The night was calm, and, as Hiwa was pointing out things to be carefully remembered, and the houses of the different chiefs, a wail arose which, spreading beyond the town, reached them even where they stood. It was the mournful au-we, passing from lip to lip, at first low, gradually swelling to loud, passionate shrieks, and then subsiding to weird, blood-curdling sobs. A few started it, then hundreds, then thousands took it up, and the mountains echoed with it—“Au-we! Au-we! Au-we!”
Hiwa’s face lighted with a smile of joy, at once savage and sublime.
“That,” she exclaimed, “is the wailing for a dead moi! The drunkard has gone! Our time has come!”
She stood for some minutes, rapidly forming plans of action.
“Follow the cliff to the beach,” she said at last, “and wait for me at the mouth of the river. It may be an hour. It may be more.”
“I should go with you,” urged Aelani.
“Keike,” she cried, “do as I bid you! The Spirit of Hiwa must appear at the wailing for the dead moi to make the hearts of Aa and the hearts of his followers like the white milk of cocoanuts, and the moi that shall be must not be seen in his royal city till he comes to it with the spearmen of Kohala at his back.”
So Aelani followed the cliff to the sea and waited at the mouth of the river. But Hiwa crept through the rank vegetation of the rich kuleanas until she reached the river, and swam softly up stream under the shade of the overhanging bushes until she was close to the palace of the moi, and there she hid herself in a clump of trees, a point from which she could see and hear what was taking place.
She knew that, for the next three days, according to ancient usage, there would be no moi, and therefore no law. She knew the nameless horrors that accompanied the wailing for a dead moi, the drunkenness, the mutilations, the bestial excesses, the wild carnival of cruelty, indecency, and lust, and the wiping out of life-long grudges with fire and bloodshed.
But the weak and friendless were nothing to Aa. His followers were the beasts of prey who would revel in outrage and murder. Why should he restrain them? Yet Hiwa, in amazement, saw him send twenty picked men in the direction of the sea, and heard him mention the name of Manoa. It could hardly be to murder her. The time for murder would be hours later, when men were frenzied with drink. But, if it were to save her from possibility of outrage, it was none too soon.