“Be quiet, Rohana!” said Sestrina as she gazed fondly at the wise-looking cockatoo which they had tamed and made their close companion, calling it Rohana since its eyes so strangely reminded them of the dead leper.
“The winds blow steadily from the sunrise, wahine, and so the heiaus (temples) music moans for us,” said Hawahee in a solemn voice. As he rose from his squatting mat, Sestrina also rose, and, inclining her form, she listened to the musical murmurs that floated from the temple.
“Let us go and give thanks to the gods ere the sun is high,” said Hawahee as he brushed the crumbs from his tappa-robe that so admirably suited his tall, handsome figure. Then they both went away down the slope that led into the lovely valley of breadfruits. Sestrina, with bowed head, followed close behind her masterful, but kind, companion.
In a few moments they stood before the wonderful temple which Hawahee had fashioned after infinite toil during the long lonely years. The temple had been made out of the natural structure of the big cavern and its high rocky walls in the valley’s side. The dimly lit, hollow chamber was about fifteen feet high, and the altar side was composed of wonderfully arranged shells of multitudinous shapes and sizes, all having been placed in rows and spiral columns that rose to the roofless edifice, for the sun by day and the stars at night were the sacred lights that shone through the branched heights of that temple’s roof. These shells, many of enormous dimensions, had been arranged with delicate care in such a way, that when the winds blew from the south-east, and came sweeping down the valley, they blew into the pearly convolutions of each shell, which responded with a musical murmur. It was not a disordered, unharmonious sound which the shells gave forth when the sea winds blew, but a perfect, harmonious, plaintive chant-like chime. And it was this weird, mournful chime which came to Hawahee’s and Sestrina’s ears as they crept under the tall breadfruit trees, so that they might kneel in prayer before the altar of the shell-gods!
It was a grand, masterly fashioned work, a temple of the highest art attainable by mortal man. With the infinite patience of religious fervour, and a deep insight and belief in the divine omnipotence of his pagan gods, Hawahee had scraped and cut, through years of toil, three of the larger shells till they resembled the faces of the goddess Pelé and the gods Kauhilo and Atua. With no other tool than a broken ship’s clasp-knife, which he had found on the Belle Isle, Hawahee had slowly cut holes and chiselled perfect brows, leaving the wide pearly convolution of each shell’s entrance for a mouth. The broad shoulders, bust and limbs of giant proportions had been cut from boulders of coral stone, each limb being fixed by indistinguishable joints of red clay. The whole was a wondrous work of art. Each shell-face and boulder had been exalted from insensate stone into an object of marvellous allegorical, sombre, awesome beauty. The pearl flush of the lips and the wrinkled brows expressed, in sculptural silence, something of the terror and majesty of the unknown powers of the universe! For, Hawahee had achieved the highest artistic result: through infinite toil he had managed to imbue, endow each form with god-like attributes. And lo, each face was an exact representation of the wonderful picture which his poetic imagination, his inward vision shaped when he knelt in religious fervour to the starlit dark and his pagan gods. But, withal, there was something more than chiselled, symbolical beauty in Hawahee’s sculptural work. This humble castaway child of Art who created his own deities, had endowed their lips with the grand orchestral harmony of the ocean’s cry in a thousand thousand caverns: for when the winds blew, each wonderful shell-mouth of the gods and goddess moaned a deep bass note which was in perfect harmony with the shrill murmurings and musical clamour of the wonderful altar’s smaller shells!
The goddess Pelé, who stood in the centre—Kauhilo on the right and Atua on the left side—was seven feet in height and possessed four arms, the extreme right arm being outstretched, the perfect tapering fingers gripping the yellowish, ivory idol that had been the symbol of the dead Chinaman’s religion. Kauhilo, who gazed with an eternal sidelong glance from his brilliant stone eyes at Pelé, had a human skull poised on his right shoulder. Atua had four arms, three outstretched and one inclined in marvellous sculptural beauty as it rested on Pelé’s shoulder, while the pearl-white eyes gazed with immutable grief into the leafy shadows of the banyan beyond the altar’s portals. Incredible as it may seem, Hawahee had with infinite patience and genius constructed a marvellous æolian organ of shells, whereon the winds not only played a cunning, sweet-murmuring cadence, but rendered a sombre, beautiful Hawaiian hymn. Some of the shells weighed a hundredweight; and glittering in the sunlight that shone down through the palms over the temple, they looked like mysterious pipes of some cathedral organ of nature’s construction, rows upon rows of small shells gradually increasing to larger rosy shells, each row arranged so that it gave forth the required note when the winds swept down the valley.
The first idea that had inspired Hawahee to make this wonderful instrument, came from his memory of the great Atua priests of his native isles. These priests would artfully place large empty shells on the shores by the tribal villages so that when the storms blew, the shells moaned to the listening, superstitious chiefs hidden up the shores. So did the priests invest their persons with a mighty significance and prove to the chiefs that they were the chosen of Atua, Tangalora, Pelé and Kauhilo.
It had taken years to select the one shell from thousands that would, when placed just so, give forth the exact note required. Sestrina had helped Hawahee in the building of this wonderful temple and altar. She, too, had roamed round the shores of that lonely Pacific isle gathering thousands and thousands of seashells, and had shared Hawahee’s enthusiasm as one by one the perfect shell was discovered. Under the influence of the Hawaiian’s fanaticism, Sestrina had developed deep faith in the virtue of the shell’s Lydian strains. “The great White God, and the older gods, will know the love I have given to this work, and will hear the winds of heaven singing sweetly to their ears,” said Hawahee.
Sestrina had gazed in wonder as the handsome, dignified fanatic toiled through the years over his marvellous work of love. And so, she too had developed a reverence for the stars and the voice of that mighty lyrist—the wind of heaven—and had felt the deep soul-thrilling thoughts that come to those who kneel before the materialised shapes of their imagination, those objects which faintly represent the solemnity of their innermost faith.
When Hawahee and Sestrina entered the temple, they at once knelt before Atua, Pelé and Kauhilo. Then, as the winds swept along the valley and the goddess Pelé’s tongueless shell-lips moaned a rich Lydian note to the deeper mouths of the gods, they too lifted their voices and took part in that wondrous choir.