My sole intercession, the voice.
Footnote 278:[ (return) ] A literal translation of the first line would be as follows: (Here) stands the doomed sacrifice for the journey in search of a bed-lover.
Footnote 279:[ (return) ] Huli-wale. To turn about, here used as the name of a place, is evidently intended figuratively to stand for mental indecision.
Footnote 280:[ (return) ] The bracketed phrase is not in the text of the original.
This fragment—two fragments, in fact, pieced together—belongs to the epic of Pele. As her little sister, Hiiaka, is about to start on her adventurous journey to bring the handsome Prince Lohiau from the distant island of Kauai she is overcome by a premonition of Pole’s jealousy and vengeance, and she utters this intercession.
The formalities just described speak for themselves. They mark better than any comments can do the superstitious devotion of the old-timers to formalism, their remoteness from that free touch of social and artistic pleasure, the lack of which we moderns often lament in our own lives and sigh for as a lost art, conceiving it to have been once the possession of “the children of nature.”
The author has already hinted at the form and character of the entertainments with which hula-folk sometimes beguiled their professional interludes. Fortunately the author is able to illustrate by means of a song the very form of entertainment they provided for themselves on such an occasion. The following mele, cantillated with an accompaniment of expressive gesture, is one that was actually given at an awa-drinking bout indulged in by hula-folk. The author has an account of its recital at Kahuku, island of Oahu, so late as the year 1849, during a circuit of that island made by King Kamehameha III. This mele is reckoned as belonging to the ordinary repertory of the hula; but to which particular form of the dance it was devoted has not been learned:
Mele
Ua ona o Kane i ka awa;
Ua kau ke kéha [281] i ka uluna;