settling herself to begin on some work in hand.
"Yes," he nodded half-sadly to me, "in her last years Hiwilani went
back to the old ways, and to the old beliefs--in secret, of course.
And, BELIEVE me, she was some collector herself. You should have
seen her bones. She had them all about her bedroom, in big jars,
and they constituted most all her relatives, except a half-dozen or
so that Kanau beat her out of by getting to them first. The way
the pair of them used to quarrel about those bones was awe-
inspiring. And it gave me the creeps, when I was a boy, to go into
that big, for-ever-twilight room of hers, and know that in this jar
was all that remained of my maternal grand-aunt, and that in that
jar was my great-grandfather, and that in all the jars were the
preserved bone-remnants of the shadowy dust of the ancestors whose
seed had come down and been incorporated in the living, breathing
me. Hiwilani had gone quite native at the last, sleeping on mats
on the hard floor--she'd fired out of the room the great, royal,
canopied four-poster that had been presented to her grandmother by
Lord Byron, who was the cousin of the Don Juan Byron and came here
in the frigate Blonde in 1825.
"She went back to all native, at the last, and I can see her yet,
biting a bite out of the raw fish ere she tossed them to her women
to eat. And she made them finish her poi, or whatever else she did
not finish of herself. She--"
But he broke off abruptly, and by the sensitive dilation of his
nostrils and by the expression of his mobile features I saw that he
had read in the air and identified the odour that offended him.
"Deuce take it!" he cried to me. "It stinks to heaven. And I
shall be doomed to wear it until we're rescued."
There was no mistaking the object of his abhorrence. The ancient
crone was making a dearest-loved lei (wreath) of the fruit of the
hala which is the screw-pine or pandanus of the South Pacific. She
was cutting the many sections or nut-envelopes of the fruit into
fluted bell-shapes preparatory to stringing them on the twisted and
tough inner bark of the hau tree. It certainly smelled to heaven,
but, to me, a malahini (new-comer), the smell was wine-woody and
fruit-juicy and not unpleasant.
Prince Akuli's limousine had broken an axle a quarter of a mile
away, and he and I had sought shelter from the sun in this
veritable bowery of a mountain home. Humble and grass-thatched was
the house, but it stood in a treasure-garden of begonias that
sprayed their delicate blooms a score of feet above our heads, that
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were like trees, with willowy trunks of trees as thick as a man's
arm. Here we refreshed ourselves with drinking-coconuts, while a
cowboy rode a dozen miles to the nearest telephone and summoned a
machine from town. The town itself we could see, the Lakanaii
metropolis of Olokona, a smudge of smoke on the shore-line, as we
looked down across the miles of cane-fields, the billow-wreathed
reef-lines, and the blue haze of ocean to where the island of Oahu
shimmered like a dim opal on the horizon.
Maui is the Valley Isle of Hawaii, and Kauai the Garden Isle; but
Lakanaii, lying abreast of Oahu, is recognized in the present, and
was known of old and always, as the Jewel Isle of the group. Not
the largest, nor merely the smallest, Lakanaii is conceded by all
to be the wildest, the most wildly beautiful, and, in its size, the
richest of all the islands. Its sugar tonnage per acre is the
highest, its mountain beef-cattle the fattest, its rainfall the
most generous without ever being disastrous. It resembles Kauai in
that it is the first-formed and therefore the oldest island, so
that it had had time sufficient to break down its lava rock into
the richest soil, and to erode the canyons between the ancient
craters until they are like Grand Canyons of the Colorado, with
numberless waterfalls plunging thousands of feet in the sheer or
dissipating into veils of vapour, and evanescing in mid-air to
descend softly and invisibly through a mirage of rainbows, like so
Yet Lakanaii is easy to describe. But how can one describe Prince
Akuli? To know him is to know all Lakanaii most thoroughly. In
addition, one must know thoroughly a great deal of the rest of the
world. In the first place, Prince Akuli has no recognized nor
legal right to be called "Prince." Furthermore, "Akuli" means the
"squid." So that Prince Squid could scarcely be the dignified
title of the straight descendant of the oldest and highest aliis
(high chiefs) of Hawaii--an old and exclusive stock, wherein, in
the ancient way of the Egyptian Pharaohs, brothers and sisters had
even wed on the throne for the reason that they could not marry
beneath rank, that in all their known world there was none of
higher rank, and that, at every hazard, the dynasty must be
perpetuated.
I have heard Prince Akuli's singing historians (inherited from his
father) chanting their interminable genealogies, by which they
demonstrated that he was the highest alii in all Hawaii. Beginning
with Wakea, who is their Adam, and with Papa, their Eve, through as
many generations as there are letters in our alphabet they trace
down to Nanakaoko, the first ancestor born in Hawaii and whose wife
was Kahihiokalani. Later, but always highest, their generations
split from the generations of Ua, who was the founder of the two
distinct lines of the Kauai and Oahu kings.
In the eleventh century A.D., by the Lakanaii historians, at the
time brothers and sisters mated because none existed to excel them,
their rank received a boost of new blood of rank that was next to
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heaven's door. One Hoikemaha, steering by the stars and the
ancient traditions, arrived in a great double-canoe from Samoa. He
married a lesser alii of Lakanaii, and when his three sons were
grown, returned with them to Samoa to bring back his own youngest
brother. But with him he brought back Kumi, the son of Tui Manua,
which latter's rank was highest in all Polynesia, and barely second
to that of the demigods and gods. So the estimable seed of Kumi,
eight centuries before, had entered into the aliis of Lakanaii, and
been passed down by them in the undeviating line to reposit in
Prince Akuli.
Him I first met, talking with an Oxford accent, in the officers'
mess of the Black Watch in South Africa. This was just before that
famous regiment was cut to pieces at Magersfontein. He had as much
right to be in that mess as he had to his accent, for he was
Oxford-educated and held the Queen's Commission. With him, as his
guest, taking a look at the war, was Prince Cupid, so nicknamed,
but the true prince of all Hawaii, including Lakanaii, whose real
and legal title was Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole, and who might
have been the living King of Hawaii Nei had it not been for the
haole (white man) Revolution and Annexation--this, despite the fact
that Prince Cupid's alii genealogy was lesser to the heaven-boosted
genealogy of Prince Akuli. For Prince Akuli might have been King
of Lakanaii, and of all Hawaii, perhaps, had not his grandfather
been soundly thrashed by the first and greatest of the Kamehamehas.
This had occurred in the year 1810, in the booming days of the
sandalwood trade, and in the same year that the King of Kauai came
in, and was good, and ate out of Kamehameha's hand. Prince Akuli's
grandfather, in that year, had received his trouncing and
subjugating because he was "old school." He had not imaged island
empire in terms of gunpowder and haole gunners. Kamehameha,
farther-visioned, had annexed the service of haoles, including such
men as Isaac Davis, mate and sole survivor of the massacred crew of
the schooner Fair American, and John Young, captured boatswain of
the snow Eleanor. And Isaac Davis, and John Young, and others of
their waywardly adventurous ilk, with six-pounder brass carronades
from the captured Iphigenia and Fair American, had destroyed the
war canoes and shattered the morale of the King of Lakanaii's land-
fighters, receiving duly in return from Kamehameha, according to
agreement: Isaac Davis, six hundred mature and fat hogs; John
Young, five hundred of the same described pork on the hoof that was
split.
And so, out of all incests and lusts of the primitive cultures and
beast-man's gropings toward the stature of manhood, out of all red
murders, and brute battlings, and matings with the younger brothers
of the demigods, world-polished, Oxford-accented, twentieth century
to the tick of the second, comes Prince Akuli, Prince Squid, pure-
veined Polynesian, a living bridge across the thousand centuries,
comrade, friend, and fellow-traveller out of his wrecked seven-
thousand-dollar limousine, marooned with me in a begonia paradise
fourteen hundred feet above the sea, and his island metropolis of
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Olokona, to tell me of his mother, who reverted in her old age to
ancientness of religious concept and ancestor worship, and
collected and surrounded herself with the charnel bones of those
who had been her forerunners back in the darkness of time.
"King Kalakaua started this collecting fad, over on Oahu," Prince
Akuli continued. "And his queen, Kapiolani, caught the fad from
him. They collected everything--old makaloa mats, old tapas, old
calabashes, old double-canoes, and idols which the priests had
saved from the general destruction in 1819. I haven't seen a
pearl-shell fish-hook in years, but I swear that Kalakaua
accumulated ten thousand of them, to say nothing of human jaw-bone
fish-hooks, and feather cloaks, and capes and helmets, and stone
adzes, and poi-pounders of phallic design. When he and Kapiolani
made their royal progresses around the islands, their hosts had to
hide away their personal relics. For to the king, in theory,
belongs all property of his people; and with Kalakaua, when it came
to the old things, theory and practice were one.
"From him my father, Kanau, got the collecting bee in his bonnet,
and Hiwilani was likewise infected. But father was modern to his
finger-tips. He believed neither in the gods of the kahunas"
(priests) "nor of the missionaries. He didn't believe in anything
except sugar stocks, horse-breeding, and that his grandfather had
been a fool in not collecting a few Isaac Davises and John Youngs
and brass carronades before he went to war with Kamehameha. So he
collected curios in the pure collector's spirit; but my mother took
it seriously. That was why she went in for bones. I remember,
too, she had an ugly old stone-idol she used to yammer to and crawl
around on the floor before. It's in the Deacon Museum now. I sent
it there after her death, and her collection of bones to the Royal
Mausoleum in Olokona.
"I don't know whether you remember her father was Kaaukuu. Well,
he was, and he was a giant. When they built the Mausoleum, his
bones, nicely cleaned and preserved, were dug out of their hiding-
place, and placed in the Mausoleum. Hiwilani had an old retainer,
Ahuna. She stole the key from Kanau one night, and made Ahuna go
and steal her father's bones out of the Mausoleum. I know. And he
must have been a giant. She kept him in one of her big jars. One
day, when I was a tidy size of a lad, and curious to know if
Kaaukuu was as big as tradition had him, I fished his intact lower
jaw out of the jar, and the wrappings, and tried it on. I stuck my
head right through it, and it rested around my neck and on my
shoulders like a horse collar. And every tooth was in the jaw,
whiter than porcelain, without a cavity, the enamel unstained and
unchipped. I got the walloping of my life for that offence,
although she had to call old Ahuna in to help give it to me. But
the incident served me well. It won her confidence in me that I
was not afraid of the bones of the dead ones, and it won for me my
Oxford education. As you shall see, if that car doesn't arrive
first.
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"Old Ahuna was one of the real old ones with the hall-mark on him
and branded into him of faithful born-slave service. He knew more
about my mother's family, and my father's, than did both of them
put together. And he knew, what no living other knew, the burial-
place of centuries, where were hid the bones of most of her
ancestors and of Kanau's. Kanau couldn't worm it out of the old
fellow, who looked upon Kanau as an apostate.
"Hiwilani struggled with the old codger for years. How she ever
succeeded is beyond me. Of course, on the face of it, she was
faithful to the old religion. This might have persuaded Ahuna to
loosen up a little. Or she may have jolted fear into him; for she
knew a lot of the line of chatter of the old Huni sorcerers, and
she could make a noise like being on terms of utmost intimacy with
Uli, who is the chiefest god of sorcery of all the sorcerers. She
could skin the ordinary kahuna lapaau" (medicine man) "when it came
to praying to Lonopuha and Koleamoku; read dreams and visions and
signs and omens and indigestions to beat the band; make the
practitioners under the medicine god, Maiola, look like thirty
cents; pull off a pule hee incantation that would make them dizzy;
and she claimed to a practice of kahuna hoenoho, which is modern
spiritism, second to none. I have myself seen her drink the wind,
throw a fit, and prophesy. The aumakuas were brothers to her when
she slipped offerings to them across the altars of the ruined
heiaus" (temples) "with a line of prayer that was as unintelligible
to me as it was hair-r
aising. And as for old Ahuna, she could make
him get down on the floor and yammer and bite himself when she
pulled the real mystery dope on him.
"Nevertheless, my private opinion is that it was the anaana stuff
that got him. She snipped off a lock of his hair one day with a
pair of manicure scissors. This lock of hair was what we call the
maunu, meaning the bait. And she took jolly good care to let him
know she had that bit of his hair. Then she tipped it off to him
that she had buried it, and was deeply engaged each night in her
offerings and incantations to Uli."
"That was the regular praying-to-death?" I queried in the pause of
Prince Akuli's lighting his cigarette.
"Sure thing," he nodded. "And Ahuna fell for it. First he tried
to locate the hiding-place of the bait of his hair. Failing that,
he hired a pahiuhiu sorcerer to find it for him. But Hiwilani
queered that game by threatening to the sorcerer to practise apo
leo on him, which is the art of permanently depriving a person of
the power of speech without otherwise injuring him.
"Then it was that Ahuna began to pine away and get more like a
corpse every day. In desperation he appealed to Kanau. I happened
to be present. You have heard what sort of a man my father was.
"'Pig!' he called Ahuna. 'Swine-brains! Stinking fish! Die and
be done with it. You are a fool. It is all nonsense. There is
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nothing in anything. The drunken haole, Howard, can prove the
missionaries wrong. Square-face gin proves Howard wrong. The
doctors say he won't last six months. Even square-face gin lies.
Life is a liar, too. And here are hard times upon us, and a slump
in sugar. Glanders has got into my brood mares. I wish I could
lie down and sleep for a hundred years, and wake up to find sugar
up a hundred points.'
"Father was something of a philosopher himself, with a bitter wit
and a trick of spitting out staccato epigrams. He clapped his
hands. 'Bring me a high-ball,' he commanded; 'no, bring me two
high-balls.' Then he turned on Ahuna. 'Go and let yourself die,
old heathen, survival of darkness, blight of the Pit that you are.
But don't die on these premises. I desire merriment and laughter,
and the sweet tickling of music, and the beauty of youthful motion,