He turned to me a weary and sceptical eye, saying:
"And if I die to-morrow, not alone will the lawyers contest my
disposition of my property, but they will contest my benefactions
and my pensions accorded, and the clarity of my mind.
"It was the right weather of the year; but even then, with our old
weak ones at the paddles, we did not attempt the landing until we
had assembled half the population of Ponuloo Valley down on the
steep little beach. Then we counted our waves, selected the best
one, and ran in on it. Of course, the canoe was swamped and the
outrigger smashed, but the ones on shore dragged us up unharmed
beyond the wash.
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com
65
"Ahuna gave his orders. In the night-time all must remain within
their houses, and the dogs be tied up and have their jaws bound so
that there should be no barking. And in the night-time Ahuna and I
stole out on our journey, no one knowing whether we went to the
right or left or up the valley toward its head. We carried jerky,
and hard poi and dried aku, and from the quantity of the food I
knew we were to be gone several days. Such a trail! A Jacob's
ladder to the sky, truly, for that first pali" (precipice), "almost
straight up, was three thousand feet above the sea. And we did it
in the dark!
"At the top, beyond the sight of the valley we had left, we slept
until daylight on the hard rock in a hollow nook Ahuna knew, and
that was so small that we were squeezed. And the old fellow, for
fear that I might move in the heavy restlessness of lad's sleep,
lay on the outside with one arm resting across me. At daybreak, I
saw why. Between us and the lip of the cliff scarcely a yard
intervened. I crawled to the lip and looked, watching the abyss
take on immensity in the growing light and trembling from the fear
of height that was upon me. At last I made out the sea, over half
a mile straight beneath. And we had done this thing in the dark!
"Down in the next valley, which was a very tiny one, we found
evidence of the ancient population, but there were no people. The
only way was the crazy foot-paths up and down the dizzy valley
walls from valley to valley. But lean and aged as Ahuna was, he
seemed untirable. In the second valley dwelt an old leper in
hiding. He did not know me, and when Ahuna told him who I was, he
grovelled at my feet, almost clasping them, and mumbled a mele of
all my line out of a lipless mouth.
"The next valley proved to be the valley. It was long and so
narrow that its floor had caught not sufficient space of soil to
grow taro for a single person. Also, it had no beach, the stream
that threaded it leaping a pali of several hundred feet down to the
sea. It was a god-forsaken place of naked, eroded lava, to which
only rarely could the scant vegetation find root-hold. For miles
we followed up that winding fissure through the towering walls, far
into the chaos of back country that lies behind the Iron-bound
Coast. How far that valley penetrated I do not know, but, from the
quantity of water in the stream, I judged it far. We did not go to
the valley's head. I could see Ahuna casting glances to all the
peaks, and I knew he was taking bearings, known to him alone, from
natural objects. When he halted at the last, it was with abrupt
certainty. His bearings had crossed. He threw down the portion of
food and outfit he had carried. It was the place. I looked on
either hand at the hard, implacable walls, naked of vegetation, and
could dream of no burial-place possible in such bare adamant.
"We ate, then stripped for work. Only did Ahuna permit me to
retain my shoes. He stood beside me at the edge of a deep pool,
likewise apparelled and prodigiously skinny.
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com
66
"'You will dive down into the pool at this spot,' he said. 'Search
the rock with your hands as you descend, and, about a fathom and a
half down, you will find a hole. Enter it, head-first, but going
"'And then?' I queried. 'You will find the hole growing larger,'
was his answer. 'When you have gone all of eight fathoms along the
passage, come up slowly, and you will find your head in the air,
above water, in the dark. Wait there then for me. The water is
very cold.'
"It didn't sound good to me. I was thinking, not of the cold water
and the dark, but of the bones. 'You go first,' I said. But he
claimed he could not. 'You are my alii, my prince,' he said. 'It
is impossible that I should go before you into the sacred burial-
place of your kingly ancestors.'
"But the prospect did not please. 'Just cut out this prince
stuff,' I told him. 'It isn't what it's cracked up to be. You go
first, and I'll never tell on you.' 'Not alone the living must we
please,' he admonished, 'but, more so, the dead must we please.
Nor can we lie to the dead.'
"We argued it out, and for half an hour it was stalemate. I
wouldn't, and he simply couldn't. He tried to buck me up by
appealing to my pride. He chanted the heroic deeds of my
ancestors; and, I remember especially, he sang to me of Mokomoku,
my great-grandfather and the gigantic father of the gigantic
Kaaukuu, telling how thrice in battle Mokomoku leaped among his
foes, seizing by the neck a warrior in either hand and knocking
their heads together until they were dead. But this was not what
decided me. I really felt sorry for old Ahuna, he was so beside
himself for fear the expedition would come to naught. And I was
coming to a great admiration for the old fellow, not least among
the reasons being the fact of his lying down to sleep between me
and the cliff-lip.
"So, with true alii-authority of command, saying, 'You will
immediately follow after me,' I dived in. Everything he had said
was correct. I found the entrance to the subterranean passage,
swam carefully through it, cutting my shoulder once on the lava-
sharp roof, and emerged in the darkness and air. But before I
could count thirty, he broke water beside me, rested his hand on my
arm to make sure of me, and directed me to swim ahead of him for
the matter of a hundred feet or so. Then we touched bottom and
climbed out on the rocks. And still no light, and I remember I was
glad that our altitude was too high for centipedes.
"He had brought with him a coconut calabash, tightly stoppered, of
whale-oil that must have been landed on Lahaina beach thirty years
before. From his mouth he took a water-tight arrangement of a
matchbox composed of two empty rifle-cartridges fitted snugly
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com
67
together. He lighted the wicking that floated on the oil, and I
looked about, and knew disappointment. No burial-chamber was it,
but merely a lava tube such as occurs on all the islands.
"He put the calabash of light into my hands and started me ahead of
him on the way, which he assured me was long, but not too long. It
was long, at least a mile in my sober judgment, though at the time
it seemed five miles; and it ascended sharply. When Ahuna, at the
last, stopped me, I knew we were close to our goal. He knelt on
his lean old knees on the sharp lava rock, and clasped my knees
with his skinny arms. My hand that was free of the calabash lamp
he placed on his head. He chanted to me, with his old cracked,
quavering voice, the line of my descent and my essential high alii-
ness. And then he said:
"'Tell neither Kanau nor Hiwilani aught of what you are about to
behold. There is no sacredness in Kanau. His mind is filled with
sugar and the breeding of horses. I do know that he sold a feather
cloak his grandfather had worn to that English collector for eight
thousand dollars, and the money he lost the next day betting on the
polo game between Maui and Oahu. Hiwilani, your mother, is filled
with sacredness. She is too much filled with sacredness. She
grows old, and weak-headed, and she traffics over-much with
sorceries.'
"'No,' I made answer. 'I shall tell no one. If I did, then would
I have to return to this place again. And I do not want ever to
return to this place. I'll try anything once. This I shall never
try twice.'
"'It is well,' he said, and arose, falling behind so that I should
enter first. Also, he said: 'Your mother is old. I shall bring
her, as promised, the bones of her mother and of her grandfather.
These should content her until she dies; and then, if I die before
her, it is you who must see to it that all the bones in her family
collection are placed in the Royal Mausoleum.'
"I have given all the Islands' museums the once-over," Prince Akuli
lapsed back into slang, "and I must say that the totality of the
collections cannot touch what I saw in our Lakanaii burial-cave.
Remember, and with reason and history, we trace back the highest
and oldest genealogy in the Islands. Everything that I had ever
dreamed or heard of, and much more that I had not, was there. The
place was wonderful. Ahuna, sepulchrally muttering prayers and
meles, moved about, lighting various whale-oil lamp-calabashes.
They were all there, the Hawaiian race from the beginning of
Hawaiian time. Bundles of bones and bundles of bones, all wrapped
decently in tapa, until for all the world it was like the parcels-
post department at a post office.
"And everything! Kahilis, which you may know developed out of the
fly-flapper into symbols of royalty until they became larger than
hearse-plumes with handles a fathom and a half and over two fathoms
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com
68
in length. And such handles! Of the wood of the kauila, inlaid
with shell and ivory and bone with a cleverness that had died out
among our artificers a century before. It was a centuries-old
family attic. For the first time I saw things I had only heard of,
such as the pahoas, fashioned of whale-teeth and suspended by
braided human hair, and worn on the breast only by the highest of
rank.
"There were tapes and mats of the rarest and oldest; capes and leis
and helmets and cloaks, priceless all, except the too-ancient ones,
of the feathers of the mamo, and of the iwi and the akakane and the
o-o. I saw one of the mamo cloaks that was superior to that finest
one in the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, and that they value at
between half a million and a million dollars. Goodness me, I
thought at the time, it was lucky Kanau didn't know about it.
"Such a mess of things! Carved gourds and calabashes, shell-
scrapers, nets of olona fibre, a junk of ie-ie baskets, and fish-
hooks of every bone and spoon of shell. Musical instruments of the
forgotten days--ukukes and nose flutes, and kiokios which are
likewise played with one unstoppered nostril. Taboo poi bowls and
finger bowls, left-handed adzes of the canoe gods, lava-cup lamps,
stone mortars and pestles and poi-pounders. And adzes again, a
myriad of them, beautiful ones, from an ounce in weight for the
finer carving of idols to fifteen pounds for the felling of trees,
and all with the sweetest handles I have ever beheld.
"There were the kaekeekes--you know, our ancient drums, hollowed
sections of the coconut tree, covered one end with shark-skin. The
first kaekeeke of all Hawaii Ahuna pointed out to me and told me
the tale. It was manifestly most ancient. He was afraid to touch
it for fear the age-rotted wood of it would crumble to dust, the
ragged tatters of the shark-skin head of it still attached. 'This
is the very oldest and father of all our kaekeekes,' Ahuna told me.
'Kila, the son of Moikeha, brought it back from far Raiatea in the
South Pacific. And it was Kila's own son, Kahai, who made that
same journey, and was gone ten years, and brought back with him
from Tahiti the first breadfruit trees that sprouted and grew on
Hawaiian soil.'
"And the bones and bones! The parcel-delivery array of them!
Besides the small bundles of the long bones, there were full
skeletons, tapa-wrapped, lying in one-man, and two- and three-man
canoes of precious koa wood, with curved outriggers of wiliwili
wood, and proper paddles to hand with the io-projection at the
point simulating the continuance of the handle, as if, like a
skewer, thrust through the flat length of the blade. And their war
weapons were laid away by the sides of the lifeless bones that had
wielded them--rusty old horse-pistols, derringers, pepper-boxes,
five-barrelled fantastiques, Kentucky long riffles, muskets handled
in trade by John Company and Hudson's Bay, shark-tooth swords,
wooden stabbing-knives, arrows and spears bone-headed of the fish
and the pig and of man, and spears and arrows wooden-headed and
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com
69
fire-hardened.
"Ahuna put a spear in my hand, headed and pointed finely with the
long shin-bone of a man, and told me the tale of it. But first he
unwrapped the long bones, arms, and legs, of two parcels, the
bones, under the wrappings, neatly tied like so many faggots.
'This,' said Ahuna, exhibiting the pitiful white contents of one
parcel, 'is Laulani. She was the wife of Akaiko, whose bones, now
placed in your hands, much larger and male-like as you observe,
held up the flesh of a large man, a three-hundred pounder seven-
footer, three centuries agone. And this spear-head is made of the
shin-bone of Keola, a mighty wrestler and runner of their own time
and place. And he loved Laulani, and she fled with him. But in a
forgotten battle on the sands of Kalini, Akaiko rushed the lines of
the enemy, leading the charge that was successful, and seized upon
Keola, his wife'
s lover, and threw him to the ground, and sawed
through his neck to the death with a shark-tooth knife. Thus, in
the old days as always, did man combat for woman with man. And
Laulani was beautiful; that Keola should be made into a spearhead
for her! She was formed like a queen, and her body was a long bowl
of sweetness, and her fingers lomi'd' (massaged) 'to slimness and
smallness at her mother's breast. For ten generations have we
remembered her beauty. Your father's singing boys to-day sing of
her beauty in the hula that is named of her! This is Laulani, whom
you hold in your hands.'
"And, Ahuna done, I could but gaze, with imagination at the one
time sobered and fired. Old drunken Howard had lent me his
Tennyson, and I had mooned long and often over the Idyls of the
King. Here were the three, I thought--Arthur, and Launcelot, and
Guinevere. This, then, I pondered, was the end of it all, of life
and strife and striving and love, the weary spirits of these long-
gone ones to be invoked by fat old women and mangy sorcerers, the
bones of them to be esteemed of collectors and betted on horse-
races and ace-fulls or to be sold for cash and invested in sugar
stocks.
"For me it was illumination. I learned there in the burial-cave
the great lesson. And to Ahuna I said: 'The spear headed with the
long bone of Keola I shall take for my own. Never shall I sell it.
I shall keep it always.'
"'And for what purpose?' he demanded. And I replied: 'That the
contemplation of it may keep my hand sober and my feet on earth
with the knowledge that few men are fortunate enough to have as
much of a remnant of themselves as will compose a spearhead when
they are three centuries dead.'
"And Ahuna bowed his head, and praised my wisdom of judgment. But
at that moment the long-rotted olona-cord broke and the pitiful
woman's bones of Laulani shed from my clasp and clattered on the
rocky floor. One shin-bone, in some way deflected, fell under the
dark shadow of a canoe-bow, and I made up my mind that it should be
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com
70
mine. So I hastened to help him in the picking up of the bones and
the tying, so that he did not notice its absence.
"'This,' said Ahuna, introducing me to another of my ancestors, 'is