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
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
slowly, for the lava rock is sharp and may cut your head and body.’
“‘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
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
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