The warriors were so surprised at the wonderful change that they forgot to fight, and only realized that this dragon was their enemy when they saw him far out of the reach of their best [[18]]weapons. They could see that dragon leaping from stone to stone, and swiftly gliding up the steep precipice. He escaped to his home in the mountain recesses and nevermore troubled the chief by the sea. His employer was killed in a later battle. Pele returned to her home in the volcano Kilauea.
[[19]]
IV
THE HILLS OF PELE
Na Puu o Pele
Through the fleeting hours of Tuesday, January eighth, in the year nineteen hundred and seven, earthquakes were felt all over the island of Hawaii. Soon after midnight as the stars of the new day Wednesday, January ninth, looked down on the melting snows of Mauna Loa, a glorious fire-light broke out on the southern slope. This light filled the sky above the mountain and was visible from all parts of the island.
The Hawaiians said “Pele has come again.” For some hours great floods of lava poured forth with extraordinary activity, quickly covering a vast area of land on the side of the mountain about four thousand feet below the summit crater. Then as the brilliant light of the sun took the place of the glow of volcanic fires, clouds of eruptive gases and smoke marked the course of the lava in its flow down the mountain side. Moreover, for nearly two days the lava found an underground channel from [[20]]which it burst forth at times with explosions attended by earthquakes which shook the western coast of the island. Puffs of smoke by day and pillars of fire by night marked the course of this underground channel. Thus for nearly three days the country throbbed with excitement because of the uncertainty attending the continued action of the lava flow. Then came Friday evening and a sky flooded with an ocean of fire. The lava burst from the side of the mountain about half-way between the summit and the sea in magnificent tossing waves, a river hundreds of feet across, dashing over old lava flows, burning the ferns and trees of the forest which had grown on lava a hundred years and more of age. Down it forced its way, sometimes cooling in great stone masses, crunching and crushing against each other, sometimes a rough mass of cinders resting upon a moving bed of fire and sometimes a swiftly moving liquid stream pushing from under a cooling surface and continually pressing downward toward the sea.
Meanwhile, as this lava flow was making its descent, another branch broke away westward. A little hill of lava frozen ages before into a massive breastwork of black stone standing in the front of this flow of 1907 divided it so that this western branch took its own way to the ocean [[21]]beach. Thus this mighty force of melted rock from the underworld hurled its vast mass down the mountain, piling itself over all life in its path and leaving only towering heaps of desolation to cover the earth. Between these two branches of the lava river lay stretched a tract of ancient lava several miles wide, desolate and dreary save for small clumps of trees and patches of ferns and grass.