Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & ProtectorateSkinner, Charles M. (Charles Montgomery)
History
Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate
Skinner, Charles M. (Charles Montgomery)
Tales -- Oceania; Tales -- West Indies
The neighbors endured these goings-on until Kamapua had added murder
to his other crimes, when they resolved that he was no longer a
subject for public patience. An army was sent against him, most of his
associates were killed, he was caught, and was taken before his father
for judgment. Olopana sternly ordered that he be given as a sacrifice
to the gods. His mother was in despair at this, for though he was a
most unworthy fellow, a nuisance, a danger, still, he was her son, and
she loved him better than her life. She bribed the priests, whose duty
it was to slay him, and they, having smeared him with chicken-blood,
laid him on the altar. The eye that was gouged from the body of
a victim, and offered to the chief who made the sacrifice, was in
this case the eye of a pig. Olopana did not even pretend to eat this
relic, as he should have done, to follow custom, but flung it aside
and gazed with satisfaction at the gory features of the man who was
shamming death. He had turned to leave the temple when Kamapua leaped
from the altar, picked up the bone dagger with which a feint had been
made of cutting out his eye and stabbed his father repeatedly in the
back. At the sight of a corpse butchering their chief the people fled
in panic, the priests, awe-struck at the result of their corruption,
hid themselves, and the murderer, so soon as he was sure that Olopana
was dead, hurried away, assembled the forty surviving members of his
band, leaped into his canoe, and left Oahu forever.
He landed at Kauai, on the cliff of Kipukai, and remembering a well
of sweet water on its side, he sought for it, up and down, and back
and forth, for he had a raging thirst. Two spirits of the place,
knowing him to be evil, had concealed the spring under a mass of
shrubbery that he might not pollute it; but he found it, and as he
drank he saw their figures reflected in the surface, despite their
concealment in the shadow, and heard their laughter at his greed and
his uncouthness. That angered him. He sprang up, chased them through
the wood, caught them, and with a swing of his great arms hurled them
to the hill across the valley, where they became stone and art seen
to this day. So ill did he behave in Kauai, assailing innocent people
and destroying their taro patches, that they determined to despatch
him, and in order to have him under their advantage it was resolved
to fence him in near Hanalei. The wall of mountain now existing there
is the fence. Just before it was finished the prince in charge of the
work sat to rest in a gap which admits the present road. He heard a
harsh laugh, and looking up saw Kamapua sitting on the top of Hoary
Head. A running fight ensued, in which the outlaw escaped across the
mountain, and the prince, hurling his spear, but missing his mark,
sent the weapon through the crest of the peak, making the remarkable
window that is one of the sights of the island. And now, when a cloud
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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