and his votaries, as was their wont, had all come forth to do him honor
in due season, and to pay their respects, in the inmost and sacredest
grove on the island, to his incarnate representative, the living spirit
of trees and fruits and vegetation, the very high god, the divine
Tu-Kila-Kila!

Early in the evening, as soon as the sun's rim had disappeared beneath
the ocean, a strange noise boomed forth from the central shrine of
Boupari. Those who heard it clapped their hands to their ears and ran
hastily forward. It was a noise like distant rumbling thunder, or the
whir of some great English mill or factory; and at its sound every woman
on the island threw herself on the ground prostrate, with her face in the
dust, and waited there reverently till the audible voice of the god had
once more subsided. For no woman knew how that sound was produced. Only
the grown men, initiated into the mysteries of the shrine when they came
of age at the tattooing ceremony, were aware that the strange, buzzing,
whirring noise was nothing more or less than the cry of the bull-roarer.

A bull-roarer, as many English schoolboys know, is merely a piece of
oblong wood, pointed at either end, and fastened by a leather thong at
one corner. But when whirled round the head by practised priestly hands,
it produces a low rumbling noise like the wheels of a distant carriage,
growing gradually louder and clearer, from moment to moment, till at last
it waxes itself into a frightful din, or bursts into perfect peals of
imitation thunder. Then it decreases again once more, as gradually as it
rose, becoming fainter and ever fainter, like thunder as it recedes, till
the horrible bellowing, as of supernatural bulls, dies away in the end,
by slow degrees, into low and soft and imperceptible murmurs.

But when the savage hears the distant humming of the bull-roarer, at