Island Nights' EntertainmentsStevenson, Robert Louis
General
Island Nights' Entertainments
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Islands of the Pacific -- Fiction; Short stories
All this while he kept by the inside of the island, for the huts were
on the shore of the lagoon, and it was there the palms grew best, and
the lagoon itself abounded with good fish. And to the outer slide he
went once only, and he looked but the once at the beach of the ocean,
and came away shaking. For the look of it, with its bright sand, and
strewn shells, and strong sun and surf, went sore against his
inclination.
“It cannot be,” he thought, “and yet it is very like. And how do I
know? These white men, although they pretend to know where they are
sailing, must take their chance like other people. So that after all we
may have sailed in a circle, and I may be quite near to Molokai, and
this may be the very beach where my father-in-law gathers his dollars.”
So after that he was prudent, and kept to the land side.
It was perhaps a month later, when the people of the place arrived—the
fill of six great boats. They were a fine race of men, and spoke a
tongue that sounded very different from the tongue of Hawaii, but so
many of the words were the same that it was not difficult to
understand. The men besides were very courteous, and the women very
towardly; and they made Keola welcome, and built him a house, and gave
him a wife; and what surprised him the most, he was never sent to work
with the young men.
And now Keola had three periods. First he had a period of being very
sad, and then he had a period when he was pretty merry. Last of all
came the third, when he was the most terrified man in the four oceans.
The cause of the first period was the girl he had to wife. He was in
doubt about the island, and he might have been in doubt about the
speech, of which he had heard so little when he came there with the
wizard on the mat. But about his wife there was no mistake conceivable,
for she was the same girl that ran from him crying in the wood. So he
had sailed all this way, and might as well have stayed in Molokai; and
had left home and wife and all his friends for no other cause but to
escape his enemy, and the place he had come to was that wizard’s
hunting ground, and the shore where he walked invisible. It was at this
period when he kept the most close to the lagoon side, and as far as he
dared, abode in the cover of his hut.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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