Even today you can see the immense kite, now turned to stone, just as Maui hauled it in for the last time and left it. It is seventy-five feet long and about forty-five feet wide, narrowing to eighteen feet at one end. At the narrow end is a crystal-clear lake, very deep and smooth as glass. In its center is a large, round stone projecting above the surface with a two-inch aperture in the middle where Maui used to make his kite string fast.
Near this lake are the two windpots, Ipunui and Ipuiki, and a little way below are three very distinct foot-prints, each fifteen inches long, showing where Maui stood while flying his great kite.
MAUI'S FISH-HOOK.
Maui, the powerful young demi-god who dwelt with his mother, the goddess Hina, in the great cave behind Rainbow Falls, had succeeded in so many hazardous undertakings, and had the welfare of his people so much at heart, that he resolved upon what was to be his greatest deed of prowess and beneficence.
Now Maui had a magic fish-hook which he cleverly used while fishing with his brothers. Maui was very sly and quick, but he was never a good fisherman. He would sit in the canoe and drag his hook through the water, catching no fish himself but snagging those his brothers caught and laughing merrily at their bewildered expressions when they pulled in their lines and found nothing.
They distrusted Maui, for he would never let them see his hook, yet they knew it was shaped differently from theirs. It was more complicated and had a double barb, while the common fish-hook had but one. But his brothers could never catch him at his tricks.
At last they no longer allowed him to accompany them on their fishing trips, as he took all the fish and honors, and they all knew—Maui included—that he did not deserve them. So Maui would go alone to the bay, but the hook remained idle in the bottom of his magic canoe which, as related in the legend of Kuna, he drove from the shores of the Island of Maui to the mouth of the Wailuku with two sweeps of his paddle.
While drifting about Maui watched some of his people who were not blessed with magic canoes, and considered the hard paddling required to send them through the water.
One day as he sat in his canoe watching another pass by, evidently on its way to a neighboring island, the demi-god wondered if it might not make things easier to have all the islands joined together, so people could travel to any part of the kingdom without the laborious canoe voyages.