The Hawaiian places his hands, palms up, edge to edge, so that the little finger of one hand touches its fellow of the other hand. By this action he means union or similarity. He turns one palm down, so that the little finger and thumb of opposite hands touch each other. The significance of the action is now wholly reversed; he now means disunion, contrariety. To indicate death, the death of a person, the finger-tips, placed in apposition, are drawn away from each other with a sweeping gesture and at the same time lowered till the palms face the ground. In this case also we find diversity. One old man, well acquainted with hula matters, being asked to signify in pantomimic fashion “the king is sick,” went through the following motions: He first pointed upward, to indicate the heaven-born one, the king; then he brought his hands to his body and threw his face into a painful grimace. To indicate the death of the king he threw his hands upward toward the sky, as if to signify a removal by flight. He admitted the accuracy of the gesture, previously described, in which the hands are moved toward the ground. There are, of course, imitative and mimetic gestures galore, as of paddling, swimming, diving, angling, and the like, [Page 179] which one sees every day of his life and which are to be regarded as parts of that universal shorthand vocabulary of unvocalized speech that is used the world over from Naples to Honolulu, rather than stage-conventions of the halau. It will suffice to mention one motion or gesture of this sort which the author has seen used with dramatic effect. An old man was describing the action of Hiiaka (the little sister of Pele) while clearing a passage for herself and her female companion with a great slaughter of the reptilian demon-horde of _ma’o_ that came out in swarms to oppose the progress of the goddess through their territory while she was on her way to fetch Prince Lohiau. The goddess, a delicate piece of humanity in her real self, made short work of the little devils who covered the earth and filled the air. Seizing one after another, she bit its life out, or swallowed it as if it had been a shrimp. The old man represented the action most vividly: pressing his thumb, forefinger, and middle finger into a cone, he brought them quickly to his mouth, while he snapped his jaws together like a dog seizing a morsel, an action that pictured the story better than any words.