"It is chelo,"[30] said the priests, "it is Pélé's berry. You must not touch them unless we ask her. She will breathe fire on you."
Kapiolani broke off a branch from one of the bushes regardless of the horrified faces of the priests. And she ate the berries, without stopping to ask the goddess for her permission.
She carried a branch of the berries in her hand. If she had told them what she was going to do they would have been frenzied with fear and horror.
Up she climbed until the full terrors of the boiling crater of Kilawea burst on her sight. Before her an immense gulf yawned in the shape of the crescent moon, eight miles in circumference and over a thousand feet deep. Down in the smoking hollow, hundreds of feet beneath her, a lake of fiery lava rolled in flaming waves against precipices of rock. This ever-moving lake of molten fire is called: "The House of Everlasting Burning." This surging lake was dotted with tiny mountain islets, and, from the tops of their little peaks, pyramids of flame blazed and columns of grey smoke went up. From some of these little islands streams of blazing lava rolled down into the lake of fire. The air was filled with the roar of the furnaces of flame.
Even the fearless Kapiolani stood in awe as she looked. But she did not flinch, though here and there, as she walked, the crust of the lava cracked under her feet and the ground was hot with hidden fire.
She came to the very edge of the crater. To come so far without offering hogs and fish to the fiery goddess was in itself enough to bring a fiery river of molten lava upon her. Kapiolani offered nothing save defiance. Audacity, they thought, could go no further.
Here, a priestess of Pélé came, and raising her hands in threat denounced death on the head of Kapiolani if she came further. Kapiolani pulled from her robe a book. In it—for it was her New Testament—she read to the priestess of the one true, loving Father-God.
Then Kapiolani did a thing at which the very limbs of those who watched trembled and shivered. She went to the edge of the crater and stepped over onto a jutting rock and let herself down and down toward the sulphurous burning lake. The ground cracked under her feet and sulphurous steam hissed through crevices in the rock, as though the demons of Pélé fumed in their frenzy. Hundreds of staring, wondering eyes followed her, fascinated and yet horrified.
Then she stood on a ledge of rock, and, offering up prayer and praise to the God of all, Who made the volcano and Who made her, she cast the Pélé berries into the lake, and sent stone after stone down into the flaming lava. It was the most awful insult that could be offered to Pélé! Now surely she would leap up in fiery anger, and, with a hail of burning stones, consume Kapiolani. But nothing happened; and Kapiolani, turning, climbed the steep ascent of the crater edge and at last stood again unharmed among her people. She spoke to her people, telling them again that Jehovah made the fires. She called on them all to sing to His praise and, for the first time, there rang across the crater of Kilawea the song of Christians. The power of the priests was gone, and from that hour the people all over that island who had trembled and hesitated between Pélé and Christ turned to the worship of our Lord Jesus, the Son of God the Father Almighty.