There were shelter and refreshment for two hungry souls, and we slid out of our saddles as though we had been boned expressly for a cannibal feast.
By this time the rosy flush on Mauna Kea had faded, and its superb brow was pale with an unearthly pallor. "Come in," said the host; and he led us under the thatched gable, that was fragrant as new-mown hay. There we sat, "in," as he called it, though there was never a side to the concern thicker than a shadow.
A stream flowed noiselessly at our feet. Canoes drifted by us, with dusky and nude forms bowed over the paddles. Each occupant greeted us, being guests in the valley, just lifting their slumberous eyelids,--masked batteries, that made Felix forget his danger; they seldom paused, but called back to us from the gathering darkness with inexpressibly tender, contralto voices.
In another apartment screened with vines we found our dinner ready. The faint nicker of the tapers suggested that what breath of air might be stirring came from the mountain, and it brought with it a message from the orangery up the valley. "How will you take your oranges?" queried Felix; "in pulp, liquid, or perfume?"--and such a dense odour swept past us at the moment, I thought I had taken them in the triple forms. "You are just in time," said our host. "Why, what's up?" asked I. "The moon will be up presently, and after moonrise you shall see the _hula-hula_."
Felix desired to be enlightened as to the nature of the what-you-call-it, and was assured that it was worth seeing, and would require no explanatory chorus when its hour came.
It was at least a mile to the scene of action; a tortuous stream wound thither, navigable in spots, but from time to time the canoe would have to take to the banks for a short cut into deeper water.
"I can never get there," growled Felix; "I'm full of needles and pins;" to which the host responded by excusing himself for a few moments, leaving Felix and me alone. It was deathly still in the valley, though a thousand crickets sang, and the fish smacked their round mouths at the top of the water. Evening comes slowly in those beloved tropics, but it comes so satisfactorily that there is nothing left out.
A moonlight night is a continuous festival. The natives sing and dance till daybreak, making it all up by sleeping till the next twilight. Nothing is lost by this ingenious and admirable arrangement. Why should they sleep, when a night there has the very essence of five nights anywhere else, extracted and enriched with spices till it is so inspiring that the soul cries out in triumph, and the eyes couldn't sleep if they would?