And singing this song he went up to his parents’ house.
Strangers were in the house. “Who are they, and what have they come for?” Hi-ku asked. “Ka-we-lu, the young Princess of Kona, is dead,” his parents told him, “and these people have come for timbers to build a house around her dead body.”
When Hi-ku heard this, he wept for his great loss. And then he left his parents and went seeking the god Lo-lu-pe, for whom he had made a song on his way up the mountain. [[112]]
Now Lo-lu-pe was in the form of a kite, because he went through the air searching for things that people needed and prayed to him to find for them. And outside a wizard’s house Hi-ku saw the image of Lo-lu-pe, a kite that was like a fish, and with tail and wings. Hi-ku went and said his prayer to Lo-lu-pe, and then he let the kite go in the winds.
That night Lo-lu-pe came to him in his dream, and showed him where Ka-we-lu was; she had gone down into the world that Mi-lu rules over—the world of the dead that is below the ocean. And Lo-lu-pe, in his dream, told him how he might come to her, and how he might bring Ka-we-lu’s spirit back to the world of the living.
He was to take the morning-glory vines, and he was to make out of them the longest ropes that had ever been made. And to each of the long ropes he was to fix the cross-piece of a swing. Then he was to let two swings go down into the ocean’s depths, and he was to lower himself by one of them. And what he was to do after that was twice told to him by Lo-lu-pe.
Hi-ku went where the morning-glory vines grew; he got the longest of the vines and, with the friends who went with him, made the longest of ropes. Then, with his friends, he went out over the ocean; he lowered the two longest ropes that were ever made, each with the cross-piece of a swing fixed to it. Down by one of the ropes Hi-ku went. And so he [[113]]came to the place of the spirits, to the place at the bottom of the sea that Mi-lu rules over.
And when he came down to that place he began to swing himself on one of the swings. The spirits all saw him, and they all wanted to swing. But Hi-ku kept the swing to himself; he swung himself, and as he swung, he sang:
“I have a swing, a swing,
And the rest of you children have none: