Hawaiian I knew would make the old woman’s heart warm until she
died with remembrance of the wonderful occasion. The wry grimace
he stole to me would not have been made had he felt any uncertainty
of its escaping her.
“And so,” Prince Akuli resumed, after the wahine had tottered away
in an ecstasy, “Ahuna and I departed on our grave-robbing
adventure. You know the Iron-bound Coast.”
I nodded, knowing full well the spectacle of those lava leagues of
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
63
weather coast, truly iron-bound so far as landing-places or
anchorages were concerned, great forbidding cliff-walls thousands
of feet in height, their summits wreathed in cloud and rain squall,
their knees hammered by the trade-wind billows into spouting,
spuming white, the air, from sea to rain-cloud, spanned by a myriad
leaping waterfalls, provocative, in day or night, of countless sun
and lunar rainbows. Valleys, so called, but fissures rather, slit
the cyclopean walls here and there, and led away into a lofty and
madly vertical back country, most of it inaccessible to the foot of
man and trod only by the wild goat.
“Precious little you know of it,” Prince Akuli retorted, in reply
to my nod. “You’ve seen it only from the decks of steamers. There
are valleys there, inhabited valleys, out of which there is no exit
by land, and perilously accessible by canoe only on the selected
days of two months in the year. When I was twenty-eight I was over
there in one of them on a hunting trip. Bad weather, in the
auspicious period, marooned us for three weeks. Then five of my
party and myself swam for it out through the surf. Three of us
made the canoes waiting for us. The other two were flung back on
the sand, each with a broken arm. Save for us, the entire party
remained there until the next year, ten months afterward. And one
of them was Wilson, of Wilson & Wall, the Honolulu sugar factors.
And he was engaged to be married.
“I’ve seen a goat, shot above by a hunter above, land at my feet a
thousand yards underneath. BELIEVE me, that landscape seemed to
rain goats and rocks for ten minutes. One of my canoemen fell off
the trail between the two little valleys of Aipio and Luno. He hit
first fifteen hundred feet beneath us, and fetched up in a ledge
three hundred feet farther down. We didn’t bury him. We couldn’t
get to him, and flying machines had not yet been invented. His
bones are there now, and, barring earthquake and volcano, will be
there when the Trumps of Judgment sound.
“Goodness me! Only the other day, when our Promotion Committee,
trying to compete with Honolulu for the tourist trade, called in
the engineers to estimate what it would cost to build a scenic
drive around the Iron-bound Coast, the lowest figures were a
quarter of a million dollars a mile!
“And Ahuna and I, an old man and a young boy, started for that
stern coast in a canoe paddled by old men! The youngest of them,
the steersman, was over sixty, while the rest of them averaged
seventy at the very least. There were eight of them, and we
started in the night-time, so that none should see us go. Even
these old ones, trusted all their lives, knew no more than the
fringe of the secret. To the fringe, only, could they take us.
“And the fringe was–I don’t mind telling that much–the fringe was
Ponuloo Valley. We got there the third afternoon following. The
old chaps weren’t strong on the paddles. It was a funny
expedition, into such wild waters, with now one and now another of
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
64
our ancient-mariner crew collapsing and even fainting. One of them
actually died on the second morning out. We buried him overside.
It was positively uncanny, the heathen ceremonies those grey ones
pulled off in burying their grey brother. And I was only fifteen,
alii kapo over them by blood of heathenness and right of hereditary
heathen rule, with a penchant for Jules Verne and shortly to sail
for England for my education! So one learns. Small wonder my
father was a philosopher, in his own lifetime spanning the history
of man from human sacrifice and idol worship, through the religions
of man’s upward striving, to the Medusa of rank atheism at the end
of it all. Small wonder that, like old Ecclesiastes, he found
vanity in all things and surcease in sugar stocks, singing boys,
and hula dancers.”
Prince Akuli debated with his soul for an interval.
“Oh, well,” he sighed, “I have done some spanning of time myself.”
He sniffed disgustedly of the odour of the hala lei that stifled
him. “It stinks of the ancient.” he vouchsafed. “I? I stink of
the modern. My father was right. The sweetest of all is sugar up
a hundred points, or four aces in a poker game. If the Big War
lasts another year, I shall clean up three-quarters of a million
over a million. If peace breaks to-morrow, with the consequent
slump, I could enumerate a hundred who will lose my direct bounty,
and go into the old natives’ homes my father and I long since
endowed for them.”
He clapped his hands, and the old wahine tottered toward him in an
excitement of haste to serve. She cringed before him, as he drew
pad and pencil from his breast pocket.
“Each month, old woman of our old race,” he addressed her, “will
you receive, by rural free delivery, a piece of written paper that
you can exchange with any storekeeper anywhere for ten dollars
gold. This shall be so for as long as you live. Behold! I write
the record and the remembrance of it, here and now, with this
pencil on this paper. And this is because you are of my race and
service, and because you have honoured me this day with your mats
to sit upon and your thrice-blessed and thrice-delicious lei hala.”
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
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