The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 17Stevenson, Robert Louis
History
The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 17
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Islands of the Pacific -- Fiction; Samoan Islands -- History; Short stories
[7] Whites.
THE ISLE OF VOICES
THE ISLE OF VOICES
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 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 for 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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