Julian Monsarrat, with keen appreciation of Hawaii’s turbulent history, filled Jack with valuable material for fiction.
From this Ranch, one may ride to the summit of Mauna Loa, which is overtopped by its sister peak only by 150 feet height of small cones in Mauna Kea’s immense crater. But Mary Low’s time was limited, and there was still so much ahead of us, that this venture, too, was set forward into the ever receding allure of future returnings.
Still another sumptuous luau, at which we came in contact with some of the Pahala neighbors, and we set out for Kilauea. There, in broad daylight, at last we beheld the bursting, beating wonder of her heart of lava quite as blood-red as all its painted or sculptured imagings. Thus it must have been when a churchman half a century ago wrote:
“Wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of His indignation.”
We amused ourselves trying to believe that this manifestation was the reward of certain offerings, of flowers and tid-bits brought purposely from the Monsarrat abundance, which Mary and ourselves cast into the burning lake.
From Hilo, where our Shipman family once more enfolded us, even to Uncle Alec, we made another flying trip down the Puna Coast, leaving Pahoa behind on our second quest into idyllic Kalapana by the turquoise sea. Here the natives are still “natives” in simple mode of life and attitude toward the same; and here one finds, at the village of Kaimu, what is said to be the largest grove of coconut palms in the Islands. On the high-piled crescent of sand, overrun by a blossoming vine, under the angled plume-tossing pillars of the grove lolled a scattered group of Hawaiians. From the noble silvered head of one of the benevolent old men Jack bought me a coral-red lei, one of a sort seldom seen these latter days in Hawaii—a solid cable full an inch in diameter, made by laboriously perforating, below the center, hard red berries or seeds, resembling the black-eyed Susan, but smaller, and sewing these close together around a cord.
The village of Kalapana, farther south, supports quite a large population, and is very lovely with its fine growth of coconut, puuhala, and monkey-pod trees. Near by are to be seen the niu moe, or sleeping-coconuts—palms such as are bent, when young, by visiting chiefs, and thereafter called by the names of the chiefs. These in Kalapana were bent by Queen Emma, wife of Kamehameha IV. The day has now gone by when Hawaiian travelers observed their telic and beautiful custom of planting a coconut wherever they chanced to rest. I call to mind an exquisite cluster of five green coco-palms beside a spring, on the Peninsula, near Pearl Harbor, Oahu. They were planted by John F. Colburn on his own estate, in the stormy days of Liliuokalani’s accession to the tottering throne, to commemorate her appointment of himself and four other ministers to serve in her cabinet. Every mile in the Territory of Hawaii is fraught with keen human interest, if one could only recognize the signs.
Kalapana landing has become so rough that it is used only for canoes, and not far off rises a cliff from out the ocean. From an inshore dell we labored up a gigantic litter of bowlders to the plateau of this bluff, and looking down from the top could detect shoals of large fish directly below in deep water. Jack, bargaining for raw fish at a native hut, missed this side-diversion, which included the exploring of a century-old tunnel beginning midway of the plateau, its mouth surrounded by broken old stone fences. Reached by this eerie passage is a large chamber once used as a place of refuge. The tunnel, made winding so that spears might not be cast after the fleeing, snakes out from the main chamber to a place on the cliff, high above the deep water. There is also, in this neighborhood, the remnant of the Niukukahi heiau. From Kalapana runs a native trail to the Volcano, but no road farther than the village itself. Also near Kalapana lies the heiau of Wahaula, “Red Mouth,” that being a feature of the idols it contained. Here idolatry was most extensively, and last, practiced. It is the largest and best preserved of the heiaus, supposed to have been built by Paao, a powerful priest, in the eleventh century. Wahaula, by the way, is the original of that restored model in the Bishop Museum, at Honolulu. The natives still tell the story of the temple’s destruction. The tradition runs that a wrestler lived near by, whose habit it was to slay pilgrims to the sacred grove of pandanus and coconut. On guard in a cave in the bluff where the trail strikes mauka toward Kau, lived a blood-thirsty maiden whose pleasure it was to signal the wrestler when wayfarers approached. The inference is that she ate the flesh of those he slew; but this, unlike the incident of the Wahiawa, Oahu, ogre, is not authentic.
A Kona chief had a friend who had been sacrificed in the heiau. This friend’s spirit appeared and bade his friend go and recover his bones from the temple inclosure. But first he must anoint his body with kukuinut oil; and by this slippery strategy he withstood the attack of the wrestler, whom he killed. He entered the heiau by daylight, the spirits, akuas, being then off duty, and hid beneath the picked bones of his friend. When the akuas returned at dusk, they suspicioned the presence of a human, but were reassured by the spirit of the Kona man’s friend, who, at midnight, crowed like a cock, and the akuas departed, thinking it was dawn. Before the rescuer of his friend’s bones made his own escape, he destroyed the great grass temple by fire. The tabu (kapu) of Wahaula was fire, and any person upon whom rested the shadow of smoke from the ghastly rites, was sacrificed.
Farther along the trail, on the makai side, is shown the footprint of a demigod of old, Niheu, as well as the mark of an arrow which he sent at another demigod who came to fight him. Following west, makai of where the trail turns mauka, is Kamoamoa, and there one may see a natural arch, of which there are several in the islands. A few interesting rock-carvings have been found here.