The Book of Missionary Heroes - Basil Mathews (reading a book txt) 📗

[23] Walt Whitman.

Kapiolani

(Date of Incident, 1824)

"Pélé[24] the all-terrible, the fire goddess, will hurl her thunder and her stones, and will slay you," cried the angry priests of Hawaii.[25] "You no longer pay your sacrifices to her. Once you gave her hundreds of hogs, but now you give nothing. You worship the new God Jehovah. She, the great Pélé, will come upon you, she and the Husband of Thunder, with the Fire-Thruster, and the Red-Fire Cloud-Queen, they will destroy you altogether."

The listening Hawaiians shuddered as they saw the shaggy priests calling down the anger of Pélé. One of the priests was a gigantic man over six feet five inches high, whose strength was so terrible that he could leap at his victims and break their bones by his embrace.

Away there in the volcanic island[26] in the centre of the greatest ocean in the world—the Pacific Ocean—they had always as children been taught to fear the great goddess.

They were Christians; but they had only been Christians for a short time, and they still trembled at the name of the goddess Pélé, who lived up in the mountains in the boiling crater of the fiery volcano, and ruled their island.

Their fathers had told them how she would get angry, and would pour out red-hot rivers of molten stone that would eat up all the trees and people and run hissing into the Pacific Ocean. There to that day was that river of stone—a long tongue of cold, hard lava—stretching down to the shore of the island, and here across the trees on the mountain-top could be seen, even now, the smoke of her anger. Perhaps, after all, Pélé was greater than Jehovah—she was certainly terrible—and she was very near!

"If you do not offer fire to her, as you used to do," the priests went on, "she will pour down her fire into the sea and kill all your fish. She will fill up your fishing grounds with the pahoehoe[27] (lava), and you will starve. Great is Pélé and greatly to be feared."

The priests were angry because the preaching of the missionaries had led many away from the worship of Pélé which, of course, meant fewer hogs for themselves; and now the whole nation on Hawaii, that volcanic island of the seas, seemed to be deserting her.

The people began to waver under the threats, but a brown-faced woman, with strong, fearless eyes that looked out with scorn on Pélé priests, was not to be terrified.

"It is Kapiolani,[28] the chieftainess," murmured the people to one another. "She is Christian; will she forsake Jehovah and return to Pélé?"

Only four years before this, Kapiolani had—according to the custom of the Hawaiian chieftainesses, married many husbands, and she had given way to drinking habits. Then she had become a Christian, giving up her drinking and sending away all her husbands save one. She had thrown away her idols and now taught the people in their huts the story of Christ.

"Pélé is nought," she declared, "I will go to Kilawea,[29] the mountain of the fires where the smoke and stones go up, and Pélé shall not touch me. My God, Jehovah, made the mountain and the fires within it too, as He made us all."

So it was noised through the island that Kapiolani, the queenly, would defy Pélé the goddess. The priests threatened her with awful torments of fire from the goddess; her people pleaded with her not to dare the fires of Kilawea. But Kapiolani pressed on, and eighty of her people made up their minds to go with her. She climbed the mountain paths, through lovely valleys hung with trees, up and up to where the hard rocky lava-river cut the feet of those who walked upon it.

Day by day they asked her to go back, and always she answered, "If I am destroyed you may believe in Pélé; if I live you must all believe in the true God, Jehovah."

As she drew nearer to the crater she saw the great cloud of smoke that came up from the volcano and felt the heat of its awful fires. But she did not draw back.

As she climbed upward she saw by the side of the path low bushes, and on them beautiful red and yellow berries, growing in clusters. The berries were like large currants.

"It is chelo,"[30] said the priests, "it is Pélé's berry. You must not touch them unless we ask her. She will breathe fire on you."

Kapiolani broke off a branch from one of the bushes regardless of the horrified faces of the priests. And she ate the berries, without stopping to ask the goddess for her permission.

She carried a branch of the berries in her hand. If she had told them what she was going to do they would have been frenzied with fear and horror.

Up she climbed until the full terrors of the boiling crater of Kilawea burst on her sight. Before her an immense gulf yawned in the shape of the crescent moon, eight miles in circumference and over a thousand feet deep. Down in the smoking hollow, hundreds of feet beneath her, a lake of fiery lava rolled in flaming waves against precipices of rock. This ever-moving lake of molten fire is called: "The House of Everlasting Burning." This surging lake was dotted with tiny mountain islets, and, from the tops of their little peaks, pyramids of flame blazed and columns of grey smoke went up. From some of these little islands streams of blazing lava rolled down into the lake of fire. The air was filled with the roar of the furnaces of flame.

Even the fearless Kapiolani stood in awe as she looked. But she did not flinch, though here and there, as she walked, the crust of the lava cracked under her feet and the ground was hot with hidden fire.

She came to the very edge of the crater. To come so far without offering hogs and fish to the fiery goddess was in itself enough to bring a fiery river of molten lava upon her. Kapiolani offered nothing save defiance. Audacity, they thought, could go no further.

Here, a priestess of Pélé came, and raising her hands in threat denounced death on the head of Kapiolani if she came further. Kapiolani pulled from her robe a book. In it—for it was her New Testament—she read to the priestess of the one true, loving Father-God.

Then Kapiolani did a thing at which the very limbs of those who watched trembled and shivered. She went to the edge of the crater and stepped over onto a jutting rock and let herself down and down toward the sulphurous burning lake. The ground cracked under her feet and sulphurous steam hissed through crevices in the rock, as though the demons of Pélé fumed in their frenzy. Hundreds of staring, wondering eyes followed her, fascinated and yet horrified.

Then she stood on a ledge of rock, and, offering up prayer and praise to the God of all, Who made the volcano and Who made her, she cast the Pélé berries into the lake, and sent stone after stone down into the flaming lava. It was the most awful insult that could be offered to Pélé! Now surely she would leap up in fiery anger, and, with a hail of burning stones, consume Kapiolani. But nothing happened; and Kapiolani, turning, climbed the steep ascent of the crater edge and at last stood again unharmed among her people. She spoke to her people, telling them again that Jehovah made the fires. She called on them all to sing to His praise and, for the first time, there rang across the crater of Kilawea the song of Christians. The power of the priests was gone, and from that hour the people all over that island who had trembled and hesitated between Pélé and Christ turned to the worship of our Lord Jesus, the Son of God the Father Almighty.