker. Each time he emerged from a sea he was surprised to find himself still there and next surprised to find the woman still there. At last he emerged to find himself alone. He looked up. The top of the tree had gone as well. At half his original height the splintered end vibrated. He was safe. The root still held while the tree had been shorn of its windage. He began to climb up. He was so weak that he went slowly and sea after sea caught him before he was above them. Then he tied himself to the trunk and stiffened his soul to face the night and he knew not what. He felt very lonely in the darkness. At times it seemed to him that it was the end of the world and that he was the last one left alive. Still the wind increased. Hour after hour it increased. By what he calculated was eleven o'clock the wind had become unbelievable. It was a horrible monstrous thing as screaming fury a wall that smote and passed on but that continued to smite and pass on a wall without end. It seemed to him that he had become upright and ethereal that it was he that was in motion that he was being driven with inconceivable velocity through unending solidness. The wind was no longer air in motion. It had become substantial as water or quicksilver. He had a feeling that he could reach into it and tear it out in chunks as one might do with the meat in the carcass of a steer that he could seize hold of the wind and hang on to it as a man in the carcass of a cliff. The wind strangled him. He could not face it and breathe for it rushed in through his mouth and nostrils distending his lungs like bladders. At such moments it seemed to him that his body was being packed and swollen with solid earth. Only by pressing his lips to the trunk of the tree could he breathe. Also the ceaseless impact of the wind exhausted him. No longer thought and was but semi-conscious. One idea constituted his consciousness so this was a hurricane. That one idea persisted irregularly. It was like a feeble flame that flickered occasionally. From a state of stupor he would return to it so this was a hurricane. Then he would go off into another stupor. The height of the hurricane endured from eleven at night in the morning and it was at eleven that the tree in which clung Mapui and his women snapped off. Mapui rose to the surface of the lagoon still clutching his daughter in the gyre. Only the South Sea Islander could have lived in such a striving smother. The pandemous tree to which he had attached himself turned over and over in the froth and churn and it was only by hanging on at times and waiting and at other times rapidly that he was able to get his head and necaras to the surface at intervals sufficiently near together to keep the breath in them. But the air was mostly water with flying spray and sheeted rain that poured along at right angles to the perpendicular. It was ten miles across the lagoon to the further ring of sand. Here tossing tree trunks, timbers, wrecks of cutters and wreckage of houses killed nine out of ten miserable beings who survived the passage of the lagoon. After round exhausted they were hurled into this mad murder of the elements and battered into formless flesh. But Mapui was fortunate. His chance was the one in ten. It fell to him by the freakage of fate. He emerged upon the sand bleeding from a score of wounds. Nakakura's left arm was broken, the fingers of her right hand were crushed and cheek and forehead were laid open to the bone. He clutched a tree that yet stood and clung on, holding the girl and sobbing for rare, while the waters of the lagoon washed by knee-high and at times waist-high. At three in the morning the backbone of the hurricane broke. By five no more than the stiff breeze was blowing, and by six it was dead calm and the sun was shining. The sea had gone down. On the yet listless edge of the lagoon, Mapui saw the broken bodies of those who had failed in the landing. That was Tafara and Urara were among them. He went along the beach examining them and came upon his wife lying half in and half out of the water. He sat down and wept, making harsh animal sounds after the manner of primitive grief. Then she stirred uneasily and groaned. He looked more closely. Not only was she alive, but she was uninjured. She was merely sleeping. Hers also had been the one chance in ten. Of the twelve hundred alive the night before, but three hundred remained. The Mormon missionary and a jond arm made the senses. The lagoon was cluttered with corpses. Not a house nor a hut was standing. In the whole atoll not two stones remained one upon another. One in fifty of the coconut palms still stood and they were wrecks, while on not one of them remained a single nut. There was no fresh water. The shallow wells that caught the surface seepage of the rain were filled with salt. Out of the lagoon a few soaked bags of flour were recovered. The survivors cut the hearts out of the fallen coconut trees and ate them. Here and there they crawled into tiny hutches made by following out the sand and covering over with fragments of metal roofing. The missionary made a crude still, but he could not still water for three hundred persons. By the end of the day, Raoul, taken a bath in the lagoon, discovered that his thirst was somewhat relieved. He cried out the news and there upon three hundred men, women and children could have been seen standing up to their necks in the lagoon and trying to drink water and through their skins. Their dead floated about them or were stepped upon where they still lie on the bottom. On the third day the people buried their dead and sat down to wait for the rescue steamers. In the meantime, Naoura, torn from her family by the hurricane, had been swept away on an adventure of her own. Clinging to a rough plank that wounded and bruised her and that filled her body with water, she was thrown clear over the atoll and carried away to sea. Here under the amazing buffets of mountains of water she lost her plank. She was an old woman, nearly sixty, but she was pa'u motan born and she had never been out of sight of the sea in her life. Swimming in the darkness, strangling, suffocating, fighting for air, she was struck a heavy blow on the shoulder by a coconut. On the instant the wind was formed and she seized the nut. In the next hour she captured seven more. Tied together they formed a life buoy that preserved her life while at the same time it threatened to pound her to a jolly. She was a fat woman and she bruised easily, but she had had the experience of hurricanes and while she prayed to her shark god for protection from sharks she waited for the wind to break. But at three o'clock she was in a stupor that she did not know. Nor did she know at six o'clock when the dead calm settled down. She was shocked in the consciousness when she was thrown upon the sand. She dug in with raw and bleeding hands and feet and clawed against the backwash until she was beyond the reach of the waves. She knew where she was. This land could be no other than the tiny islet of Tako Kota. It had no lagoon, no one lived upon it. Haiku Eru was fifteen miles away. She could not see Haiku Eru but she knew that it lay to the south. The days went by and she lived on the coconuts that had kept her afloat. They supplied her with drinking water and with food. But she did not drink all she wanted nor eat all she wanted. Rescue was problematical. She saw the smoke of the rescue steamers on the horizon and what steamer could be expected to come to the lonely, uninhabited Tako Kota. From the first she was tormented by corpses. The sea persisted in flinging them upon her bit of sand, and she persisted until her strength failed and thrusted them back into the sea where the sharks tore at them and devoured them. When her strength failed, the bodies festued in her beech with ghastly horror and she withdrew from them to the bed, which was not far. By the tenth day her last coconut was gone and she was shriveling from thirst. She dragged herself along the sand looking for coconuts. It was strange that so many bodies floated up and no nuts. Surely there were more coconuts afloat than dead men. She gave up at last and lay exhausted. The end had come. Nothing remained but to wait for death. When it was stupor she became slowly aware that she was gazing at a patch of sandy red hair on the head of the corpse. The sea flung the body towards her, then drew it back. It turned over and she saw that it had no face. Yet there was something familiar about that patch of sandy red hair. An hour passed. She did not exert herself to make the identification. She was waiting to die for what man that thing of horror once might have been. But at the end of the hour she sat up slowly and stared at the corpse. An unusually large wave had thrown it beyond the reach of the lesser waves. Yes, she was right. That patch of red hair could belong to but one man in the Paomotus. It was Levi, the German Jew, the man who had bought the pearl and carried it away on the Hera. One thing was evident. The Hera had been lost. The pearl buyer's god of fishermen and thieves had gone back on him. She crawled down to the dead man. His shirt had been torn away and she could see the leather money belt about his waist. She held her breath and tugged at the buckles. They gave easier than she had expected than she crawled hurriedly away across the sand dragging the belt after her. Pocket after pocket she unbuckled in the belt and found empty. Where could he have put it? In the last pocket of all she found it. The first and only pearl he had bought on the voyage. She crawled a few feet further to escape the pestilence of the belt and examine the pearl. It was the one Mapui had found in bed robbed of by Tohriki. She waited in her hand and rolled back and forth caressingly. But in it she saw no intrinsic beauty. What she did see was the house Mapui and Tohara and she had builded so carefully in their minds. Each time she looked at the pearl she saw the house in all its details including the octagon drop clock on the wall. That was something to live for. She tore a strip from her ahu and dyed the pearl securely about her neck. And she went on along the beach panting and groaning completely seeking for coconuts. Quickly she found one and as she glanced around the second she broke one drinking its water which was mildewy and eating the last particle of the meat. A little later she found its shattered dugout. Its outrigger was gone but she was hopeful and before the day was out she found the outrigger. Every find was an arguri. The pearl was a talisman. Late in the afternoon she saw rocks floating low in the water. When she dragged it out on the beach its contents rattled and inside she found ten tins of salmon. She opened one by hammering it on the canoe. When a leak was started she drained the tin. After that she spent several hours in extracting the salmon hammering and squeezing the doubt a morsel at a time. Eight days longer she waited for rescue. In the meantime she fastened the tin on the canoe using for lashings all the coconut fiber she could find and also what remained of her ahu. The canoe was badly cracked and she could not make it water type but a calabash made from a coconut she stored on board for a baler. She was hard put for a paddle. With a piece of tin she sawed off all her hair close to the scalp. Out of the hair she braided a cord and by means of the cord she lashed a three foot piece aluminum handle to a board from the salmon case. She nod wedges with her teeth and with them wedged the lashing. On the eighteenth day at midnight she launched the canoe through the surf and started back for Hiku Eiru. She was an old woman. Hardship had stripped her fat from her till scarcely more than bones and skin and a few stringy muscles remained. The canoe was large and should have been paddled by three strong men but she did it alone with a makeshift paddle. Also the canoe leaked badly and one third of her time was devoted to bailing. By clear daylight she looked vainly for Hiku Eiru. A stern tako kohta had sunk beneath the sea rim. The sun blazed down on her nakedness compelling her body to surrender its moisture. Two tins of salmon were left to the day she battered holes in them and drained the liquid. She had no time to waste in extracting the meat. A currant was setting to the westward she made westing whether she made salting or not. In the early afternoon standing upright in the canoe she sighted Hiku Eiru. Its wealth of coconut palms was gone. Only here and there at wide intervals could she see the ragged remnants the sight cheered her. She was nearer than she had thought. The currant was setting her to the westward. She bore up against it and paddled on. The wedges in the paddle lashing worked loose and she lost much time at frequent intervals in driving them tight. Then there was the bailing. One hour and three she had to seize paddling in order to bail and all the time she drifted to the westward. By sunset Hiku Eiru bore southeast from her three miles away. There was a full moon and by eight o'clock the land was due east and two miles away. She struggled on for another hour but the land was as far away as ever. She was in the main grip of the currant. The canoe was too large. The paddle was too inadequate and too much of her time and strength was wasted in bailing. Besides she was very weak and growing weaker. The canoe was drifting off to the westward. She breathed a prayer to her shark god, slipped over the side and began to swim. She was actually refreshed by the water and quickly left the canoe astern. At the end of an hour the land was perceptibly nearer. Then came her fright. Right before her eyes not twenty feet away a large fin cut the water. She swam steadily toward it and slowly it glided away and went off to the right and circling around her. She kept her eyes on the fin and swam on. When the fin disappeared she lay face downward in the water and watched. When the fin reappeared she resumed her swimming. The monster was lazy. She could see that. Without doubt he had been well fed since the hurricane. Had he been very hungry long and one bite she knew could cut her in half. But she did not have any time to waste on him. Whether she swam or not the current drew away from the land just the same. A half hour went by and the shark began to grow bolder. Seeing no harm in her he drew closer in narrowing circles, cocking his eyes at her impudently as he swid past. He encouraged the dash at her. She resolved to play first. It was a desperate act she meditated. She was an old woman alone in the sea and weak from starvation and hardship and yet she, in the face of this sea tiger must anticipate his dash by herself dashing at him. She swam on waiting her chance. At last he passed languidly by barely eight feet away. She rushed at him suddenly feigning that she was attacking him. He gave a wild flirt of his tail as he fled away and his sandpaper hide striking her took off her skin from elbow to shoulder. He swam rapidly in a widening circle and at last disappeared. In the hole in the sand covered over by fragments of metal roofing Mapui and Tifara lay disputing. If you had done, as I said, charge Tifara for the thousandth time and hidden the pearl and told no one, you would have it now. But Huru Huru was with me when I opened the shell. Have I not told you so times and times and times without end? And now we shall have no house. Ra'ul told me today that if you had not sold the pearl to Toriki I did not sell it. Toriki robbed me. That if you had not sold the pearl he would give you five thousand French dollars, which is ten thousand chili. He has been talking to his mother, Mapui explained. She has an eye for a pearl. And now the pearl is lost, Tifara complained. It paid by debt with Toriki. That is twelve hundred I have made, anyway. Toriki is dead, she cried. They have heard no word of his schooner. She was lost along with the Eora'i and the Hyra. Will Toriki pay you the three hundred credit he promised? No, because Toriki is dead. And had you found no pearl would you today owe Toriki the twelve hundred? No, because Toriki is dead and you cannot pay dead men. But Levi did not pay Toriki, Mapui said. He gave him a piece of paper that was good for the money in Pape'e. And now Levi is dead and Toriki is dead and the paper lost with him and the pearl is lost with Levi. You are right, Tifara. I have lost the pearl and got nothing for it. Now let us sleep. He held up his hand suddenly and listened. From without came a noise as if one who breathed heavily and with pain. A hand fumbled against the math that served for a door. Who is there? Mapui cried. Tifara came the answer. Can you tell me where is my son Mapui? Tifara screamed and gripped her husband's arm. A ghost she chattered. A ghost. Mapui's face was aghastly yellow. He clung weakly to his wife. Good woman, he said in faltering tones, striving to disguise his vice. I know your son well. He is living on the east side of the lagoon. Mapui came the sound of a sigh. Mapui began to feel elated. He had fooled the ghost. But where do you come from, old woman? He asked. From the sea, was the dejected answer. I knew it. I knew it screamed Tifara, rocking to and fro. Since when is Tifara bedded in a strange house? came Uri's voice through the batting. Mapui looked fear and reproach at his wife. The voice that had betrayed them. And since when is Mapui, my son, denied his old mother? The voice went on. No, no, I have not. Mapui has not denied you, he cried. I am not Mapui. He is on the east side of the lagoon, I tell you. The Gakaroo sat up in the bed and began to cry. The matting started to shake. What are you doing, Mapui demanded? I am coming in, said the voice of Nauri. One end of the matting lifted. Tifara tried to dive under the blankets, but Mapui held on to her. He had to hold on to something. Together, struggling with each other, with shivering bodies and chattering teeth, they gazed with protruding eyes at the lifting mat. They saw Nauri dripping with seawater, without her ahoo, creep in. They rolled over backwards from her for Nakakura's blanket with which to cover their heads. You might give your old mother a drink of water, the ghost said plainly. Give her a drink of water, Tifara commanded in the shaking voice. Give her a drink of water, Mapui passed on the command to Nakarura, and together they kicked Nakarura from under the blanket. A minute later, beeping, Mapui saw the ghost drinking. When it reached out a shaking hand and laid it on his, he felt the weight of it and was convinced that it was no ghost. Then he emerged, dragging Tifara after him, and in a few minutes all were listening to Nakarura's tale. And when she told of Levi and dropped the pearl into Tifara's hand, even she was reconciled to the reality of her mother-in-law. In the morning, said Tifara, you will sell the pearl to Raoul for 5,000 French. The house objected Nakarura. He will build the house, Tifara answered. He weighs it will cost 4,000 French. Also will he give 1,000 French in credit, which is 2,000 chili. And it will be 6 fathoms long, Nakarura queried. I answered Mapua 6 fathoms. And in the middle room will be the octagon drop clock. I and the round table as well. Then give me something to eat and drink. And after that we will sleep, for I am weary. And tomorrow we will have more talk about the house before we sell the pearl. It will be better if we take the 1,000 French in cash. Money is ever better than credit in buying goods from the traders. End of The House of Mapua by Jack London Recorded by Tom Crawford in Kool, California in the fall of 2009. From the hand from that well-ordered road we tread, and all the world is wild and strange, churl and ghoul and gin and sprite shall bear us company to-night. For we have reached the oldest land, wherein the powers of darkness range. From the dusk to the dawn The House of Sadhu near the Takasali gate is two-storied with four-carved windows of old brown wood and a flat roof. You may recognize it by five red hand-prints arranged like the five of diamonds on the white-wash between the upper windows. Bhagwan Das, the Buniya, and a man who says he gets his living by seal-cutting live in the lower story with a troop of wives, servants, friends and retainers. The two upper rooms used to be occupied by Janu and Azizun, and a little black-and-tan terrier that was stolen from an Englishman's house and given to Janu by a soldier. Today only Janu lives in the upper rooms. Sadhu sleeps on the roof generally, except when he sleeps in the street. He used to go to Peshawar in the cold weather to visit his son who sells curiosities near the Eduardo's gate, and then he slept under a real mud-roof. Sadhu is a great friend of mine because his cousin had a son who secured, thanks to my recommendation, the host of Head Messenger to a big firm in this station. Sadhu says that God will make me a Lieutenant Governor one of these days. I dare say his prophecy will come true. He is very, very old, with white hair and no teeth worth showing, and he has outlived his wits, outlived nearly everything except his fondness for his son at Peshawar. Janu and Azizun are Kashmiris, ladies of the city, and theirs was an ancient and more or less honorable profession. But Azizun has since married a medical student from the Northwest and has settled down to a most respectable life somewhere near Bareli. Bhagwan Das is an extortionate and an adulterer. He is very rich. The man who is supposed to get his living by seal-cutting pretends to be very poor. This lets you know as much as is necessary of the four principal houses of Sadhu. Then there's me, of course, but I am only the chorus that comes in at the end to explain things, so I do not count. Sadhu was not clever. The man who pretends to cut seals was the cleverest of them all. Bhagwan Das only knew how to lie, except Janu. She was also beautiful, but that was her own affair. Sadhu's son at Peshawar was attacked by pleurisy, but Sadhu was troubled. The seal-cutter man heard of Sadhu's anxiety and made capital out of it. He was abreast of the times. He got a friend in Peshawar to telegraph daily accounts of the son's health. And here the story begins. Sadhu's cousin's son told me one evening that Sadhu wanted to see me, that he was too old and feeble to come personally and that I should be conferring an everlasting honour on the house of Sadhu if I went to him. But I think, seeing how well off Sadhu was then, that he might have sent something better than an ikka which jolted fearfully to haul out a future Lieutenant Governor to the city on a muggy April evening. The ikka did not run quickly. It was full dark when we pulled up opposite the door of Runjit Singh's tomb near the main gate of the fort. Here was Sadhu, and he said that by reason of my condescension I was absolutely certain that I should become a Lieutenant Governor while my hair was yet black. Then we talked about the weather and the state of my health and the wheat crops for fifteen minutes in the Huzori Ba under the stars. Sadhu came to the point at last. He said that Janu had told him that there was an order of the Sirkar against magic because it was feared that magic might one day kill the Empress of India. I didn't know anything about the law, but I fancied that something interesting was going to happen. I said that so far from magic being discouraged by the government it was highly commended. The greatest officials of the state practiced it themselves. If the financial statement isn't magic I don't know what is. Then to encourage him further I said that if there was any Jadu afoot I had not the least objection to giving it my countenance and sanction and to seeing that it was clean distinguished from the unclean Jadu which kills folk. It took a long time before Sadhu admitted that this was just what he had asked me to come for. Then he told me in jerks and quavers that the man who said he cut seals was a sorcerer of the cleanest kind. That every day he gave Sadhu news of his sick son in Peshawar more quickly than the lightning could fly and that this news was always corroborated by the letters. Further that he had told Sadhu how a great danger was threatening his son which could be removed by clean Jadu and of course heavy payment. I began to see exactly how the land lay and told Sadhu that I also understood a little Jadu in the western line and would go to his house and see that everything was done decently and in order. We set off together and on the way Sadhu told me that he had paid the seal cutter between one hundred and two hundred rupees already and the Jadu of that night would cost two hundred more. Which was cheap he said considering the greatness of his son's danger but I do not think he meant it. The lights were all cloaked in the front of the house when we arrived. I could hear awful noises from behind the seal cutter's shop front as if someone were groaning his soul out. Sadhu shook all over and while we groped our way upstairs told me that the Jadu had begun. Jadu and Azizun met us at the stair-head and told us that the Jadu work was coming off in their rooms because there was more space there. Jannu is a lady of free-thinking turn of mind. She whispered that the Jadu was an invention to get money out of Sadhu and that the seal cutter would go to a hot place when he died. Sadhu was nearly crying with fear and old age. He kept walking up and down the room in the half light repeating his son's name over and over again and asking Azizun if the seal cutter ought not to make a reduction in the case of his own landlord. Jannu pulled me over to the shadow in the recess of the carved bow-windows. The boards were up and the rooms were only lit by one tiny oil lamp. There was no chance of my being seen if I stayed still. Presently the groans below ceased and we heard steps on the staircase. That was the seal cutter. He stopped outside the door as the Jadu and Azizun fumbled at the chain and he told Sadhu to blow out the lamp. This left the place in jet darkness except for the red glow from the two hukwas that belonged to Jannu and Azizun. The seal cutter came in and I heard Sadhu throw himself down on the floor and groan. Azizun caught her breath and Jannu backed onto one of the beds with a shutter. There was a clink of something metallic and then shot up a pale blue-green flame near the ground. The light was just enough to show Azizun pressed against one corner of the room with the terrier between her knees. Jannu with her hands clasped, leaning forward as she sat on the bed. Sadhu faced down, quivering, and the seal cutter. I hope I may never see another man like that seal cutter. He was stripped to the waist with a wreath of white jasmine as thick as my wrist around his forehead, a pin cloth round his middle, and a steel bangle on each ankle. This was not awe-inspiring. It was the face of the man that turned me cold. It was blue-gray in the first place. In the second, the eyes were rolled back till you could only see the whites of them. And in the third, the face was the face of a demon, a ghoul. Anything you please except of the sleek, oily old ruffian who sat in the daytime over his burning lathe downstairs. He was lying on his stomach with his arms turned and crossed behind him as if he had been thrown down, pinioned. His head and neck were the only parts of him off the floor. They were nearly at right angles to the body, like the head of a cobra at spring. It was ghastly. In the center of the room on the bare earth floor stood a big, deep brass basin, with a pale blue-green light floating in the floor like a nightlight. Round that basin, the man on the floor wriggled himself three times. How he did it, I do not know. I could see the muscles ripple along his spine and fall smooth again, but I could not see any other motion. The head seemed the only thing alive about him, except that slow curl and uncurl of the laboring back muscles. Janu from the bed was breathing seventy to the minute. Azizun held his hands before her eyes, and old Sudhu fingering at the dirt that had got into his white beard was crying to himself. The horror of it was that the creeping, crawly thing made no sound, only crawled. And remember, this lasted for ten minutes while the terrier whined, and Azizun shuddered, and Janu gasped, and Sudhu cried. I felt the hair lift at the back of my head, and my heart thumped like a thermantodote Luckily the seal-cutter betrayed himself by his most impressive trick and made me calm again. After he had finished that unspeakable crawl he stretched his head away from the floor as high as he could and sent out a jet of fire from his nostrils. Now, I knew how fire-spouting is done. I can do it myself, so I felt at ease. The business was a fraud. If he had only kept to that crawl without trying to raise the effect, goodness but I might not have thought. Both the girls shrieked at the jet of fire, and the head dropped chin down on the floor with a thud. The whole body lying then like a corpse with its arms thrust. There was a pause of five full minutes after this, and the blue-green flame died down. Janu stooped to settle one of her anklets while Azizun turned her face to the wall and took the terrier in her arms. Sudhu put out an arm mechanically to Janu's hukwa, and she slid it across the floor with her foot. Directly above the body and on the wall were a couple of flaming portraits in stamped paper frames of the Queen and the Prince of Wales. They looked down on the performance and to my thinking seemed to heighten the grotesqueness of it all. Just when the silence was getting unendurable the body turned over and rolled away from the basin to the side of the room where it lay stomach up. A faint plop from the basin exactly like the noise a fish makes when it takes a fly and the green light in the center revived. I looked at the basin and saw bobbing in the water the dried, shriveled black head of a native baby. Open eyes, open mouth and shaved scalp. It was worse being so very sudden than the crawling exhibition. We had no time to say anything before it began to speak. Read Poe's account of the voice that came from the mesmerized dying man and you will realize less than one half of the horror of that head's voice. There was an interval of a second or two between each word and a sort of ring, ring, ring in the note of the voice like the timber of a bell. It peeled slowly as if talking to itself for several minutes before I got rid of my cold sweat. Then the blessed solution struck me. I looked at the body lying near the doorway and saw just where the hollow of the throat joins on the shoulders a muscle that had nothing to do with any man's regular breathing twitching away steadily. The whole thing was a careful reproduction of the Egyptian tariff in that one reads about sometimes and the voice was as clever and as appalling a piece of ventriloquism as one could wish to hear. All this time the head was lip, lip, lapping against the side of the basin and speaking. I told Sattu, on his face again whining, of his son's illness and of the state of the illness up to the evening of that very night. I always shall respect the seal-cutter for keeping so faithfully to the time of the Peshawar telegrams. It went on to say that skilled doctors were night and day watching over the man's life and that he would eventually recover if the fee to the potent sorcerer whose servant was the head in the basin were doubled. The mistake from the artistic point of view came in. To ask for twice your stipulated fee in a voice that Lazarus might have used when he rose from the dead is absurd. Janu, who is really a woman of masculine intellect, saw this as quickly as I did. I heard her say, Ash Nanin Farib scornfully under her breath and just as she said so the light in the basin died out. The head stopped talking and then it changed. Then Janu struck a match, lit the lamp, and we saw that head, basin, and seal-cutter were gone. Sudhu was ringing his hands and explaining to anyone who cared to listen that if his chances of eternal salvation depended on it, he could not raise another two hundred rupees. Azizun was nearly in hysterics in the corner, while Janu sat down composedly on one of the beds to discuss the probabilities of the whole thing being a Bunaw or make-up. I explained as much as I knew of the seal-cutter's way of Janu, but her argument was much more simple. The magic that is always demanding gifts is no true magic, said she. My mother told me that the only potent love spells are those which are told you for love. This seal-cutter man is a liar and a devil. I dare not tell, do anything, or get anything done, but the seal-cutter is a friend of Baghwan Das, the Buniya for two gold rings and a heavy anklet. I must get my food from his shop. The seal-cutter is a friend of Baghwan Das, and he would poison my food. A fool's Janu has been going on for ten days and has cost Sudhu many rupees each night. The seal-cutter used black hens and lemons and mantras before. He never showed us anything like this till tonight. Azizun is a fool Sudhu has lost his strength and his wits. See now I had hoped to get from Sudhu many rupees while he lived and many more after his death and, behold, he is spending everything on that offspring of a devil and a she-ass, the seal-cutter. Here I said, but what induced Sudhu to drag me into this business? Of course I can speak to the seal-cutter and he shall refund. The whole thing is child's talk, it's a game, and senseless. Sudhu is an old child, said Janu. He has lived on the roofs these seventy years and is as senseless as a milk-coat. He brought you here to assure himself that he was not breaking any law of the sier-cutter whose salt he ate many years ago. He worships the dust off the feet of the seal-cutter and that cow devourer has forbidden him to go and see his son. What does Sudhu know of your laws or the lightning-post? I have to watch his money going day by day to that lying beast below. Janu stamped her foot on the floor and nearly cried with vexation while Sudhu was whimpering under a blanket in the corner and Azizun was trying to guide the pipe-stem to his foolish old mouth. Now the case stands thus. Unthinkingly I have laid myself open to the charge of aiding and abetting the seal-cutter in obtaining money under false pretenses, which is forbidden by Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code. I am helpless in the matter for these reasons. I cannot inform the police. What witness would support my statements? Janu refuses flatly. And Azizun is a veiled woman, somewhere near Bareilly, lost in this big India of ours. I dare not again take the law into my own hands and speak to the seal-cutter, for certain am I that not only would Sudhu disbelieve me, but this step would end in the poisoning of Janu, who is bound hand and foot by her debt to the Buniya. Sudhu is an old daughter, and whenever we meet, mumbles my idiotic joke that the Sirkar rather patronizes the black art than otherwise. His son is well now, but Sudhu is completely under the influence of the seal-cutter, by whose advice he regulates the affairs of his life. Janu watches daily the money that she hoped to weedle out of Sudhu taken by the seal-cutter and becomes daily more furious and sullen. She will never tell, because she dare not, but unless something happens to prevent her, I am afraid that the seal-cutter will die of cholera, the white arsenic kind, about the middle of May, and thus I shall have to be privy to a murder in the house of Sudhu. End of In the House of Sudhu by Rudyard Kipling