# The Gates of Morning/Book 4/Chapter 11

CHAPTER XI
THE GREEN SICKNESS
ALL that remained of her was the boat, the lesser of the two boats which Aioma had saved for the moment.
The island was without a single canoe, and he intended to build one as swiftly as might be for the fishing; that being done he would destroy the boat and so obliterate the last trace of the cursed papalagi.
So he set to work and the work progressed, Le Moan helping with the others. She worked at the making of the sail, Kanoa helping her, happy, ignorant of her utter deadness to all things, yet sometimes wondering.
Sometimes this woman he had taken to his heart seemed indeed a spirit or a lost soul as she had seemed to him that time before the killing of Carlin; always she was remote from him in mind, untouchable as the gulls he had chased as a child on Soma. Yet she was his and she let him love her,—and “Time,” said the heart of Kanoa, “will bring her arms around me.”
Her strangeness and indifference increased his passion. A child and yet a man, he moved now in a wonder world, he was always singing when alone and there was something in his voice that made it different from the voices of the others, so that when the women heard him singing in the groves they said “That is Kanoa.”
​And despite his happiness in her and his love for her and his embraces, despite the joy of new life that filled Karolin and the beauty of the nights in which Taori and Katafa walked together on the reef, never once did the desire come to Le Moan to destroy herself—all that was nothing to her now.
She had torn out her heart and nothing else mattered, even life.
“And to-morrow or next day,” one morning said Aioma, “the canoe will be ready and we will burn the lesser ayat as we burned the greater. Ah hai, what is this, the reef is lifting before my eyes—Look you, Tahuku!”
But Tahuku saw nothing. The reef was solid as of old and the sun was shining on it and he said so.
The canoe-builder shut his eyes and when he opened them again the reef had ceased to lift, but he was weary. Bells rang in his ears and his hands were hot and dry and now after a while and towards midday one of the papalagi—so it seemed to him—had seized him from behind and tied a band round his head, screwing it so tight that he would have screamed had he been an ordinary man.
He lay on the ground, and as he lay a woman, one of the wives of Poni, came running, panting as she ran.
“I burn, I burn!” cried the woman. “Aioma, my sight is going from me; I burn, I burn!” She fell on the ground and Katafa running to her raised her head.
​Aioma turning on his side tried to rise but could not, then he laughed.
Then he began to sing. He was fighting the papalagi and killing them, the Spaniards of long ago and the whale men and Carlin and Rantan; his song was a song of victory, yet he was defeated. The white men had got him with the white man's disease. Measles stood on the beach of Karolin, for the green ship with its cargo of labour had fallen to measles and Aioma in boarding it had sealed his doom.
It was Poni who guessed the truth. He had seen measles before—and now, remembering the ship, he cried out that they were undone, that the devils from the green ship had seized them and that they must die.
He had no need to say that.
Aioma lasted only a day, and the lagoon took him; by then the whole population was down, all but Taori, Katafa, Le Moan and Kanoa.
Kanoa had taken the disease at Vana Vana many years ago and was immune; the others, saved, perhaps, by the European blood in their veins, still resisted the disease.
The people died on the coral or cast themselves burning into the lagoon and were seized by the sharks, who knew.
And to Le Moan as she watched them, it was not the green sickness that did the work, but she herself.
She had brought this curse on Karolin. She had brought the schooner and the white men, she had taken the schooner to meet the green ship; it was the mother ​of her mother, Le Juan, who was reaching through her to slay and slay. Aioma in a lucid interval before he died had seized her by the hands and told her this, but she had no need of the telling of Aioma. She knew. And she watched, helpless and uncaring. She could do nothing, and the people passed, vanished like ghosts, died like flies, whilst the wind blew gently and the sun shone and the gulls fished and dawn came ever beautiful as of old through the Gates of Morning.
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