Hiwa: A Tale of Ancient Hawaii

THE first glimmering of dawn rested on Waipio Valley. The moi kane, his great nobles and chief officers of state, his personal attendants, his guards, heralds, priests, diviners, bards, story-tellers, dancers, and buffoons, the whole aialo, even to the lowest menials of the court, slept the deep sleep that follows a night of heavy eating and heavier drinking. All slept except Aa, the terrible high-priest, and a few score men of his personal following. The royal city was silent.

It lay among surroundings both lovely and grand. The valley itself, only a few feet above sea-level and flat as a Western prairie, was, then as now, rich almost beyond exaggeration, and green with all edible products of the lowlands. It was thickly dotted with grass huts, for in those times, before the great wars and centuries before the white strangers came with their loathsome diseases that consumed flesh and bone, the population was dense.

The valley fronted on the open ocean, unobstructed by land for thousands of miles. On every other side it was shut in by rock walls from two to three thousand feet high. At the southwest extremity the Waipio River, cold from the mountain-side, clear and sparkling, fell six hundred feet to a narrow shelf of rock, and then, dropping a thousand feet more at a single plunge, suddenly became a sluggish stream, with a current hardly perceptible, winding its tortuous way to the sea. To the northwest were the Saw-Teeth of the Gods, wild and picturesque verdure-clad mountains that to this day form impenetrable barriers between the plantations of Hamakua and North Kohala. To the southeast, stretching along the coast for a hundred miles, were the rich highlands of Hamakua, Hilo and Puna, rising, ever rising, as they recede from the sea until they reach the dizzy heights of Mauna Kea, and of Mauna Loa, where eternal winter wages intermittent war with rock fires from the bowels of the earth.

In the gray twilight of that morning, centuries ago, Eaeakai paddled his fishing-canoe down the Waipio River and up the coast, straight to the Saw-Teeth of the Gods. In the early morning there was good fishing opposite those stupendous cliffs, and Eaeakai had taken to himself a buxom wahine, who could not live on love alone any more than if she were a haole bride, but had to have her fish and poi. He was also in daily expectation of another responsibility. Thus far there had always been fish and poi in his hut, for he was industrious and thrifty, rich for a landless freeman, kanaka-wale, as his kaukehi or single dug-out was the trimmest and swiftest on all the Windward Coast. Best of all, he was a happy man, for he was very much in love with his own wife. So he chanted a love mele as he bent to his work.

He had scarcely reached his fishing-ground and baited his turtle-shell hook when he heard a rustling sound overhead. As he looked up he caught glimpses through the dense foliage of a woman, in the garb of Eve, rapidly making her way down the steep declivity, regardless of the sharp thorns and terrible lava that cut and tore her hands and feet and body. Yet, in spite of her desperate haste, and at the peril of her life, she firmly clutched and carefully guarded from rock and thorn the mamo which royalty alone might wear and live.