Even as Death seized her, her unconquerable spirit flashed forth, and she tore herself from his grasp. Abandoning the boat for the moment, she made her way through the passage to the surface of the pool.
As her lungs filled with air, the sweet delirium of a water death vanished, and her whole body was racked with pain. But it was no time to heed that, and, diving again, she caught the incoming flood and saved the boat. Then, staggering to the tree where her baby lay half famished, she gave it her breast and fainted.
Sleep followed the swoon, the long, deep sleep of utter exhaustion, and then, after many hours of death-like unconsciousness, came dreams. She dreamed that Kaanaana, lying beside her, with his arms twined around her, told her, between hot kisses, that Ii and Aa were dead, and that he, being of the next noblest blood, could now marry her.
As she uttered a cry of rapture, the dream changed. She saw her child and her lover dead at her feet, and her fierce uncle stood before her with a bloody spear in his hand.
The swiftly succeeding events of the past two days came back to her in visions more horrible than the reality: her sin against Ku, the doom hanging over her, the flight, the pursuit, the escape, the maternity, the irrevocable vow, and the rescue of the boat—all these facts, colored and intensified by the ghastly fancies that come to us only in dreams.
She awoke with a shiver. Her head throbbed. Every bone in her body ached. Every nerve was pain. Yet, for the moment, superstitious terror and the reaction of a noble but over-taxed spirit were far harder to bear.
Baby fingers and a plaintive wail of hunger aroused her, and, when the little keike was again fed and sleeping, she arose and went to the boat, a few steps away, to satisfy her bewildered senses that the day’s work was not a dream.
It rested upon the beach of smooth, hard, white sand, the gift of the coral insect, a rare one, too, on the rock-bound, windward coast of Hawaii. Tiny waves murmured on the shore as softly as a mother’s lullaby. The thunder of the ocean was muffled by a wall of eternal rock, and the mad rush and swirl of waters in the passage sounded but faintly from the furthermost recess of the cavern. Save for these distant sounds and the occasional splash of a fish, the silence of death reigned. All around were black walls, two thousand feet high, and overhead shone the moon and the stars.
The beauty and grandeur of the solitude appealed strongly to Hiwa, child of an impressionable and poetic race, and restored her to her wonted frame of mind.
“Eternal Ku,” she cried, falling on her knees, “Ruler of Gods, from whom I am descended, and to whom I shall return, I have rescued this boat through thy help. In it my child shall learn to do such deeds as I have done this day. In it, when he is grown, he shall go to meet the chiefs who will follow him to victory. I thank thee, Ku, and, when the time comes, I will pay thee with my blood according to my vow, knowing that my son is Aelani, The Pledge from Heaven, and that he shall yet be moi, mightiest of his line!”