CHAPTER XV.

ORDEAL BY SMOKE.

The Fijian cure for leprosy is submission to the ordeal by smoke. It is like the old English ordeal by water in cases of suspected witchcraft. If the subject survived the experiment she was no witch; if she were drowned, as generally happened, she was a witch well got rid of.

Lepers in Fiji are cured or killed by smoke from the wood of the sinu ganga. This tree attains a height of 60ft., and is generally found in mangrove swamps. It bears minute green flowers arranged in catkins. When the tree is pierced, a white milk flows which is burning to the skin. The suspected leper is taken to a small empty house. Having been stripped naked, his body is rubbed all over with green leaves, and then buried in them. A small fire is lighted, and a few pieces of the sinu ganga are laid on it. Soon a thick black smoke begins to ascend. The patient is bound hand and foot, and drawn up over the fire by a rope fastened to his heels, leaving his head some 18in. from the ground, in the midst of the poisonous exhalations. The door is closed, the victim’s friends retire to a little distance, while he shouts and screams in the agony caused by the suffocating heat. The unfortunate wretch sometimes faints after a few minutes of this treatment. When the man is considered to be sufficiently smoked, the fire is put out, the slime is scraped from his body, and deep gashes are cut in his flesh with sharpened pearl-oyster shells, until the blood flows freely. He is then taken down and laid on the mats to await the result, which is sometimes death, and sometimes, strange to say, complete recovery.

I protested vehemently that I was no leper, and Lolóma joined her weeping remonstrances to mine, but without effect. The suspicion was too grave.

“I shall be avenged for this,” I cried, as I was hurried away, though I believed my hours were numbered. “I will come with the front of battle and the thunder of Britain, and Bent-Axe shall see if a white man can be tortured with impunity.”

“Every man is a wind in his own bay,” laughed the savage. “You are not in the land of the white man now, and your words are as idle as the sea-foam. To-morrow’s sun will see the fair Lolóma at rest in these arms.”

Smarting with rage, I was borne away to a native house, in which preparations for the ordeal I was to be subjected to had been made by the cunning priest and his friend the previous night. I was satisfied that it would not be their fault if I left the chamber alive. Soon the whole room was filled with smoke. I was triced up by the heels with my head dangling over the fire, and my two enemies and their assistants, being unable to bear the fumes any longer, left me. I knew that if possible, Lolóma would contrive my escape, but it took her a long time to divest herself of her gala trappings, in which she could not move, and the demons who plotted my destruction had laid their plans so well that I was in a fair way to be suffocated before a friendly hand could reach me.

The sun had just set when I found myself swinging in the accursed smoke, a prey to reflections which assumed the form of a horrid phantasmagoria, owing to the blood rushing to my head, and the stifling heat of the baleful exhalations. After the lapse of a few seconds I became incapable of clear thought. My brain thumped and bounded, and I shrieked aloud. Once, after terrible struggling, I reached the rope with my hands, and endeavoured to haul myself into an endurable position, but my nerveless fingers lost their hold, and I fell back in a swoon—an inert mass swinging to and fro in the smoky glare. I must have fainted when I had been suspended two or three minutes, though it seemed as many hours, for I felt as if my head were bursting all the time.

When I recovered consciousness I was lying on the ground in the hut, a few paces from the fire. Lolóma stood by, emptying a pipkin of water over me.

On my way to the place of torture I had learned from the conversation of Shark and Bent-Axe that its locality had been kept secret. Lolóma, watched by her relatives, had great difficulty in getting away until it was thought that sufficient time had elapsed for the ordeal by smoke to be accomplished. Then she tracked my executioners to the house. With her light step and lithe figure she was able to elude them in the gloom, and enter the building through a small aperture in the side, used as a window, and which was only closed by a mat. To cut the rope of sinnet with a bamboo knife was the work of a moment, and I fell to the ground in her arms.

“Run for your life,” were her first words to me as soon as she saw that I had regained consciousness.

I recovered myself quickly. My eyes were blinded and smarting with the smoke, but I snatched up a club which lay on the floor, and ran, as near as I could guess, after the retreating form of the girl through the doorway. Outside the hut a man emerged from the smoke and gloom and seized me by the left shoulder. It was Bent-Axe. With one blow from the club I felled him, and darted up a ravine towards the hills. In an hour’s time I was safe in my old cave, where there was some food, for Lolóma and I had kept up the habit of making festival excursions there, and the existence of the bower was still known only to us two.

The trees and shrubs around the entrance to the cave were spangled with a cloud of dancing fireflies, though I had never seen these insects in the locality before. Capturing three or four, I contrived an excellent lantern by placing them in a cocoanut cup, covering the top with a film of fine masi, through which the light shone. I found that by shaking the bowl violently I could excite these interesting insects to increase the light they emit from the luminous discs on each side of their bodies. Subsequent experience proved to me that with a little sugar-cane for food they would live in captivity for weeks. Furnished with my new-made lamp, I explored at leisure the long aisles and fretted vaults of my picturesque cell, which was beautiful beyond the dreams of architecture.