The Hawaiians, breathless with their efforts, sat down and gazed hopelessly upon the rising lava. A dense poisonous smoke was gradually narrowing their horizon all around and slowly approaching, leaving no hope of escaping suffocation, even if they were spared a more immediate and violent death. Their position was far worse than to be on a burning prairie, for fire can then be made to fight fire as the ally of man. Here all nature was melting before the heat of the eruption. At any instant the solid rock on which they sat might surge and toss like the waves of the ocean, in blazing, gory-hued billows, while of themselves not one particle of matter would survive to disclose their fate. The fast increasing heat soon drove them to the centre of the hill, where sheltered by a pile of stones they had a moment’s respite.
Tolta, leaving his men, searched everywhere for another chance to cross the lava, but was driven back, scorched and faint, to the knoll. “Am I to die here like a scorpion encircled by fire?” said he, in a rage at his futile efforts. “Was it for this that I have plotted vengeance, and to possess Beatriz? Juan to escape, and she to die with me the death of a dog; curses upon Pele and her demon crew! Great god of Mexico, if thou art not thyself become a slave to the Christian’s God, save thy servant!” and he shook his fist at the hot lava in the fury of his despair.
“This inhuman cavern— It were too bad a prison-house for goblins. —— —— —— no place safe but this!”
Mutual terror forces hostile animals into peaceful companionship. Under its influence the wolf lies down as quietly beside the lamb as if in the kingdom of love. The extremes of faith and education produce in man under threatened, speedy death, much the same outward result. Pohaku’s warriors, bred in cruelty, and believing only in malignant deities, viewed their fast coming fate with sullen indifference. So long as there was hope in their exertions they were ready to show themselves men, but when death looked them right in the face, they were equally ready to proffer their breasts to his stroke without further struggle. Their instincts taught them that as life was beyond their control, so was death. He was a foe they could not conquer, neither should he triumph in their fear. Thus in his ignorance and unbelief the savage meets the great change with an insensibility, which, in its outward calm, rivals the faith of the Christian.