If you want your crops to grow, and your rivers to run, the fields to yield you game, and the sea fish--this is what I ask: give me victims, victims! That is our compact.

Tu-Kila-Kila calls you." The men bowed down once more and repeated humbly, "You shall have victims as you will, great god; only give us yam and taro and bread-fruit, and cause not your bright light, the sun, to grow dark in heaven over us." "Cut yourselves," Tu-Kila-Kila cried, in a peremptory voice, clapping his hands thrice.

"I am thirsting for blood.

I want your free-will offering." As he spoke, every man, as by a set ritual, took from a little skin wallet at his side a sharp flake of coral-stone, and, drawing it deliberately across his breast in a deep red gash, caused the blood to flow out freely over his chest and long grass waistband.

Then, having done so, they never strove for a moment to stanch the wound, but let the red drops fall as they would on to the dust at their feet, without seeming even to be conscious at all of the fact that they were flowing.
Tu-Kila-Kila smiled once more, a ghastly self-satisfied smile of unquestioned power.