While the ring of their heathen death-song still echoed in my ear, and
the hiss and roar of the volcanic fires still boomed and resounded
wildly around me, I was dimly conscious in an interval of heat that the
lava-flood fell back for a few moments, and that a lull had intervened
in that surging tide of fiery liquid. I was sorry for that. It would do
nothing now but needlessly prolong my horrible torture. When once one
has made up one's mind to face death, in whatever form, the sooner one
can get the wrench over the better. To be roasted alive is bad enough in
all conscience; but to be roasted alive by intermittent stages is a
thing to make even a soldier or a man of science shrink back appalled
from the ghastly prospect.
In my agony, I looked up once more at the sheer precipice. As I looked,
I saw yet another person had come down to join the group by the edge. My
heart bounded with a faint throb of hope. It was Kea, Kea, pretty,
gentle Kea.
"Surely," I said to myself in my own soul, "Kea at least will not desert
me. Kea will try her very best to save me."
The light of the volcano lit up the faces of the men and the girl with a
ruddy glow. I could see every movement of their muscles distinctly. Kea
came down with clasped hands, and blanched lips, like one frantic with
terror, and seemed to beg and implore the man in the mask to aid or
assist her in some projected undertaking. The man in the mask shook his
head sternly. It was clear he was adamant. Kea redoubled her prayers and
entreaties. The priest rejected her petition with his hands outspread,
and turned once more as if in blind worship toward the mouth of the
crater. I knew that Kea was begging hard for my life, and that Kalaua,
sternly refusing her prayer, was devoting me as a victim to his
unspeakable goddess.
There are moments that seem as long as years. This was one of them.
Presently, Kea seemed to ask some favour, some last favour. The stern
old priest made answer slowly. I fancied he was relenting. She turned to
the men, as if to ask a question. The men in return assented with a
solemn movement of their awestruck bodies. Then Kea looked up at her
uncle again imploringly. She spoke with fervour, I could see it was some
sort of compact or bargain between them she was trying to negotiate. At
last the man in the mask gave in. He nodded his head and folded his
arms. He appeared to look on like a passive spectator. I imagined
somehow, quickened as my senses were by the extremity of the moment,
that he had entered into an agreement with her, not indeed to save me,
but to abstain from active interference with Kea's movements if she
wished herself to assist me in any way.
I breathed more freely. As soon as their hasty conference was over, the
girl drew near to the brink of the precipice. She raised her hands as if
pulling at an invisible rope: then she made signs to me to wait
patiently, if wait I could, for that help was going to arrive shortly.
After that, she broke eagerly away with a gesture of sympathy, and ran
off in hot haste towards the winding path that led from the floor to the
summit of the crater.
I lay there some minutes more in an agony of suspense. Would she come
back in time, or would the fiery flood burst up once more to the level
where I lay before she had time to arrive with assistance?
The man in the mask, whom I took to be Kalaua, and the four natives who
stood by his side, still watched me, unmoved, with stolid indifference,
from the jagged brink of that high granite precipice.
By and by, they looked down with deeper attention still. I could tell by
their gestures and their excited manner that the lava, after its lull,
had begun to ascend afresh. The man in the mask advanced and prostrated
himself. He quivered with emotion. He flung his arms up wildly. His
limbs shook. He seemed as if in the bodily presence of Pélé.
Next moment, a roar like the roar of thunder, or the discharge of a
volley of heavy artillery, boomed forth from the crater, loud and
sharp, with explosive violence. The ledge about me began to gape with
chinks. Fissures opened up in the solid rock by my side with a crackling
noise. The Floor of the Hawaiians sweated fire. Liquid lava oozed forth
from a huge rent not three hundred yards away from the place where I
lay, and flowing in a stream over the bed inward, fell back again in a
surging cataract of fire into the central hollow. I wondered I was not
scorched to death outright, so near was the lava-flood. But the place
where I lay still remained solid. How long it would remain so, I did not
even dare to speculate.
At that instant, as I looked up in my agony of suspense towards the
brink of the precipice, with the liquid fire rising apace to seize me, I
saw Kea, all breathless with haste, rush eagerly up to the edge and lean
over towards me. In her hands, O joy, she held a large coil or ring of
something. Thank heaven! Thank heaven! My heart bounded with delight.
Saved! saved! It was rope she was carrying!
She flung it down in a curl, sailor-fashion, towards the spot where I
lay. I saw as it fell it was of different sizes, and knotted together
with big rude knots in many places. Clearly she had not been able to
find a single rope long enough for her purpose. She had made up this
length as well as she was able out of different pieces hunted up by
hazard in odd corners at Kalaua's on the spur of the moment.
It was a giddy height to which to trust one's self, even with the
stoutest and strongest cable ever woven on earth. But with that weak and
patched-up line of rotten old cords? Impossible! Impossible! If one of
the knots were to give way with my weight, if one of the pieces were to
break in the middle, I should be hurled down again a second time, yet
more helpless than ever, and dashed into little pieces in an instant on
that sharp and stubborn granite platform!
But drowning men clutch at straws. This was no moment to deliberate or
reason. I would have trusted myself just then, broken leg and all, to a
line of whipcord, if nothing else came handy.
The rope descended in a whirl through the air. It fell taut--plumb to
the bottom. A fresh disappointment! To my utter horror, the end still
dangled some ten feet above me!
I couldn't possibly jump up to reach it. With a loud cry of distress Kea
saw it was too short. In a moment without stopping to think or hesitate,
she had torn the lower part of her long native dress into strips and
shreds, and lengthened the frail cord by this insecure addition just far
enough to reach me as I stood on tip-toe.
I clutched it at last with both my hands, and threw back my head as a
signal to Kea that all was right, and she might begin pulling.
Never shall I forget the awful sensations that coursed through my body
as I dangled there, half-way in air, while that delicate young girl,
thin and graceful, but strong of limb, with the inherited strength of
her savage country-women, hauled me slowly up by main force of
struggling nerve and sinew, past all possible conception of her natural
powers.
She hauled me up by first passing the rope round a jagged peak of lava,
which thus acted as a sort of rude natural pulley, enabling her to get
rid of the direct strain, and to throw the weight in part on the edge of
the precipice, and then by winding it round her own waist as a living
windlass. Slowly, slowly, clinging by my hands to the hard rope, that
cut and bruised my poor bleeding fingers, and with my broken leg
dangling painfully in mid-air with excruciating twitches, I rose by
degrees towards the brink of the abyss. How Kea had ever strength to
raise me I do not know to this very day. I only know that as each knot
on the rope grated and jerked round the edge of the peak that served for
pulley it sent a thrill of incredible and unutterable pain through my
injured limb, and almost made me let go my hands off the hard rope they
were grasping and clutching with all their energy.
Meanwhile, the man in the feather mask and the natives by his side stood
stolidly by, neither helping nor hindering, but gazing at me as I
dangled in mid-air with sublime indifference, as one might gaze at a
spider running up his own web with practised feet towards his nest on
the ceiling. It was clear my life was no more to them than that. If the
rope had given way, if the crumbling peak of honey-combed lava had
broken short with the weight, and precipitated me, a mangled mass, to
the bottom, they would have stood there as stolidly, and smiled as
imperturbably at my shattered limbs in the awful embrace of their fiery
goddess. Truly, truly, the dark places of the earth are full of cruelty.
[Illustration: "I CLUTCHED THE CRUMBLING PEAK WITH MY HOOKED FINGERS."]
As I rose in the air the lava, now belching forth with renewed vigour,
followed me fast up the mouth of the crater. It followed me fast, like a
living creature. One might almost have fancied that Pélé, disappointed
of her victim, made haste in her frantic efforts to snatch him from the
hands of that frail mortal maiden who strove almost in vain to rescue
him in time by violent means from her cruel clutches. I didn't wonder
any longer that those ignorant and superstitious natives should picture
the volcano to themselves in their own souls as a living will. I almost
felt it alive myself, so wildly and eagerly did the tongues of flame
seem to dart forth towards me with their forked and vibrating tips, as
if thirsting to lick me up and swallow me down in their hungry lunges.
The time I took in rising was endless. Could I hold on till the end?
that was the question. At last, after long intervals of giddy suspense,
I reached the top, or almost reached it; I clutched the crumbling peak
with my hooked fingers. Kea still wound the rope round and round her
body, as she approached to help me. She held out her hand. I grasped it
eagerly. "You must jump," she cried: and all wounded as I was, I jumped
with wild force on to the solid floor of the upper platform. My broken
leg thrilled through with pain. But I was safe--safe. I was standing by
her side on the Floor of the Strangers. The lava sank down again with a
hideous sob, as if disappointed of its living prey. I gazed around me
for the priest and his acolytes. Not a sign or a mark of them anywhere
was to be seen. I stood alone with Kea by the brink of the precipice.
The rest had melted away to their hidden lairs as if by magic.
I was rescued, indeed, but by the skin of my teeth. Such peril leaves
one unmanned as one escapes it.