"Oh, no," he retorted with flashing eyes: "it was no superstition. It was solemn fact. Wounds would never heal at such times, and broken limbs would set with difficulty. You see, in the old clays, we knew a good deal about wounds, of course--far more than nowadays. We were all warriors then. We fought and hacked each other. We were often liable to get severely injured. Stone hatchets cut a man up so awkwardly."
"Why," I cried, "now you come to mention it, I remember the year I was working at Etna, the Sicilians at Catania all declared that sprains and cuts and rheumatic affections would never get well before or during eruptive periods. I hardly believed them at the time, I confess; but if two people so widely apart in race and space as you and the Sicilians both say so, I dare say there may really be something in it."
"There _is_ something in it," Kalaua echoed gravely. "I know it by experience."
"An atmospheric or electric condition, no doubt," I said, lighting a cigarette.
"Our fathers used to think," Kalaua corrected slowly, "that Pélé's daughter was the goddess of disease; and when Pélé was angrily searching for a victim, or when Pélé's son, the humpbacked god, who lives with his mother among the ashes of the crater, was in search of a fresh wife among the daughters of men, then, our heathen forefathers used to say, the goddess of disease went forth through the land to prick the people with the goads and thorns that she pushed into their flesh and their veins and their marrow. Pélé had many sons and daughters; all of them worked the will of their mother. The goddess of disease was the eldest and noblest--she searched everywhere for a victim for her mother."
"And did she ever get one?" I asked with curdling blood.
"Yes," Kalaua answered. "The Hawaiians are brave. Sometimes the people would suffer so much from Pélé's daughter that some one among them, a noble-minded youth, would willingly offer himself up as a propitiation to Pélé. Then Pélé's wrath would be appeased for the time, and the eruptions would cease, and the land would have slumber. But those, we know, were only foolish old heathen ideas. Nowadays of course the Hawaiians are wiser.
"Yes," I replied, smiling and withdrawing my cigarette. "The Hawaiians nowadays are nominally Christian."