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. 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, Pele 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 Pele and greatly to be feared." The priests were angry because the preaching of the missionaries had led many away from the worship of Pele 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 Pele 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 Pele?" 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. "Pele is nought," she declared, "I will go to Kilawea,[29] the mountain of the fires where the smoke and stones go up, and Pele 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 Pele 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 Pele; if I live you must all believe in the true God, Jehovah."