Island Nights' EntertainmentsStevenson, Robert Louis
General
Island Nights' Entertainments
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Islands of the Pacific -- Fiction; Short stories
Keola was married with Lehua, daughter of Kalamake, the wise man of
Molokai, and he kept his dwelling with the father of his wife. There
was no man more cunning than that prophet; he read the stars, he could
divine by the bodies of the dead, and by the means of evil creatures:
he could go alone into the highest parts of the mountain, into the
region of the hobgoblins, and there he would lay snares to entrap the
spirits of the ancient.
For this reason no man was more consulted in all the Kingdom of Hawaii.
Prudent people bought, and sold, and married, and laid out their lives
by his counsels; and the King had him twice to Kona to seek the
treasures of Kamehameha. Neither was any man more feared: of his
enemies, some had dwindled in sickness by the virtue of his
incantations, and some had been spirited away, the life and the clay
both, so that folk looked in vain for so much as a bone of their
bodies. It was rumoured that he had the art or the gift of the old
heroes. Men had seen him at night upon the mountains, stepping from one
cliff to the next; they had seen him walking in the high forest, and
his head and shoulders were above the trees.
This Kalamake was a strange man to see. He was come of the best blood
in Molokai and Maui, of a pure descent; and yet he was more white to
look upon than any foreigner: his hair the colour of dry grass, and his
eyes red and very blind, so that “Blind as Kalamake, that can see
across to-morrow,” was a byword in the islands.
Of all these doings of his father-in-law, Keola knew a little by the
common repute, a little more he suspected, and the rest he ignored. But
there was one thing troubled him. Kalamake was a man that spared for
nothing, whether to eat or to drink, or to wear; and for all he paid in
bright new dollars. “Bright as Kalamake’s dollars,” was another saying
in the Eight Isles. Yet he neither sold, nor planted, nor took
hire—only now and then from his sorceries—and there was no source
conceivable for so much silver coin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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