Here, a priestess of Pele came, and raising her hands in threat denounced death on the head of Kapiolani if she came further.  Kapiolani pulled from her robe a book.  In it—­for it was her New Testament—­she read to the priestess of the one true, loving Father-God.

Then Kapiolani did a thing at which the very limbs of those who watched trembled and shivered.  She went to the edge of the crater and stepped over onto a jutting rock and let herself down and down toward the sulphurous burning lake.  The ground cracked under her feet and sulphurous steam hissed through crevices in the rock, as though the demons of Pele fumed in their frenzy.  Hundreds of staring, wondering eyes followed her, fascinated and yet horrified.

Then she stood on a ledge of rock, and, offering up prayer and praise to the God of all, Who made the volcano and Who made her, she cast the Pele berries into the lake, and sent stone after stone down into the flaming lava.  It was the most awful insult that could be offered to Pele!  Now surely she would leap up in fiery anger, and, with a hail of burning stones, consume Kapiolani.  But nothing happened; and Kapiolani, turning, climbed the steep ascent of the crater edge and at last stood again unharmed among her people.  She spoke to her people, telling them again that Jehovah made the fires.  She called on them all to sing to His praise and, for the first time, there rang across the crater of Kilawea the song of Christians.  The power of the priests was gone, and from that hour the people all over that island who had trembled and hesitated between Pele and Christ turned to the worship of our Lord Jesus, the Son of God the Father Almighty.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 24:  Pay-lay.]

[Footnote 25:  Hah-wye-ee.]

[Footnote 26:  Discovered by Captain Cook in 1778.  The first Christian missionaries landed in 1819.  Now the island is ruled by the United States of America.]

[Footnote 27:  Pa-h[=o]-e-h[=o]-e.]

[Footnote 28:  Kah-pee-[=o]-l[)a]-nee.  She was high female chief, in her own right, of a large district.]

[Footnote 29:  Kil-a-wee-[)a].  The greatest active volcano in the world.]

[Footnote 30:  Chay-lo.]

CHAPTER IX

THE CANOE OF ADVENTURE

Elikana

(Date of Incident, 1861)

  “I know not where His islands lift
    Their fronded palms in air;
  I only know I cannot drift
    Beyond His love and care.”

I

Manihiki Island looked like a tiny anchored canoe far away across the Pacific, as Elikana glanced back from his place at the tiller.  He sang, meantime, quietly to himself an air that still rang in his ears, the tune that he and his brother islanders had sung in praise of the Power and Providence of God at the services on Manihiki.  For the Christian people of the Penrhyn group of South Sea Islands had come together in April, 1861, for their yearly meeting, paddling from the different quarters in their canoes through the white surge of the breakers that thunder day and night round the island.