]
[Footnote 22: M[)a]-lee-ay-to-[)a].]
[Footnote 23: Walt Whitman.]
CHAPTER VIII
KAPIOLANI, THE HEROINE OF HAWAII
_Kapiolani_
(Date of Incident, 1824)
"Pele[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 Pele, 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 Pele. 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 Pele, who
lived up in the mountains in the boiling crater of the fiery volcano,
and ruled their island.
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