IWA repeated her visits to Waipio many times as the years went by. In her anxiety to know the condition of affairs she frequently ventured where she was likely to be seen and recognized. She knew that she had been recognized on several occasions. By day it might have cost her her life; but, appearing only at night, when spirits were supposed to be abroad, she was regarded, not as Hiwa in living flesh and blood, but as the spirit of Hiwa that Ukanipo had taken to himself. She justly trusted to the superstition of the people for safety, knowing that she had become an object of mortal terror.
Sixteen years had passed since her [52] escape. Ii was rapidly nearing a drunkard’s grave, or, more accurately, the time when his bones would be hidden in a cave, for mois were not buried in the ground like common men. Aa had become moi in all but name, and ruled with bloody and cruel hands. The masses groaned under his ruthless exactions. Many of the lesser chiefs had been assassinated or sacrificed on the altars of Ku, and their possessions confiscated. The great chiefs were becoming restive and alarmed. Yet who should take up arms against the Lord of Life and Death, vice-gerent of Ku? Ii and Aa were of the blood of the gods. Hiwa knew how matters stood, and believed the time for action would come soon if the great nobles understood they could have a leader of divine birth.
Aelani had not reached his seventeenth year—a mere smooth-water swimmer. The pool, swarming with sharks, was a fine training school for a boy of twelve; but the ocean was the only proper place for an athletic young man, big, powerful, destined for great deeds. Aelani had learned to love [53] it in its varying moods, and most of all when it was stirred to wrath, when tempests raged and huge waves dashed against the cliffs and broke in spray two hundred feet high. Many a time, in calm and in storm, Hiwa and Aelani had sported together in the open sea, like the fish to which they were almost akin, but always with the greatest precautions against discovery, for the superstition which protected her might not protect him. Now the time was at hand when risks must be taken.
“Keike,” said Hiwa, one evening, “we will go windward to-night and see your royal city.”
They emerged from the water, at their journey’s end, close to Eaeakai’s hut. On this night also the fisherman and Lilii, his wife, and Manoa, their daughter, were sleeping outside. The girl—just past sixteen, which is three years older in the tropics than in the frozen north—was surpassingly beautiful, as her mother and Hiwa had been in the bloom of early womanhood. She lay in the moonlight, her lips half parted, smiling in her sleep, as if happy dreams were her [54] guests. Her lustrous black hair, reaching in heavy masses half way to her feet, was her only covering. It was not shamelessness. Neither was it the innocence of a babe. It was Nature untainted and unpurified by what we call civilization.
The sensations of the young man who had never before seen a female face or form save his mother’s may be imagined more easily than described. He stood gazing, like one in a trance.
“Well, keike,” Hiwa observed with a peculiar smile, as he reluctantly followed her, “at last you have seen a woman! And perhaps it is time you should.”
Avoiding the town, they made their way to the Kukuihaele side of the valley, and climbed to a height of about five hundred feet. It seemed to Aelani, as the valley lay spread before him, that he had already seen it many times, it had been described to him so well. To his right was the winding trail, the serpentine ladder, that led to the heights of Kukuihaele, forming the southern exit to the outer world, and beyond, stretching [55] northwesterly, long lines of white surf glistened in the moonlight and thundered on the beach. To his left was the mighty southern wall, and, at its further end, the stupendous falls of the Waipio River, sixteen hundred feet high. Then the wall bent irregularly to the northwest, apparently extending to the Waimano side; but Aelani knew that the valley, for a dozen miles more, wound its way, a deep chasm in the mountains. He knew the stream that traversed it, joining the Waipio River near the sea. He knew the rocky defile leading to the southwest, by which an army might some time enter to make him moi. He knew it from vivid description, although he could not see it. Opposite, across the valley, the Waimano cliffs, which Hiwa sixteen years before had sealed in her flight, rose to an altitude of three thousand feet, and below them, in the midst of rich, green lowlands, lay the royal town. In the centre of the town, distinguished by its size, was the palace of the moi, and near it that of the high-priest. Scattered through the valley, and also distinguishable by their size and the [56] clusters of huts about them, were the town residences of the great nobles. Kaanaana’s was on the Kukuihaele side, not far from where Hiwa and Aelani stood. But it was empty. He and his retinue had long since withdrawn to his domains beyond the mountains of Hamakua.
The night was calm, and, as Hiwa was pointing out things to be carefully remembered, and the houses of the different chiefs, a wail arose which, spreading beyond the town, reached them even where they stood. It was the mournful au-we, passing from lip to lip, at first low, gradually swelling to loud, passionate shrieks, and then subsiding to weird, blood-curdling sobs. A few started it, then hundreds, then thousands took it up, and the mountains echoed with it—“Au-we! Au-we! Au-we!”
Hiwa’s face lighted with a smile of joy, at once savage and sublime.
“That,” she exclaimed, “is the wailing for a dead moi! The drunkard has gone! Our time has come!”
She stood for some minutes, rapidly forming plans of action.
[57] “Follow the cliff to the beach,” she said at last, “and wait for me at the mouth of the river. It may be an hour. It may be more.”
“I should go with you,” urged Aelani.
“Keike,” she cried, “do as I bid you! The Spirit of Hiwa must appear at the wailing for the dead moi to make the hearts of Aa and the hearts of his followers like the white milk of cocoanuts, and the moi that shall be must not be seen in his royal city till he comes to it with the spearmen of Kohala at his back.”
So Aelani followed the cliff to the sea and waited at the mouth of the river. But Hiwa crept through the rank vegetation of the rich kuleanas until she reached the river, and swam softly up stream under the shade of the overhanging bushes until she was close to the palace of the moi, and there she hid herself in a clump of trees, a point from which she could see and hear what was taking place.
She knew that, for the next three days, according to ancient usage, there would be no moi, and therefore no law. She knew the [58] nameless horrors that accompanied the wailing for a dead moi, the drunkenness, the mutilations, the bestial excesses, the wild carnival of cruelty, indecency, and lust, and the wiping out of life-long grudges with fire and bloodshed.
But the weak and friendless were nothing to Aa. His followers were the beasts of prey who would r............