Effortlessly we surmounted the familiar road, to a point where our way turned to the left. In a gray car in a gray-and-silver dawn we passed the home of the Maguires, and with Mauna Kea’s icy peak flushing in our eyes, pursued the drive toward Parker Ranch. Bending off to the right for a remembered sugar-loaf hill, Puuwaawaa, we came to the home of the Hinds, and there spent a fortnight with Robert Hind and his wife, Hannah, whose eyes and smile Jack more than once preserved, for what time may be, in written romances. Their sons and daughters were absent in eastern colleges. Here in terraced gardens of lawns and every flower and plant that will grow at this 2700-foot elevation, we worked and played; and each morning, before breakfast, Jack and I made it a point to attend the toilette of a kingly peacock, whose absorption in the preening of his black-opal plumage was little disturbed by our admiring scrutiny and conversation. And there were horseback rides, and long motoring trips. One of these picnics was to the great heiau of Honaunau, south of Kealakekua Bay.
To reach this Temple of Refuge,—which also served as a court of Justice—one was obliged to leave a vehicle and take to the saddle. There has since been made a good automobile road.
We descended upon horses lent by Miss Ethel Paris, an energetic young woman capable of running her cattle ranch unaided should need arise. She entertained us with the unobtrusive, faultless hospitality of her Hawaiian strain, combined with the Caucasian blood that attains, in this gentle tropic, to something nearly equal in warmth and generousness.
Honaunau is one of the most imposing of Hawaii’s relics, and covers nearly seven acres. Its walls, still intact, measure a dozen feet in height and eighteen in thickness, and in olden times protected uncounted fugitives from the wrath of their fellows. Those of the Tower of London dwindle into comparative insignificance before this savage architectural triumph.
The heiau forms a lordly man-made promontory upon a low cape of lava, relieved by towering coconut palms that wave their plumage at entrancing angles for one who would sketch. It is a mammoth pile of mystery, every stone, small and great, a secret laid by the hands of men who were born of woman and who loved, and fought, and worked, and now are cosmic dust. The Bishop Museum is conducting further investigations into this broken edifice that piques the imagination far beyond its available legend.
Umbilical cords were placed in interstices of the stones and sealed with small rocks. To this day, many a modest Hawaiian maiden of Christian beliefs could admit, if she would, that her parents had dedicated to the huge altar of their forefathers such souvenir of their pride and lingering sense of romance and reverence for hereditary custom. I wonder, left to themselves in this lotus land, how long it would take the Hawaiians to revert. I wonder, equally, how long we dominant white-faces, given that same dreamy environment, would need to attain the same retrogression. Jack London played with this theme in “The Scarlet Plague,” but in California climate. He gave them about a generation.
A racy episode in the pre-Christian stage of Kaahumanu’s career, when she fled the consequences of Kamehameha’s rage following an amorous escapade, is still whispered half-laughingly by hapa-haoles. They point out, in the great inclosure, the tilted, roof-like stone under which the fascinating and capricious lady took sanctuary.
That night we slept at the Tommy Whites’, after a luau at their house. Here, to our joy, we found Mother Shipman, carrying on a little “progress” of her own; and her greeting was: “My own son and daughter!” Next day there was still another luau, mauka at the old Roy place, Wahou, where again we met the Walls. Mrs. Roy, mother of both Mrs. Shipman and Mrs. White, had passed away several years earlier. Her garden remained, more beautiful than ever in its fragrant riot of roses and blumeria and heliotrope, and the begonias had surpassed all promising.
Kiholo, seaside retreat of the Hinds, was enjoyed for a night and a day—miles down-slope over the lava. And again we drove to Parker Ranch, guests of Mary and Hannah’s Aunt Kalili, Mrs. Martin Campbell. The great holding, nearly doubled in acreage, is now the fortune of one part-Hawaiian lad, Richard Smart. For Thelma Parker had sacrificed herself for love in a tragic marriage, and died untimely, survived by but one of her children, who, the father shortly following his child-wife to the grave, became sole heir to the estate. On the side of Mauna Kea, in the family burial ground walled with sepulchral cypresses, rest the ashes of beautiful Thelma, taken there with all fitting pomp, mourned by every Hawaiian heart born on her lands. Standing beside her grave, we tried to vision that long funeral cortège winding up the grassy leagues she had so often galloped wild in her childhood. Poor little maid—one is thankful that at least she had that wonderful maidenhood.
Near the cemetery is Mana, old deserted home of Parkers, rambling in a great courtyard. The main body of the building is called Kapuaikahi; the right wing, Waialeale; the left, Evahale. Mary wept amidst the ruined fountains, for here her early years had been spent with her sisters and cousins, and Princess Kaiulani had been a familiar visitor. An Hawaiian caretaker let us in, and through the koa rooms we wandered, touching almost reverently the treasures of generations—furniture, pianos, china, and moldy albums of photographs. One curio especially appealed to Jack, who uses a similar incident in “Michael, Brother of Jerry”—a whale-tooth, sailor-carven, with an inscription referring to the sinking of the Essex by a cow-whale. Coincidentally, a man, claiming to be a survivor of the Essex, died in Honolulu about this time of our visit to Mana.