Nathaniel Bright Emerson

“ Hawaiian mythology figured Pele, the goddess of the volcano, as a creature of passion, capable of many metamorphoses; now a wrinkled hag, asleep in a cave on a rough lava bed, with banked fires and only an occasional blue flame playing about her as symbols of her power; now a creature of terror, riding on a chariot of flame and carrying destruction; and now as a young woman of seductive beauty, as when she sought passionate relations with the handsome prince, Lohiau; but in disposition always jealous, fickle, vengeful. ”

“ He has flown, like its smoke, to heaven.
’Tis there I must seek him!
“How absurd of you,” said Pele; “you were not sent on an expedition to heaven, but to bring a man who is here on earth. If you fly up to heaven, you will pass him by and leave him here below.”
Hiiaka and her faithful companion—Pau-o-pala’e—had gotten well away from the vast pit of Kilauea, with its fringe of steam-cracks and fumaroles that radiate from it like the stays of a spider-web, and they were nearing the borders of Pana-ewa, when Hiiaka’s quick ear caught the sound of a squealing pig. ”

“ If one comes to the study of the hula and its songs in the spirit of a censorious moralist he will find nothing for him; if as a pure ethnologist, he will take pleasure in pointing out the physical resemblances of the Hawaiian dance to the languorous grace of the Nautch girls, of the geisha, and other oriental dancers. But if he comes as a student and lover of human nature, back of the sensuous posturings, in the emotional language of the songs he will find himself entering the playground of the human race. ”

“ As Pele drew near to the rustic hall where the hula was in full blast, the people in the outskirts of the assembly turned to look in wonder and admiration at the beauty and charm of the stranger who had appeared so unexpectedly and whose person exhaled such a fragrance, as if she had been clad with sweet-scented garlands of maile, lehua and hala. One and all declared her to be the most beautiful woman they had ever looked upon. Where was she from? Surely not from Kaua’i. Such loveliness could not have remained hidden in any nook or corner of the island, they declared. ”

“ He plumes himself like a wild bird of gay feather, standing forth in the decorous finery of his rank, girded and flowerbedecked after the manner of the halau, eager to win applause for his party not less than to secure for himself the loving reward of victory. In his hand is the instrument of the play, the kilu; the artillery of love, however, with which he is to assail the heart and warm the imagination of the fair woman opposed to him is the song he shoots from his lips. ”

“ The Heroes, too, who dwell in the mountains,
Our Comrades they, who range the forest;
Women-gods of the ether who heal—
Powers that hold with thee, God Laká:
He gives men the rich-ripe mountain-apple.
The Gods pour out their healing water;
The bunchy thatch-grass waves in awe;
God Echo whose voices rumble afar;
And the Landscapist Ku and the Princess
Who plucked and ate the fateful ulei.
The women who sit in the outskirts,
All clad in robes of funeral black—
Great love has prompted their coming.
I Hiiaka, the shadow, have come,
From love to my birth-mate, my sister. ”

“ To the heathen the book of nature is a sealed book. Where the word of God is not, the works of God fail either to excite admiration or to impart instruction. The Sandwich Islands present some of the sublimest scenery on earth, but to an ignorant native—to the great mass of the people in entire heathenism—it has no meaning. As one crested billow after another of the heaving ocean rolls in and dashes upon the unyielding rocks of an iron-bound coast, which seems to say, “Hitherto shalt thou come and no farther,” the low-minded heathen is merely thinking of the shellfish on the shore. ”

“ On landing in Kohala, Hiiaka took the road that led up through the thickly wooded wilderness of Mahiki, the region that had been the scene, now some months gone, of the most strenuous chapter in her warfare to rid Hawaii of the mo’o—that pestilent brood of winged and crawling monsters great and small that once infested her wilds and that have continued almost to the present day to infest the imagination of the Hawaiian people. ”

“ He did not starve in a fool’s paradise, a neglected object of man’s superstitious regard, as in Constantinople; nor did he vie with kings and queens in the length and purity of his pedigree, as in England; but in Hawaii he entered with full heart of sympathy into all of man’s enterprises, and at his death bequeathed his body a sacrifice to men and gods. It was fitting that the Hawaiian poet should celebrate the dog and his altogether virtuous and altruistic services to mankind. The hula ilío may be considered as part of Hawaii’s tribute to man’s most faithful friend, the dog. ”

“ I summon you, Kane-kapoléi;
Pray gather, ye Wilderness Host;
Come Kane, and come Kanaloa;
Hiiaka, prophet and priest, am I:
It is mine to inspire, to perform:
I have striven for life and life came—
Your life, Lohiau of Haena—
Aye, life, life indeed;
Life in its fullness, life in detail;
Life to stand at the temple shrine:
Such life be yours, beloved Lohiau!
Urge on; let the cure work!
Hiiaka chanted also another prayer:
E Lono, e Lono, e Lono-ku-lani,
E Lono noho i ka wai,
O houlu oe, o inana oe ”

“ At the proper psychological moment, with the wreath of victory crowning her brow, while Pele-ula was vainly intent on an effort to turn the tide of her own defeat and gain the shadow of a recognition as mistress of the game of Kilu, Hiiaka, with a significant gesture to her companions, spat upon the ground and, her example having been imitated by Wahine-oma’o and Lohiau, their physical bodies were at once transported to a distance while their places continued to be occupied by unsubstantial forms that had all the semblance of reality. ”

“ It would seem as if the physical ecstasy of the dance and the sensuous joy of all nature’s finery had breathed their spirit into the aspiration and that the beauty of leaf and flower, all of them familiar forms of the god’s metamorphosis—accessible to their touch and for the regalement of their senses—had brought such nearness and dearness, of affection between goddess and worshiper that all fear was removed. ”

“ And to bask in the sun at Oma’o-lála.
Those seeming friends, they went with us,
And then, they left us in Puna—
Land dear to the heart of Kane:
Who eats of your soul is your true friend.
Woe is me, woe is me!
Hiiaka, not yet come back from her adventures in the underworld, heard this lament of Paoa and wondered at his performance—that he, a handsome man, should be standing out in the open with not even a malo about his loins to hide his nakedness, “I wonder what is his name,” she said aloud. ”

“ Who would imagine that a Hawaiian would ever picture the god of love as a shark? As a bird, yes; but as a shark! What a light this fierce idyl casts on the imagination of the people of ancient Hawaii! ”

“ It was necessary to bear in mind that when one deflowered the woods of their fronds of íe-íe and fern or tore the trailing lengths of maile—albeit in honor of Laka herself—the body of the goddess was being despoiled, and the despoiling must be done with all tactful grace and etiquette.
It must not be gathered from this that the occasion was made solemn and oppressive with weight of ceremony, as when a temple was erected or as when a tabu chief walked abroad, and all men lay with their mouths in the dust. ”

“ The gods ascend to the highlands;
The goddess Pele tears in a frenzy;
She raves and beats about in the Pit:
Its crumbled walls float like boats in the gulf:
An ash-heap is Puna, melted its sand—
Crisp-done by thy fire, Thine, O Woman!
When Hiiaka recognized the desperate strait of her friend and lover she urged him to betake himself again to prayer. [208]
“Prayer may serve in time of health; it’s of no avail in the day of death,” was his answer.
It was not now a band of women with firebrands, but a phalanx of fire that closed in upon Lohiau. The whole land seemed to him to be a-flame. ”

“ If the action of the play runs strong and stirs the emotions, each hoopa’a lifts his ipu wildly, fiercely smites it, then drops it on the padded rest in such manner as to bring out its deep mysterious tone.
At a signal from the kumu, who sits with the hoopa’a, the poo-pua’a, leader of the olapa, calls the mele (kahea i ka mele) —that is, he begins its recitation—in a tone differing but little from that of ordinary conversation, a sing-song recitation, a vocalization less stilted and less punctilious than that usually employed in the utterance of the oli or mele. ”

“ The sea is the home of the gods.
I lay in a swoon from hunger
What time I awoke from love’s dream,
Love, salt with the brine of our tears.
Let us mingle our tears.
It was a question with Hiiaka whether to follow the Koolau or the Kona side of the island. The consideration that turned the scale in favor of the Koolau route was that thus she would have sight of a large number of aunts and uncles, members of the Pele family, whose ghosts still clung to the dead volcanic cones and headlands which stood as relics of their bygone activities, and where they eked out a miserable existence. ”

“ The hula ulili, also called by the descriptive name kolili—to wave or flutter, as a pennant—was a hula that was not at all times confined to the tabu restrictions of the halau. Like a truant schoolboy, it delighted to break loose from restraint and join the informal pleasurings of the people. Imagine an assembly of men and women in the picturesque illumination given by flaring kukui torches, the men on one side, the women on the other. ”

“ Weighted with wreaths of lehua
From Bird-beak clean down to the feet.
Catch and bind these robbers of men;
Bind them fast, lest they slip through your hands
And escape to the robber-pit—
These mortals, who call themselves gods!
The meaning of the figure in the first two verses, though obscure, seems to be that Hilo, so rich in natural beauty, is by that very fact robbed of the energy to defend herself and cast off the incubus that oppresses her.
As the creatures fled from Hiiaka’s pursuit, their human disguise fell from them and their real character as mo’o was evident. ”

“ As fire is produced by friction, so it was often by the congress of wits rather than by the flashing of genius that the songs of the hula were evolved.
The composition and criticism of a poetical passage were a matter of high importance, often requiring many suggestions and much consultation. If the poem was to be a mele-inoa, a name-song to eulogize some royal or princely scion, it must contain no word of ill-omen. The fate-compelling power of such a word, once shot from the mouth, was beyond recall. Like the incantation of the sorcerer, the kahuna ánaaná, it meant death to the eulogized one. ”