The giant young alii stared at his old friend and mumbled, “I begged you, Reverend Hale, to make me a minister. If your church doesn’t want me …”
“A minister?” Abner shouted, and suddenly the hideousness of this night—the hulas, the living stone, the drums and the kahunas—overwhelmed him and he began to laugh hysterically. “A minister?” he repeated several times, until Kelolo placed his hand gently but firmly over the missionary’s mouth and had him dragged away from the ceremonies, but the God-driven little man struggled loose and rushed back almost to the bridal couple before he was apprehended.
“Keoki!” he shouted. “Are you proceeding with this marriage?”
“As my father before me,” Keoki replied.
“Infamous!” Abner moaned. “It puts you outside the pale of civilized …”
“Hush!” an imperious voice commanded, and Abner drew back. It was Noelani who came close to him and said softly, “Beloved Makua Hale, we are not doing this to hurt you.”
Abner looked at the beautiful young woman with flowers in her hair and he argued, with equal control, “Noelani, you are being tempted by these men to commit a grave sin.”
The Alii Nui did not argue, but pointed instead toward the dark hills, saying, “In former days we followed our own gods, and our valleys were filled with people. We have tried following yours, and our islands are sunk in despair. Death, awful sickness, cannon and fear. That is what you have brought us, Makua Hale, although we know you did not intend it to be so. I am the Alii Nui, and if I die without child, who will keep the Hawaiian spirit alive?”
“Noelani, dear little girl of my hopes, there are dozens of men … right here … who would be proud to be your husband.”
“But could their children be designated Alii Nui?” Noelani countered, and this line of pagan reasoning so infuriated Abner that he drew back and cried in dismal voice, “Abomination! Malama would curse you from her grave!”
Later, Kelolo confessed that he should have kept silent, but he could not, and asked tauntingly, “What directions do you think Malama gave me when she whispered on her deathbed?”
In horror the little missionary, his pale face and watery blond hair shining in the torchlight, stared at Kelolo. Could what the alii said be true? Had Malama commanded this obscenity? The repulsiveness of this possibility was more than he could accommodate at the moment, and he stumbled from the compound while the kahunas restored Kane, and the drums resumed their nuptial beat.
Bedazed, Abner moved along the dark and dusty road whose stones in recent years had witnessed so many changes. He saw the shadowy houses of the king and the wooden stores of the Americans who had scorned God and fought the mission. In the roads the whalers were snug-anchored, his permanent enemies, and at Murphy’s grog shop somebody was playing a lonely concertina. How alien these things were to his lacerated spirit.
In the deep night he left the town and climbed a barren field strewn with rocks, and when he stumbled upon a clump of dwarfed trees he sat among their roots and looked back at his silent parish as if he were no longer responsible for it. To the south he could see the monstrous torches of the pagans. In the roads he could spot the swaying night-lights of the whalers, and between lay the grass-roofed shacks of the people. How miserable and grubby this town really was, how pitiful. What a minimum impression he had made upon Lahaina, how inconsequential his accomplishments. Malama had tricked him. Keoki had betrayed him. And Iliki was God knows where. Now even the gentlest of them all, Noelani, had turned against him and had rebuked his church.
For nearly ten years he had worn only one coat; God had not once sent him a pair of trousers that fitted; he had acquired only such learned books as he could beg from distant Boston; his wife had slaved in a wretched hut; and he had accomplished nothing. Now, as dawn began breaking over his little town, he studied in humiliation of spirit the shimmering sea, the mocking whalers and the palace grounds where the torches were slowly burning out. And he wished ardently that he could call down upon this entire congregation, saving only the mission house and its uncomplaining occupants, some awful Biblical destruction.
“Floods! Winds from the hills! Pestilence! Destroy this place!” But even as he begged God to inflict such punishment, the perverse lesser gods of the vicinity were preparing to launch what would be his crowning humiliation, for in the night that was to follow, the goddess Pele herself would visit once more her devotee Kelolo, and the upshot of this ghostly convocation would haunt Abner Hale for many months.
When John Whipple, rising early to sweep out the store, saw Abner staggering down from the hills back to town, he ran out and grabbed the little man, asking, “Abner, what has happened?”
Hale started to explain, but he could not pronounce the vile words. He hesitated dumbly for a moment, his eyes failing to focus properly, and then he pointed at a group of Hawaiians coming along the road from the palace. They wore maile in their hair, and a light step; they carried a drum and walked in triumph as they had a thousand years before, and Abner said weakly, “Ask them.” And he stumbled off to bed.
Later that day he dispatched a letter to the missionaries in Honolulu reporting: “At four o’clock this morning, January 4, 1832, in the old palace of Malama the kahunas triumphed and the dreadful deed was done.”
In daylight, when the auguries were studied and the kahunas were satisfied that a good marriage had been launched, they assured Keoki: “This night you have done a fine thing for Hawaii. The gods will not forget, and when your child is born you will be free to go back to your own church once more and become a minister.” But Keoki, shivering from the burdens which the gods throw upon some shoulders, knew that this could not be.
At the following dusk Kelolo, gratified that he had protected the succession of his family in these heavenly islands, walked among the shadows and as he did so he met, for the last time on earth, the silent, delicate form of Pele, keeper of the volcanoes, dressed in silken robes, with strange glasslike hair standing out in the night breeze. She obstructed his pathway beneath the palms and waited for him to approach her, and Kelolo could see that her face was radiant with contentment, and when she took her place beside him, walking mysteriously through whatever trees came into her way along the narrow path, he felt tremendous consolation. And they continued thus for some miles, each happy in the other’s company, but when the walk ended, Pele did what she had never done before. She paused dramatically, raised her left hand and pointed south, directly through the Keala-i-kahiki Channel and onto Keala-i-kahiki Point, and she stood thus for some minutes, as if commanding Kelolo with her fiery yet consoling eyes.
He spoke for the first time and asked, “What is it, Pele?” but she was content merely to point toward Keala-i-kahiki, and then, as if wishing to bid farewell to this great alii, her dear and personal friend, she brushed past him, kissing him with fiery lips and vanishing in a long silvery trail of smoke. He stood for a long time, engraving in his memory each incident of her visit, and that night when he returned to his solitary shack outside the palace grounds he took down his two most sacred treasures: the whitened skull of his wife Malama and a very old stone, about the size of a fist, curiously shaped and well marked. It had been given him more than forty years before by his father, who had averred that the occult powers of the Kanakoas derived from this stone, which one of their ancestors recovered on a return trip to Bora Bora. It was, his father had sworn, not merely sacred to the goddess Pele; it was the goddess; she was free to roam the islands and to warn her people of impending volcanic disasters; but her spirit resided in this rock, and it had done so for generations out of mind, long, long before even the days of Bora Bora. And through the night Kelolo sat with his treasures, trying to unravel the divine mystery of which they were the most significant parts. In the morning his confusion was clarified, for a swift ship sped into Lahaina Roads with news that a massive surge of the volcano on Hawaii was threatening the capital town of Hilo and the citizens prayed that the Alii Nui Noelani would
enter upon the swift ship and return, to stop the flow of lava that must otherwise wipe out the town.
When the news was brought to Noelani, her impulse was to send Kelolo instead, for he was the friend of Pele. Furthermore, her discussions with Dr. Whipple had satisfied her that volcanoes were the result of natural forces whose eruption could almost be predicted scientifically, and she realized that the island stories of Pele were nonsense, but before she could discuss these conclusions with the messengers from Hilo, Kelolo hurried up and said, “You must go, Noelani. If Pele is destroying Hilo, it must be in punishment, and you should go where the lava is white-hot and remind her that Hilo loves her.”
“You are the friend of Pele,” Noelani replied. “You must go.”
“But I am not the Alii Nui,” Kelolo said gravely. “Here is a chance for you to win the people to you forever.”
“I cannot believe that Pele has anything to do with this lava,” Noelani objected.
“I saw her last night,” Kelolo said simply. “I talked with her.”
Noelani looked at her father in amazement. “You saw Pele?” she demanded.
“I walked with her for two miles,” Kelolo replied.
“Did she give you any message?” Noelani asked incredulously.
“No,” Kelolo lied. “But of course she warned me of the volcano on Hawaii. Yes, she pointed toward Hawaii.” But he knew that she had not done this; she had pointed in quite a different direction.
“And you wish me to go to Hilo?” Noelani asked.
“Yes, and I will entrust to your care a stone that will enable you to halt the lava,” Kelolo assured her.
And it was in this way, in the year 1832, that the Alii Nui Noelani Kanakoa left Lahaina with the curse of Abner Hale in her ears—“This is madness, an abomination”—carrying a sacred stone and traveling by ship to the port town of Hilo, where from the bay she could see the overpowering advance of glowing lava, rolling slowly upon itself and crushing in fiery embrace all it encountered. The town was obviously doomed; by the next night the lava must encompass it, and from shipboard there seemed no use for a young woman to try to stop it.
But the local kahunas breathed with relief when they saw Noelani alight, laden with the mana that heals, and start her painful climb to the lava face. Behind her streamed the entire population of the town, save only the local missionaries who were outraged by this heathenish performance. Up through the palm trees at the edge of town, through the nau brushes, and on into the scrubby brush marched the solemn, hushed procession. Now only a few yards ahead lay the crawling, crackling snout of lava: as each new flow cascaded down the mountainside it sped over former flows that in the meantime had cooled, using them as a passageway to lower ground, and as the living white-hot flow came to the dead tip of old lava, it poised a moment in the air, then rushed out in many new directions, consuming here a tree, there a house and beyond a pigpen. There would be a hissing and crackling of fire, and the doomed object would burn away in a sudden, fatal gasp. Then, as the ugly snout cooled, it formed a channel for the next burning flow.
It was to this creeping, crawling, devouring face that the young woman Noelani journeyed, and as she approached the living fire she underwent a transformation, for what she had been summoned to do was no less than to confront the fire goddess herself and to challenge her in a work that had been carried on by volcanoes since long before the coming of the Polynesians, and in the mystery of these last moments, in the awful inner fires that were burning away at her reason, Noelani lost all sense of ever having been a Christian. She was a daughter of Pele, one in whose family the very being of the goddess had resided, and now, returning to the suzerainty of the fire goddess, Noelani planted her feet before the on-surging lava and decided that here she would stand and if need be, die.
Holding the sacred rock of Pele aloft, she cried, “Pele! Great goddess! You are destroying the town of those who love you! I pray you to halt!”
And standing there with the stone aloft, she watched new fires reach the ugly snout and start to gush forward toward the town of Hilo, and as the fires trembled, she threw into them tobacco, and two bottles of brandy which flamed furiously, and four red scarves, for that was a color Pele loved, and a red rooster and finally a lock of her own hair. And the fires of Pele hung in the snout, consumed the tobacco, and slowly froze into position. The flow of lava had halted at Noelani’s feet, but there were no cheers, only the soft prayers of all who had trusted that Pele would never destroy the town of Hilo. The fires went out. The probing fingers consumed no more homes, and in a daze of glory and confusion Noelani returned to her ship and went once more to Lahaina, there to await the birth of the child who, when she was gone, would take her place as intercessor with the gods.
This halting of the lava was the worst single blow Abner Hale experienced in Lahaina, for coming so quickly after the defection of Keoki and his sister, it was interpreted as confirming their marriage; while Noelani’s demonstrated ability to influence the ancient gods convinced Hawaiians that they still survived, and many began drifting away from the Christian church. But what hurt Abner most was the hilarity with which Americans greeted the miracle. One profane captain kept shouting, “From here on count me a firm believer in Madame Pele!” Another promised, “Now if Noelani will only take care of the storms, I’ll join her church, too.”
Abner, suffering at each defection from his church and wincing at the American jibes, became obsessed with the lava incident and went about arguing with anyone who would listen: “The burning rock came so far and stopped. What’s so miraculous about that?”
“Ah, but who stopped it?” his tormentors would parry.
“A woman stands before a nose of lava as it’s about to die down, and that’s a miracle,” he snorted contemptuously.
“Ah, but what if she hadn’t been there?” the logicians queried.
After some weeks Abner went at last, and grudgingly, to consult with John Whipple, and the young scientist reassured him. “When the internal pressures of a volcano become powerful enough, they erupt into violence. Depending solely upon the interior forces within the earth, and nothing more, lava is spewed forth and rolls down mountainsides. If there’s enough lava, it’s got to reach the ocean. If there isn’t, it stops somewhere en route.”
“Are these things known?” Abner asked.
“By anyone with a grain of intelligence,” Whipple replied. “Look at Lanai. Anyone can see it was a volcano once. Look at our own Maui. At one time it had to be two separate volcanoes, gradually coalescing along that line. I would guess that at some time all the separate islands we see from this pier were one great island.”
“How could that have been?” Abner queried.
“Either the islands sank or the sea rose. Either explanation would do.”
The grandeur of this concept was too difficult for Abner to accept, and he retreated to certainty: “We know that the world was created four thousand and four years before the birth of Christ, and there is no record of islands having risen or fallen.” The idea was repugnant to him.
Whipple was going to ask about the Flood, but he changed the subject and casually remarked, “Abner, why did you put yourself in such a bad light at the marriage of Keoki and Noelani? You surrendered a lot of influence that week.”
“It was an abomination, unnatural, unclean!” Abner stormed.
“I’ve been thinking about it a great deal,” Whipple reflected. “What’s so dreadful about it? Now really, don’t quote me incidents from the Bible. Just tell me.”
“It’s abhorrent and unnatural,” Abner stormed, still hurting from the actions of his two preferred Hawaiians.
“What’s really so abhorrent about it?” Whipple pressed.
“Every civilized society …” Abner began, but his companion grew impatient and snapped: “Damn it, Abner, every time you start an answer that way I know it’s going to be irrelevant. Two of the most completely civilized societies we’ve ever had were the Egyptians and the
Incas. Now, no Egyptian king was ever allowed to marry anybody but his sister, and if I can believe what I’ve heard, the same was true of the Incas. They prospered. As a matter of fact,” Whipple continued, “it’s not a bad system, scientifically. That is, if you’re willing to kill off ruthlessly any children with marked defects, and apparently the Egyptians, the Incas and the Hawaiians were willing to do so. Have you ever seen a handsomer group of people than the alii?”
Abner felt that he was going to be sick, but before he could react to Whipple’s astonishing reflections, the doctor said, “Noelani has asked me to attend her at the birth of the baby.”
“Of course you rebuked her,” Abner said with assurance.
“Oh, no! A doctor could practice an entire lifetime and not meet such an opportunity,” Whipple explained.
“You would be partner to such a crime?” Abner asked, stunned by the prospect.
“Naturally,” Whipple said, and the two men walked back from the pier in silence, but when Abner reached home and sent the children out into the walled yard he confided in whispers to his wife the nauseating news that John Whipple was preparing to attend Noelani, but to his surprise Jerusha replied, “Of course. The girl deserves all consideration. This must be doubly frightening for her.”
“But John Whipple, a consecrated Christian!”
“The important thing is that he’s a doctor. Do you suppose I ever rested easily, knowing that a totally untrained man would be my attendant when the children were born?”
“Were you so afraid?” Abner asked in surprise.
“I began by being,” Jerusha said, “but my love for you made it possible to control my fears. Even so, I’m glad that Brother John is going to tend the girl.”
Abner started to rant, but Jerusha had in these months of his defeat heard enough, and now she said firmly, “My dearest husband, I am afraid you are making a fool of yourself.”
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