CHAPTER IV
THE RESCUE OF THE BOAT
THE Hawaiian Islands, as all the world knows, are entirely of volcanic origin. The soil, whether red or black, that produces a hundred tons of sugar-cane and fourteen tons of sugar to the acre, is lava pulverized by the suns and rains of thousands of years. The coffee lands are lava, rotten, honey-combed, porous, to a degree still unpulverized, but far on the way to becoming so. And the recent flows show what every part of every island has been—first, an overflowing sea of boiling rock; then, when the rock-currents froze, weird, fantastic, utter desolation. In the mighty crater of Haleakala (The House of the Sun) are rock-billows as they stiffened unknown ages ago, rock-billows five hundred feet high. And smaller volcanoes, once active, now extinct, are almost numberless.
Hiwa’s refuge was the crater of one of these small, extinct volcanoes. At some time a lake of boiling rock, perhaps a mile long and three-quarters of a mile wide and a thousand feet deep, forcing a subterranean exit to the sea, had disappeared, leaving a huge puka, a hole in the mountain, some two thousand feet deep. As the centuries came and went the surface rock gradually became soil of marvellous fertility. Birds, flying across, dropped seeds of vegetables, fruits, shrubs, and trees. The place became a wilderness of luxuriant vegetation. In moist, eternal summer food for a hundred mouths ripened every day in the year. Nor was Hiwa denied her accustomed food from the sea, as well as from the land. The makai or sea entrance to the passage was some three or four fathoms below the ebb and flow of the tide, but after a few rods its roof rose abruptly to a height of several hundred feet, and the passage itself broadened into a large cavern, its bottom being a salt-water pool swarming with fish. And the mountain rivulet, after its wild leap of two thousand feet, lazily crawled along the bottom of the crater till it reached the pool.
So Hiwa and Aelani were safe from hunger and thirst. Nature provided a varied and abundant diet. They had no need of clothes, for the days were not hot nor the nights cold. They had no enemies to fear. No other human being knew of their refuge or dreamed of their existence. There were no wild beasts to attack them, no poisonous serpents, no snakes of any kind, no reptiles or insects that could seriously injure or annoy them. In that age even mosquitoes were unknown.
But Hiwa did not look to a safe and easy existence. She had devoted her life to a great purpose. She had become more than a woman, more than a mother. Her son was Aelani, The Pledge from Heaven. The rainbow had covered him at his birth, and Ku had answered her irrevocable vow with thunder from the mountains. Separated from her lover, exiled from the human race, consecrated to death on the altar of Ku, yet still moi wahine, believing herself goddess-born, and as far above mere mortals as we think ourselves above the brutes, her sole remaining object in life was to care for her child, to teach him the accomplishments, duties and prerogatives of a moi, to prepare the way for his return to his people, and then send him forth to battle for his throne.
Her first task was to secure the fisherman’s boat.
It is said that a native woman on Kahlooawe kept appointments with her lover on Lanai, swimming to meet him one night and returning the next, the round trip being nearly six miles. Such stories are accepted without hesitation by people familiar with a race which still spends much of its time in the sea, and was practically amphibious until civilization changed its habits.
Although in swimming and diving Hiwa had proved herself a match for Kaanaana, the champion athlete of the nation, she knew she was undertaking a task dangerous even for her, if not impossible. Yet she felt that the boat was worth risking everything.
At break of the day following the birth of her child, having nursed him and tenderly laid him on a soft bed of ferns, in the shade of a big koa tree, she swam forth, armed with a sharp stick to protect herself from sharks. Sharks, however, were a matter of small concern; the danger lay in the fierce waves and terrible cliff.