The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 18

by Robert Louis Stevenson

CHAPTER III

THE CITY OF REFUGE

Our way was northward on the naked lava of the coast. The schoolmaster led the march on a trumpeting black stallion; not without anxious thought, I followed after on a mare. The sun smote us fair and full; the air streamed from the hot rock, the distant landscape gleamed and trembled through its vortices. On the left, the coast heaved bodily upward to Mau, the zone of mists and forests, where it rains all day, and the clouds creep up and down, and the groves loom and vanish in the margin.

The land was still a crust of lava, here and there ramparted with cliffs, and which here and there breaks down and shows the mouths of branching galleries, mines and tombs of nature’s making, endlessly vaulted, and ramified below our passage. Wherever a house is, cocoa-palms spring sheer out of the rock; a little shabby in this northern latitude, not visibly the worse for their inclement rooting. Hookena had shone out green under the black lip of the overhanging crag, green as a May orchard; the lava might have been some rich black loam. Everywhere, in the fissures of the rock, green herbs and flowering bushes prospered; donkeys and cattle were everywhere; everywhere, too, their whitened bones, telling of drought. No sound but of the sea pervades this region; and it smells strong of the open water and of aromatic plants.

We skirted one cliffy cove, full of bursting surges; and if it had not been for the palms, and the houses, and the canoes that were putting out to fish, and the colour of the cliffs and the bright dresses (lilac, red, and green) of the women that sat about the doors at work, I might have thought myself in Devonshire. A little further, we passed a garden enclosed in dry stone walls from the surrounding blackness; it seemed a wonder of fertility; hard by was the owner, a white man, waiting the turn of the tide by the margin of his well; so soon as the sea flowed, he might begin to irrigate with brackish water. The children hailed my companion from wayside houses. With one little maid, knotting her gown about her in embarrassment so as to define her little person like a suit of tights, we held a conversation more prolonged. “Will you be at school to-morrow?” “Yes, sir.” “Do you like school?” “Yes, sir.” “Do you like bathing?” “No, ma’am,” with a staggering change of sex. Another maiden, of more tender growth and wholly naked, fled into the house at our approach, and appeared again with a corner of a towel. Leaning one hand on the post, and applying her raiment with the other, she stood in the door and watched us haughtily. The white flag of a surveyor and a pound-master’s notice on a board told of the reign of law.

At length we turned the corner of a point and debouched on a flat of lava. On the landward hand, cliffs made a quadrant of an amphitheatre, melting on either side into the general mountain of the isle. Over these, rivers of living lava had once flowed, had frozen as they fell, and now depended like a sculptured drapery. Here and there the mouth of a cave was seen half blocked, some green lianas beckoning in the entrance. In front, the fissured pavement of the lava stretched into the sea and made a surfy point. A scattered village, two white churches, one Catholic, one Protestant, a grove of tall and scraggy palms, and a long bulk of ruin, occupy the end. Off the point, not a cable’s length beyond the breaching surf, a schooner rode; come to discharge house-boards, and presently due at Hookena to load lepers. The village is Honaunau; the ruin, the Hale Keawe, temple and city of refuge.

The ruin made a massive figure, rising from the flat lava in ramparts twelve to fifteen feet high, of an equal thickness, and enclosing an area of several acres. The unmortared stones were justly set; in places, the bulwark was still true to the plummet, in places ruinous from the shock of earthquakes. The enclosure was divided in unequal parts—the greater, the city of refuge; the smaller, the heiau, or temple, the so-called House of Keawe, or reliquary of his royal bones. Not his alone, but those of many monarchs of Hawaii were treasured here; but whether as the founder of the shrine, or because he had been more renowned in life, Keawe was the reigning and the hallowing saint. And Keawe can produce at least one claim to figure on the canon, for since his death he has wrought miracles. As late as 1829, Kaahumanu sent messengers to bring the relics of the kings from their long repose at Honaunau. First to the keeper’s wife, and then to the keeper, the spirit of Keawe appeared in a dream, bidding them prevent the desecration. Upon the second summons, they rose trembling; hasted with a torch into the crypt; exchanged the bones of Keawe with those of some less holy chieftains; and were back in bed but not yet asleep, and the day had not yet dawned, before the messengers arrived. So it comes that to this hour the bones of Keawe, like those of his great descendant, sleep in some unknown crevice of that caverned isle.

When Ellis passed in 1823, six years before this intervention of the dead, the temple still preserved some shadow of its ancient credit and presented much of its original appearance. He has sketched it, rudely in a drawing, more effectively in words. “Several rudely carved male and female images of wood were placed on the outside of the enclosure, some on low pedestals under the shade of an adjacent tree, others on high posts on the jutting rocks that hung over the edge of the water. A number stood on the fence at unequal distances all around; but the principal assemblage of these frightful representatives of their former deities was at the south-east end of the enclosed space, where, forming a semi-circle, twelve of them stood in grim array, as if perpetual guardians of ‘the mighty dead’ reposing in the house adjoining.... Once they had evidently been clothed, but now they appeared in the most indigent nakedness.... The horrid stare of these idols, the tattered garments upon some of them, and the heaps of rotting offerings before them, seemed to us no improper emblems of the system they were designed to support; distinguished alike by its cruelty, folly, and wretchedness. We endeavoured to gain admission to the inside of the house, but were told it was strictly prohibited.... However, by pushing one of the boards across the doorway a little on one side, we looked in and saw many large images, with distended mouths, large rows of sharks’ teeth, and pearl-shell eyes. We also saw several bundles, apparently of human bones, cleaned, carefully tied up with sinnet made of cocoanut fibre, and placed in different parts of the house, together with some rich shawls and other valuable articles, probably worn by those to whom the bones belonged.” Thus the careless eyes of Ellis viewed and passed over the bones of sacrosanct Keawe, in his house which he had builded.

Cities of refuge are found not only in Hawaii but in the Gilberts: where their name is now invariably used for a mosquito-net. But the refuge of the Gilberts was only a house in a village, and only offered, like European churches, a sanctuary for the time. The hunted man might harbour there, and live on charity: woe to him if he stepped without. The City of Refuge of Honaunau possessed a larger efficacy. Its gate once passed, an appearance made before the priest on duty, a hasty prayer addressed to the chief idol, and the guilty man was free to go again, relieved from all the consequences of his crime or his misfortune. In time of war, its bulwarks were advertised by pennons of white tapa; and the aged, the children, and the poorer-hearted of the women of the district awaited there the issue of the battle. But the true wives followed their lords into the field, and shared with them their toil and danger.