[28] Pu’u o Moe-awa. The full form is Moe-awakea (noonday sleep), the name of a hill in Puna. By omitting kea, the word awakea (noon) comes to mean bitter, thus imparting to the meaning a cutting irony. Cf. [note (a)], page 176. [↑]
[29] Hana-lei, literally, to make a wreath; a valley on Kauai. [↑]
[30] Hala. It was ill luck to wear a wreath of the hala drupe. [↑]
CHAPTER XXXII
HIIAKA EXTRICATES HER CHARGE FROM THE DANGEROUS FASCINATIONS OF THE KILU[1]
Hiiaka, having—by her marvellous skill—extricated her charge from the toils of the enchantress, turned a deaf ear to Pele-ula’s urgent persuasions to abide yet longer and taste more deeply the sweets of her hospitality. Her determination arrived at, she wasted no time in leave-taking but made all haste to put a safe distance between the poor moth and the flame that was the focus of his enchantment. Their route lay eastward across the dusty, wind-swept, plain of Kula-o-kahu’a—destined in the coming years to be the field of many a daring feat of arms;—then through the wild region of Ka-imu-ki, thickset with bowlders—a region at one time chosen by the dwarf Menehune as a sort of stronghold where they could safely plant their famous ti ovens and be unmolested by the nocturnal depredations of the swinish Kama-pua’a. Hiiaka saw nothing or took no notice of these little rock-dwellers. Her gaze was fixed upon the ocean beyond, whose waves and tides they must stem before they reached and passed Moloka’i and Maui, shadowy forms that loomed in the horizon between her and her goal.
Hiiaka, standing on the flank of Leahi and exercising a power of vision more wonderful than that granted by the telescope, had sight of a wild commotion on her beloved Hawaii. In the cloud-films that embroidered the horizon she saw fresh proof of her sister’s unmindfulness of the most solemn pledges. It was not her fashion to smother her emotions with silence:
Ke ahi maka-pa[2] i ka la, e;
O-wela kai ho’i o Puna;