The House of Pride | Page 8

paused. He raised one hand, and with gnarled and twisted
fingers lifted up the blazing wreath of hibiscus that crowned his black
hair. The moonlight bathed the scene in silver. It was a night of peace,
though those who sat about him and listened had all the seeming of
battle-wrecks. Their faces were leonine. Here a space yawned in a face
where should have been a nose, and there an arm-stump showed where
a hand had rotted off. They were men and women beyond the pale, the
thirty of them, for upon them had been placed the mark of the beast.

They sat, flower-garlanded, in the perfumed, luminous night, and their
lips made uncouth noises and their throats rasped approval of Koolau's
speech. They were creatures who once had been men and women. But
they were men and women no longer. They were monsters--in face and
form grotesque caricatures of everything human. They were hideously
maimed and distorted, and had the seeming of creatures that had been
racked in millenniums of hell. Their hands, when they possessed them,
were like harpy claws. Their faces were the misfits and slips, crushed
and bruised by some mad god at play in the machinery of life. Here and
there were features which the mad god had smeared half away, and one
woman wept scalding tears from twin pits of horror, where her eyes
once had been. Some were in pain and groaned from their chests.
Others coughed, making sounds like the tearing of tissue. Two were
idiots, more like huge apes marred in the making, until even an ape
were an angel. They mowed and gibbered in the moonlight, under
crowns of drooping, golden blossoms. One, whose bloated ear-lobe
flapped like a fan upon his shoulder, caught up a gorgeous flower of
orange and scarlet and with it decorated the monstrous ear that
flip-flapped with his every movement.
And over these things Koolau was king. And this was his kingdom,--a
flower-throttled gorge, with beetling cliffs and crags, from which
floated the blattings of wild goats. On three sides the grim walls rose,
festooned in fantastic draperies of tropic vegetation and pierced by
cave- entrances--the rocky lairs of Koolau's subjects. On the fourth side
the earth fell away into a tremendous abyss, and, far below, could be
seen the summits of lesser peaks and crags, at whose bases foamed and
rumbled the Pacific surge. In fine weather a boat could land on the
rocky beach that marked the entrance of Kalalau Valley, but the
weather must be very fine. And a cool-headed mountaineer might climb
from the beach to the head of Kalalau Valley, to this pocket among the
peaks where Koolau ruled; but such a mountaineer must be very cool of
head, and he must know the wild-goat trails as well. The marvel was
that the mass of human wreckage that constituted Koolau's people
should have been able to drag its helpless misery over the giddy
goat-trails to this inaccessible spot.

"Brothers," Koolau began.
But one of the mowing, apelike travesties emitted a wild shriek of
madness, and Koolau waited while the shrill cachination was tossed
back and forth among the rocky walls and echoed distantly through the
pulseless night.
"Brothers, is it not strange? Ours was the land, and behold, the land is
not ours. What did these preachers of the word of God and the word of
Rum give us for the land? Have you received one dollar, as much as
one dollar, any one of you, for the land? Yet it is theirs, and in return
they tell us we can go to work on the land, their land, and that what we
produce by our toil shall be theirs. Yet in the old days we did not have
to work. Also, when we are sick, they take away our freedom."
"Who brought the sickness, Koolau?" demanded Kiloliana, a lean and
wiry man with a face so like a laughing faun's that one might expect to
see the cloven hoofs under him. They were cloven, it was true, but the
cleavages were great ulcers and livid putrefactions. Yet this was
Kiloliana, the most daring climber of them all, the man who knew
every goat-trail and who had led Koolau and his wretched followers
into the recesses of Kalalau.
"Ay, well questioned," Koolau answered. "Because we would not work
the miles of sugar-cane where once our horses pastured, they brought
the Chinese slaves from overseas. And with them came the Chinese
sickness--that which we suffer from and because of which they would
imprison us on Molokai. We were born on Kauai. We have been to the
other islands, some here and some there, to Oahu, to Maui, to Hawaii,
to Honolulu. Yet always did we come back to Kauai. Why did we come