Come, ascend, descend,
Let the sun stop over the river of Hea.
Stand thou still, O sun!”
The sun waited and its light rested on the precipice and pierced the deep shadows of the cave in which the body lay while Hiiaka sought Lohiau.
Hiiaka heard the spirit voice saying, “Moving, moving, you will find me in a small coconut calabash fastened in tight.” Hiiaka followed [[132]]the spirit voice and soon saw a coconut closed up with feathers. Over the coconut a little rainbow was resting. She caught the coconut and went back to the body of Lohiau. It had become very dark in the cave, but she did not care, this was as nothing to her. She took the bundle of the body of Lohiau and said: “We have the body and the spirit, we are ready now to go down to our house.”
Then she called the spirits of the many kinds of ferns of Pau-o-palae to take the body down. The fern servants of Pau-o-palae carried the bundle of the body down to the house.
Hiiaka said to her friend: “You ask how the spirit can be restored into the body. It is hard and mysterious and a work of the gods. We must gather all kinds of ferns and maile and lehua and flowers from the mountains. We must take wai-lua (flowing water) and wai-lani (rain) and put them into new calabashes to use in washing the body. Then pray. If my prayer is not broken [interrupted or a mistake made], he will be alive. If the prayer is broken four times, life will not return.”
The servants of Pau-o-palae, the goddess of ferns, brought all manner of sweet-scented ferns, flowers, and leaves to make a bed for the body of Lohiau, and to place around the inside of the house as fragrant paths by which [[133]]the gods could come to aid the restoration to life.
There were many prayers, sometimes to one class of gods and sometimes to another. The following prayer was offered to the au-makuas, or ghost-gods, residing in cloud-land and revealing themselves in different cloud forms:
“Dark is the prayer rising up to Kanaloa,