Hawaii - James Michener [206]
Queen Kaahumanu, regent of the islands, came attended by Queens Liliha and Kinau, both of enormous girth. From Hawaii came Princess Kalani-o-mai-heu-ila, heavier by forty pounds than Malama, and from Honolulu, Kauikeaouli, the boy king. The great men of the islands were there: Paki and Bold and Hoapili and the leader called by westerners Billy Pitt; and Dr. Whipple, seeing them assemble, thought: "In one lifetime they lifted their islands from paganism to God, from the Stone Age to the modern. And to do so they had to fight off the Russians, the English, the French, the Germans and the Americans. Every time a civilized warship came to their islands it was to make them turn over girls for the sailors or rum to the natives." They were an amazing race, the old alii of Hawaii, and now as they gathered in formal panoply for the death of Luka Malama Kanakoa they seemed to be mourning for themselves.
Dr. Whipple observed to Abner: "They are like echoes of the great animals that once roamed the world and marched slowly to their death as changes overtook them."
"What animals?" Abner asked suspiciously.
"The monstrous ones before the ice ages," Whipple explained. "Some scientists think they vanished because they became too huge to be accommodated on the changing earth."
"I have no interest in such speculation," Abner replied.
In her grass palace Malama greeted each of the great old friends. "Aloha nui nui," she repeated constantly.
"Auwe, auwe!" they wept. "We have come to weep with our beloved sister."
When extreme pain in breathing attacked her, she bit her lower lip and gasped through the corners of her big mouth, resuming her smile as soon as the pain passed, while around her, in a vast semicircle, hunched the alii, whispering to themselves and praying.
Now Kelolo decided that it was time to move the woman he had loved so deeply onto the bed where she would die, so he sent his men to the hills to fetch bundles of fragrant leaves--api for protection against evil spirits, ti for healing, and mysterious maile whose penetrating aroma was the best loved--and when these leaves arrived, redolent and reminiscent of courtship days on Hawaii, Kelolo gently broke the back of each one so as to release its odor, and he arranged them in a formal pattern over the tapa blanket. Over this fragrant bed he placed a softly woven pandanus mat, and then a soft tapa, and over all a sheet of Cantonese silk embroidered with golden dragons. And whenever giant Malama moved on this bed, she caught the smell of maile.
Next, Kelolo went to the beach and had his fishermen procure fresh aholehole, which in the old custom of the islands he cooked himself. He grated coconuts and saw to the baking of breadfruit, and in her last days she ate not a morsel except from his fingers. In the long hours of the night it was he who waved the soft feathered wands to keep away the flies from the great sleeping body that he had loved so well, and he never approached her except on his hands and knees, for he wished to remind her that she was the Alii Nui, the one from whom his mana came. But what pleased her most was the morning, when Kelolo would leave her for a while and then come creeping back to her on his elbows, for his arms would be filled with red lehua blossoms and ginger and yellow hau. He brought them to her with dew still upon them, as he had done years ago, before the clashing battles of Kamehameha had interrupted their