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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: it was supposed that no man should behold their faces. They killed
by the sight like basilisks; a chance view of one of those
boatwomen was a crime to be wiped out with blood. In the days of
Nakaeia the palace was beset with some tall coco-palms which
commanded the enclosure. It chanced one evening, while Nakaeia sat
below at supper with his wives, that the owner of the grove was in
a tree-top drawing palm-tree wine; it chanced that he looked down,
and the king at the same moment looking up, their eyes encountered.
Instant flight preserved the involuntary criminal. But during the
remainder of that reign he must lurk and be hid by friends in
remote parts of the isle; Nakaeia hunted him without remission,
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