The pit was elliptical, nine feet deep, and about twenty-four feet long.  Wood was piled in it, and rocks from the dismantled Kaumakapili church.  The fire burned until the stones became red and then white, and they, too, were turned with long poles to make the heat even.  I inspected the heating process several times.  At the hour advertised in the American and native papers, in an enclosure built for the occasion, with seats about the pit, the mystery was enacted.  The setting was superb, the flaming furnace of heathenism in the shadow of the lonely ruin of the Christian edifice.  Papa Ita appeared garbed in white tapa, with a wonderful head-dress of the sacred ti-leaves and a belt of the same.  The spectators were of all nations, including many Hawaiians.  The deposed queen, Liliuokalani, was a most interested witness.

Papa Ita looked neither to the right nor left, but striking the ground thrice with a wand of ti, he raised his voice in invocation and walked upon the stones.  He reached the other end, paused and returned.  Several times he did this and when photographers rushed to make a picture, he posed calmly in the center of the pit, and then, with all the air of a priest who has celebrated a rite of approved merit, he retired with dignity.  As he departed from the inclosure, the natives crowded about him, fearfully, as viewed the Israelites the safety of Daniel emerging from the lions’ den.  Did I not see the former queen lift the hem of his tapa and bow over it?  It was night, the lights sputtered, and I was awed by the success of the incantation.  A minute after Papa Ita had gone, I threw a newspaper upon the path he had trod, and it withered into ashes.  The heat seared my face.  The doctors, five or six of them, Americans and English, resident in Honolulu, shrugged their shoulders.  They had examined Papa Ita’s feet before the ceremony and afterward.  The flesh was not burned, but, well—­What?  I confess I do not know.  A thermometer held over the umu of Papa Ita at a height of six feet registered 282 degrees Fahrenheit.

There could be no negation of the extreme heat of the oven of Tufetufetu.  I had tested it for myself.  No precaution was taken by the walkers.  I knew most of them intimately.  There was no fraud, no ointment or oil or other application to the feet, and all had not the same thickness of sole.  At Raratonga, near Tahiti, the British resident, Colonel Gudgeon, and three other Englishmen had followed the tahua as my neighbors had here.  The official said that though his feet were tender, his own sensations were of light electric shocks at the moment and afterward.  Dr. William Craig, who disobeyed the tahua and looked behind, was badly burned, and was an invalid for a long time, though Dr. George Craig and Mr. Goodwin met with no harm.  The resident half an hour after his passage tossed a branch on the stones, and it caught fire.  In Fiji, Lady Thurston with a long stick laid her handkerchief on the shoulder of one of the walkers, and when withdrawn in a few seconds it was scorched through.  A cloth thrown on the stones was burned before the last man had gone by.