As the natives themselves put it, he learned the Death of the High God, and where in the world his Soul was hidden.
Thereupon, in some mysterious way or other, he became Tu-Kila-Kila himself, and ruled as High God for ten years or more here on this island.
Now, up to that time, the legend goes on, none but the men of the island knew the secret; they learned it as soon as they were initiated in the great mysteries, which occur before a boy is given a spear and admitted to the rank of complete manhood.

But sometimes a woman was told the secret wrongfully by her husband or her lover; and one such woman, apparently, told the strange Korong, and so enabled him to become Tu-Kila-Kila." "But where does the parrot come in ?" Felix asked, with still profounder excitement than ever.

Something within him seemed to tell him instinctively he was now within touch of the special key that must sooner or later unlock the mystery.
"Well," the Frenchman went on, still stroking the parrot affectionately with his hand, and smoothing down the feathers on its ruffled back, "the strange Tu-Kila-Kila, who thus ruled in the island, though he learned to speak Polynesian well, had a language of his own, a language of the birds, which no man on earth could ever talk with him.

So, to beguile his time and to have someone who could converse with him in his native dialect, he taught this parrot to speak his own tongue, and spent most of his days in talking with it and fondling it.

At last, after he had instructed it by slow degrees how to repeat this long sermon or poem--which I have often heard it recite in a sing-song voice from beginning to end--his time came, as they say, and he had to give way to another Tu-Kila-Kila; for the Bouparese have a proverb like our own about the king, 'The High God is dead; may the High God live forever!' But before he gave up his Soul to his successor, and was eaten or buried, whichever is the custom, he handed over his pet to the King of the Birds, strictly charging all future bearers of that divine office to care for the parrot as they would care for a son or a daughter.