neck, representing the lives of men. What a prize the head of Jakara would be! His noted bravery, his cunning in war, his unbeaten fighting strength! Whoever drank of the head of Jakara – what a famous warrior he would instantly become! He would imbibe all Jakara’s qualities to strengthen his own. The killer would become invincible!
And now the idea had dawned in the ambitious mind of Beizam! It was sleeping again, but time would surely bring it to full wakefulness. As likely as not some little unexpected incident would hurry its consummation. Jakara’s spinal cord shuddered in sympathy. Mentally he decided to discard his native weapons and never walk without Lightning, nor ever meet the Pretty Lamar again, even by accident. The natives jokingly called her “Lamar” simply because she was the whitest-skinned girl on the island.
Weeks later, and Jakara had whistled as he climbed. He was glad to be away from the Council. For a solid week he, with the chiefs, had listened to a dispute which involved complicated land-laws whose rights went back for centuries.
For a great land-stealing case was before the Council. It had gone past individuals, having implicated the villages of Zerwageed and I’Laid. The island was seething with excitement.
But now Jakara’s duties in the case were over. Always he had sought to abstain from meddling with the affairs of the island otherwise than in war. Thus he incurred no man’s enmity, ran the risk of no private feuds. He merely took his seat on the Council when his position made it necessary. But he never helped in the voicing of any decision against individuals.
With war the matter was different. There the whole of the island was united, and the men who could plan success were revered as the greatest in the Group.
Jakara reached his Lookout, got his telescope, and searched the sea – searched as if he awaited some dearly beloved thing. But the horizon all around was bare of any sail. Sighing, he trained his telescope down on Mer.
Around the disputed land all the population was gathered in an interested circle, very quiet, however, for C’Zarcke and the Zogo-le were personally examining the boundary line before judgment.
Jakara then directed his glass down upon the snub nose of Gelam-Pit, where the waves rolled lazily against the cliffs. From the south-west end of Mer the island rises steeply in long grassy slopes to culminate in giant Gelam, and Jakara trained the telescope well inland at the main taboo country hidden around its base. The telescope showed plainly the huge training-ground in the centre of the Kwod.
The Kwod was purely a training college, where the island youths were fitted to become men of Mer, to be worthy of its past traditions, to fit themselves to carry on the work begun by the great supermen of the past.
Their training lasted from early boyhood until stripling age. As tender lads, numbers of them were taken from their homes and rarely saw their parents again until they were almost grown to manhood.
Their training was Spartan. Jakara could see squads of them now, while he watched with a reminiscent sympathy as they broke and flew when, with a fearful yell, a crowd of hideously masked men, flourishing shark-tooth swords, rushed on them from the surrounding timber. Thus were the lads trained in quickness of brain, eye, feet, and body. Also for an hour twice daily they were shot at, the severity growing by degrees until finally some of the best bowmen on Mer would fire at them with war-bows. Later still the lads would have to stand in the open and dodge showers of arrows that rained on them from archers hidden among the trees. With the arrows would whizz many sling-stones. Naturally, a number of lads each year never left the Kwod.
Jakara had had to go through all that strenuous training. He had done so willingly enough, and now was very glad. In it he had gained an amazing proficiency in the use of weapons, and had developed his physique in a manner that stood him in good stead when he had to fight in earnest. There he had gained proficiency in harpooning dugong, in turtle capture, in all manner of fishing. There he had learned the religion, the beliefs, the life of all the Island peoples. Step by step he had won his initiation degrees, and at last, most interesting of all, he had been put through their mystic rites relating to the spirit-land, though only to the degree permitted to a fighting chief. The deep secrets and the malevolent magic were for the Maid-le alone, while the “most known by men” was only for the Zogo-le, with their terrible head C’Zarcke, Au-Zogo-zogo-le, Au-Maid-maid-le.
Jakara stayed on his Lookout until the sun went down. It was very lonely then. He climbed down the Lookout to his hut, not whistling. From Maiad village came the plaintive fluting of the burral, sweet but sad. The villages slept. The Islands slept. The sea never sleeps: she dreams sometimes, as does the night. Upon their mats the people slept coiled up like tired children, a wealth of resting limbs and tangled tresses abandoned in dreaming repose. Outside, all was utter silence; even Nature dreamed and leased the air and the land and the sea to the spirit folk and the unknown energy that is.
Within the Zogo-house sat C’Zarcke the dreaded, C’Zarcke the all-powerful, C’Zarcke the hungry seeker after knowledge. He communed in silent company, for skulls do not talk, at least, in words that humans hear. Twenty were his company, once men whose individual history was a lifetime spent in acquiring knowledge. Each had its characteristics, and each a personality of its own which grimaced: “Read me now, if you can!” There were two characteristics common to all: their silence, and the roominess of the brain cavities. For his personal souvenirs, C’Zarcke collected only those relics whose bony walls had once held brains that reasoned, that sought to know things.
Though mostly of black and brown people, there were representatives of high civilization there, for a Spanish don leered over one shoulder while C’Zarcke stared straight into the eye-sockets of an English captain. A blueness illuminated the shadowy room; the light was diffused from the sockets of a box-shaped skull. Other things were in that room, a nameless feeling of presences in the heavy air; the vagueness, and the possibility of what might be, gave to that ghostly, dimly-lighted place a fearfulness that belonged to darkness. Yet something – to the human mind a repellant feeling of uncanny power – would not be denied, and that heavy silence and darkness seemed to be its element. Not nearly so repugnant were the sentinel forms of men stretched mummified. Their appearance was dreadful, so let them stay shrouded in the night. Then there was a “something” from the rafters that stared straight down upon C’Zarcke’s head. It had once been a woman. So terrible was it that no stranger would have looked twice, although he would at once have realized that the woman had triumphed over death, for she was still beautiful.
C’Zarcke sat as in a death-like trance, made horrible, however, because his “dead” face was so expressive of life and burning expectancy; inside the massive head all reasoning was concentrated to absorb something coming to him through the air. Presently his eyes clouded as if to dim his vision and focus sight straight back upon the brain within. Then in his eyes appeared that intense, blue-black glitter. He sighed lingeringly, and his splendid chest barely moved, while through his eyes, and possibly his ears, he was drinking in mind-energy sent to him from all the Zogo-le of the Strait, aye, and from every Maid-le priest of the Bomai-Malu Cult far south down the Australian coast, and to north-west right up along the New Guinea shores. Each of these sat in a comfortable position inside his Zogo-house, and, if compass lines had been drawn from every island, the three groups of the Zogo-le and every man of the Maid-le priesthood would have been found staring straight towards C’Zarcke. In a crescent around each man, with his own head as the centre, were evenly-placed skulls, though it is believed that these were kept not because the present Zogo-le believed them to possess a really tangible power, but because their ancestors in dim ages had superstitiously used them in first seeking after knowledge. Each skull grinned on a level with, and at, the priest’s head. All else was darkness, a waiting, almost a living silence, and every man of them – some with brutal, but all with intellectual, faces, drawn taut and strained, and their queer, bright eyes with the purple glitter staring inwards and outwards – strove to hypnotize his body and brain and force out towards C’Zarcke that deep
