A merry dance for them to the sea,
Down to the sea at Nana-huki!
Hiiaka now pays attention to the doings of the people on the canoe in the offing. It is necessary to explain that, on landing at Mokuleia, she had ordered her two companions to continue their voyage and meet her on the other side of Cape Kaena whose pointed beak lay close at hand. Lohiau, nothing loath—a pretty woman was company enough for him—turned the prow of the canoe seaward and resumed his paddle. After passing the cape, the ocean calmed, making the work of steering much less arduous. Now it was that Lohiau, feeling the warm blood of young manhood swell the cockles of his heart and finding opportunity at hand, made ardent love to his attractive voyage-companion. He pressed nose and lip against her’s and used every argument to bring her to accept his point of view.
Wahine-oma’o had a mind of her own and though not at all averse to love and its doings and though very much drawn to this lover in particular, she decidedly objected to compromising her relations with Hiiaka, but above all, with the dread mistress of the Volcano, with whom she must ere long make reckoning. Like Pele, Wahine-oma’o permitted the kisses of Lohiau for a time, but, knowing that passion grows by what it feeds on, she presently cut short his rations and told him to behave himself, enforcing her denial with the unanswerable argument that she was well persuaded that they would be seen by Hiiaka. It was even so. It was worse. Hiiaka did not content herself with throwing temptation before Lohiau, as one might place raw meat before a hungry dog; by some witchery of psychologic power she stirred him up to do and dare, yet at the same time she impelled Wahine-oma’o to accept, but only a certain degree, for she carefully set bounds to their conduct. And this, be it understood, is but the opening act of a campaign in which Hiiaka resolves to avenge herself on Pele.
When at length Hiiaka centered her attention on the actions of the people in the canoe, it needed but a glance to tell her that the contagium planted in the soil of Lohiau’s mind had worked to a charm. Her own description—though in figures that seem high-wrought and foreign to our imaginations—had better tell the tale:
Aluna au o Poha-kea,
Wehe ka ilio[4] i kona kapa;
Hanai alualu[5] i ke kula o Miki-kala,[6]
I ke kula o Puha-maló[6]
Hakaká, kipikipi o Kai-a-ulu[7] me ke kanáka;