"There is something in it," Kalaua echoed gravely. "I know it by experience."
"An atmospheric or electric condition, no doubt," I said, lighting a cigarette.
"Our fathers used to think," Kalaua corrected slowly, "that Pélé's daughter was the goddess of disease; and when Pélé was angrily searching for a victim, or when Pélé's son, the humpbacked god, who lives with his mother among the ashes of the crater, was in search of a fresh wife among the daughters of men, then, our heathen forefathers used to say, the goddess of disease went forth through the land to prick the people with the goads and thorns that she pushed into their flesh and their veins and their marrow. Pélé had many sons and daughters; all of them worked the will of their mother. The goddess of disease was the eldest and noblest—she searched everywhere for a victim for her mother."
"And did she ever get one?" I asked with curdling blood.
"Yes," Kalaua answered. "The Hawaiians are brave. Sometimes the people would suffer so much from Pélé's daughter that some one among them, a noble-minded youth, would willingly offer himself up as a propitiation to Pélé. Then Pélé's wrath would be appeased for the time, and the eruptions would cease, and the land would have slumber. But those, we know, were only foolish old heathen ideas. Nowadays of course the Hawaiians are wiser.
"Yes," I replied, smiling and withdrawing my cigarette. "The Hawaiians nowadays are nominally Christian."
The phrase seemed to excite Kalaua's suspicions. "We know now," he went on more quietly, with a searching look, "that eruptions are due to purely natural causes."
"I hope," I said, "if an eruption's coming, I shall be well enough anyhow to get out and watch it. The doctor promised soon to let me have a pair of crutches."
Kalaua smiled. "If an eruption comes at all," he answered, with the air of a man who speaks of what he knows, "it'll come, I take it, on Saturday next, and you won't be well enough to get out by then. The moon will be full on Saturday at midnight. Eruptions come oftenest at the full moon. Our fathers had a foolish old reason for that, they said that Pélé and her son had a grudge against the moon, and strove always to put it out with their belching fire, for eclipses, they thought in their ignorance and folly, were caused by Pélé's humpbacked son trying to strangle the moon in its cradle."
"Why," I said, "that's likely enough, when one comes to think of it."