Just off the southwest shore of Lanai is a block of lava eighty or ninety feet high, vertical or overhanging on every side, absolutely without foothold. Yet at its top one may see from the neighboring shore a grave with a low wall built about it. This is the resting-place of Pupehe, the wife of one to whom was given the name of Misty Eyes, because the woman’s eyes so dazzled his own. These two loved so well that they were all in all to one another. They chose to live apart from their people, roaming the woods, climbing the hills, surf-riding, fishing, berrying as the whim took them.
Lest some chief should look on her face and envy him, Misty Eyes hid his companion in a little hut among the trees, as secret and secure as a bird’s nest, and sometimes they would go together to a cave, opening from the sea, opposite Pupehe’s Rock, to catch and cook a sea-turtle.
The season of storms was at hand, but as the day had broken fair, Pupehe went to the cave to prepare a meal, while her husband took the calabashes to fill at a spring up the valley. A mist had come up from nowhere when he turned to go back; the wind was rising to a gale, the sea was whitening. His heart went into his throat, for he recalled how the breakers thundered in at the cave and swept the strip of beach inside. Flinging down the calabashes, he ran with all his speed. Immense waves were sweeping the cavern from end to end. Their thunder deafened him. Out of an acre of seething white a brown arm lifted. He leaped in, seized Pupehe, and succeeded in gaining the shore, but to no avail. She was dead. After the storm had passed he paddled to the lonely rock; was raised, with his burden, by a pitying god, and on the summit, where none might stand even beside the grave of her whom in life he had guarded so jealously, he buried the cold form. When the last stone had been placed on the wall, Misty Eyes sang a dirge for his wife and leaped into the sea.
The Lady of the Twilight
In Koolauloa, Oahu, is a natural well, of unknown depth and thirty yards in diameter, that is believed to be connected with the ocean. Bodies drowned in this crater are said to have been found afterward floating in the sea. This pond, known as Waiapuka, hides the entrance to a cave that can be reached only by diving, and in that cave was concealed during her infancy Laieikawai, Lady of the Twilight. Her father, enraged that his wife always presented female children to him, swore he would kill all such offspring until a male issue should appear, and Laieikawai was therefore kept out of his sight and in retirement until she had grown to womanhood. Her beauty attracted even the gods, and chiefs from many islands travelled far to see her face when she had been taken from the cavern by her grandmother and bestowed more fittingly in a house thatched with parrot feathers and guarded by the lizard god. Her bed was bird-wings, the birds were her companions, she wore a robe tinted like a rainbow, and wherever she went a fragment of rainbow hung over her and might be seen afar.
Laieikawai married a sun prince, and the same rainbow served as a ladder to take her to his new home in the moon, his place in the sun being too hot and glaring for endurance. This was a fickle prince, for having seen another pretty face on earth, he descended, and it was a year ere he appeared in the moon again. The young wife meanwhile had gone to the bowl of knowledge, a wooden vessel enclosed in wicker, decorated with feathers and with birds carved in wood along the rim. Looking in and uttering the command, “Laukapalili!” a vision of her recreant husband appeared. The father and mother of the prince were joint witnesses with the wife of his faithlessness. As the picture vanished the air grew dark; faint, grisly shapes arose, and wailing voices sounded, “Heaven has fallen!” Standing on the rainbow bridge, the father, mother, and wife cast off their love for the prince, and condemned him to be a wandering ghost, living on butterflies. Then, having tired of heaven, the Lady of the Twilight returned to earth.
The Ladrones
The taking of Guam during the war with Spain was one of the comedies of that disagreement. When its rickety fort was fired upon by one of our ships, the Spanish governor hastened down to the shore to greet the American officers, and apologized because he was out of powder and could not reply to what he supposed was a salute. Off in that corner of the world he had not heard of any war.