Touched lands not the choice of Paoa;—
’Twas the route of Ka-moho-alii,
Of Pele and Kane-milo-hai,
Route traveled by Kane-apua, and by
Hiiaka, the wise, the darling of Pele.
Pele and her company landed on Hawaii at Pua-kó, a desolate spot between Kawaihae and Kailua. Thence they journeyed inland until they came to a place which they named Moku-aweo-weo—not the site of the present crater of that name, but—situated where yawns the vast caldera of Kilauea. It was at the suggestion of Ku-moku-halii and Keawe-nui-kau of Hilo that the name was conferred. They also gave the name Mauna-loa to the mountain mass that faced them on the west, “because,” said they, “our journey was long.”
Night fell and they slept. In the morning, when the elepaio uttered its note, they rose and used the Paoa staff. The omens were favorable, and Pele decided that this was the place for her to establish a permanent home.
The people immediately began to set out many plants valuable for food; among them a variety of kalo called aweü, well suited for upland growth; the ulu (bread-fruit); the maiä (banana); the pala-á (an edible fern); the awa (Piper methysticum) and other useful plants.
The land on the Hilo side of Kilauea, being in the rain belt, is fertile and well fitted for tillage. The statement, however, that Kilauea, or its vicinity, became the place of settlement for any considerable number of people cannot be taken literally. The climatic conditions about Kilauea are too harsh and untropical to allow either the people or the food plants of Polynesia to feel at home in it. The probability is that instead of being gathered about Kilauea, they made their homes in the fat lands of lower Puna or Hilo.
Pele, on her human side at least, was dependent for support and physical comfort upon the fruits of the earth and the climatic conditions that made up her environment. Yet with all this, in the narrative that follows her relations to humanity are of that exceptional character that straddle, as it were, that border line which separates the human from the superhuman, but for the most part occupy the region to the other side of that line, the region into which if men and women of this work-a-day world pass they find themselves uncertain whether the beings with whom they converse are bodied like themselves or made up of some insubstantial essence and liable to dissolve and vanish at the touch.