Hawaii - James Michener [62]
As she had hoped, toward dusk the clouds began to dissipate, and it was Teura who first saw the new island looming ahead. Gasping, she cried, "Oh, great Tane! What is it?"
"Look! Look!" shouted Teroro.
And there before them, rearing from the sea like an undreamed-of monster, rose a tremendous mountain more massive than they had ever imagined, crowned in strange white and soaring majestically into the evening sunset.
"What a land we have found!" Teroro whispered.
"It is the land of Tane!" King Tamatoa announced in a hushed whisper. "It reaches to heaven itself."
And all in the canoe, seeing this clean and wonderful mountain, fell silent and did it reverence, until Pa cried, "Look! It is smoking!" And as night fell, the last sight the men of Bora Bora had was of a gigantic mountain, hung in the heavens, sending fumes from its peak.
The vision haunted the voyagers, for they knew it must be an omen of some proportions, and in the quiet hours of the night old Teura dreamed and woke screaming. The king hurried to her side, and she whispered, "I know what it was we forgot."
She went aft with her nephew, to where no one could hear, and she confided: "The same dream returned. I heard this voice crying, "You have forgotten me.' But this time I recognized the voice. We have left behind a goddess whom we should have brought."
King Tamatoa felt a sick quaking near his heart and asked, "What goddess?" for he knew that if a goddess felt insulted, there was no restriction on the steps she might take in exacting revenge; her capacity was limitless.
"It is the voice of Pere, the ancient goddess of Bora Bora," the old woman replied. "Tell me, nephew, when your wandering stars were searching the heavens, were they not attended by specks of fire?"
The king tried to recall his haunting premonitory dream and was able, with extraordinary clarity, to conjure it, and he agreed: "There were specks of fire. Among the northern stars."
They summoned Tupuna and told him the burden of his wife's dream, and he acknowledged that it must have been the goddess Pere who had wanted to come on the voyage, whereupon his nephew asked, "But who is Pere?"
"In ancient days on Bora Bora," the old man explained as the thin-horned curve of the dying moon rose in the east, "our island had mountains that smoked, and Pere was the goddess of flame who directed our lives. But the flame died away and we supposed that Pere had left us, and we no longer worshiped the red-colored rock that stood in the temple."
"I had forgotten Pere," Teura confessed. "Otherwise I would have recognized her voice. But tonight, seeing the smoking mountain, I remembered."
"And she is angry with us?" the king asked.
"Yes," Teura replied. "But Tane and Ta'aroa are with us, and they will protect us."
The old seers went back to their places, and the king was left alone, in the shadow of his new land now barely visible in the misty moonlight. He was disturbed that a man could take so much care to satisfy the gods, and that he could nevertheless fail. He could study the omens, bend his will to them, and live only at the gods' commands; but always some small thing intruded; an old woman fails to recognize the voice of a goddess and disaster impinges upon an entire venture. He knew the rock of Pere; it had been retained in the temple for no known reason, both its name and its properties forgotten; it was no longer even dressed in feathers. It would have been so simple to have brought that rock, but the facts had eluded him and now he felt at the mercy of a revengeful goddess who had been deeply insulted, the more so because she had taken the trouble to warn him. He beat his hands against the poles of the grass hut and cried, “Why can we never do anything right?"
If the king was perplexed by his arrival at the new land, there were other passengers who were terrified. In the rear of the left hull, the slaves huddled in darkness, whispering. The four men were telling the two