Unwritten Literature of Hawaii Part 60

A tale this wrung from my heart, 20 Not told by the tongue of man.

Wrong! yet right, was I, my friend; My love after all was for you, While I lived a vagabond life there and here, Sowing my vagrom tears in all roads-- 25 Prompt my payment of debt to your house-- Yes, truly, I'm wrong!

[Page 257]

XLI.--THE WATER OF KANE

If one were asked what, to the English-speaking mind, const.i.tutes the most representative romantico-mystical aspiration that has been embodied in song and story, doubtless he would be compelled to answer the legend and myth of the Holy Grail. To the Hawaiian mind the aspiration and conception that most nearly approximates to this is that embodied in the words placed at the head of this chapter. The Water of Kane. One finds suggestions and hints of this conception in many pa.s.sages of Hawaiian song and story, sometimes a phosph.o.r.escent flash, answering to the dip of the poet's blade, sometimes crystallized into a set form; but nowhere else than in the following mele have I found this jewel deliberately wrought into shape, faceted, and fixed in a distinct form of speech.

This mele comes from Kauai, the island which more than any other of the Hawaiian group retains a tight hold on the mystical and imaginative features that mark the mythology of Polynesia; the island also which less than any other of the group was dazzled by the glamour of royalty and enslaved by the theory of the divine birth of kings.

_He Mele no Kane_

He u-i, he ninau: He u-i aku ana au ia oe, Aia i-hea ka wai a Kane?

Ala i ka hikina a ka La, 5 Puka i Hae-hae;[512]

Aia i-laila ka Wai a Kane.

E u-i aku ana au ia oe, Aia i-hea ka Wai a Kane?

Aia i Kau-lana-ka-la,[513]

10 I ka pae opua i ke kai,[514]

Ea mai ana ma Nihoa,[515]

[Page 258] Ma ka mole mai o Lehua; Aia i-laila ka Wai a Kane.

E u-i aku ana au ia oe, 15 Aia i-hea ka Wai a Kane?

Aia i ke kua-hiwi, i ke kua-lono, I ke awawa, i ke kaha-wai; Aia i-laila ka Wai a Kane.

E u-i aku ana au ia oe, 20 Aia i-hea ka Wai a Kane?

Aia i-kai, i ka moana, I ke Kua-lau, i ke anuenue, I ka punohu,[516] i ka ua-koko,[517]

I ka alewa-lewa; 25 Aia i-laila ka Wai a Kane.

E u-i aku ana au ia oe, Aia i-hea ka Wai a Kane?

Aia i-luna ka Wai a Kane, I ke ouli, i ke ao eleele, 30 I ke ao pano-pano, I ke ao popolo-hua mea a Kane la, e!

Aia i-laila ka Wai a Kane.

E u-i aku ana au ia oe, Aia i-hea ka Wai a Kane?

35 Aia i-lalo, i ka honua, i ka Wai hu, I ka wai kau a Kane me Ka.n.a.loa--[518]

He wai-puna, he wai e inu, He wai e mana, he wai e ola.

E ola no, e-a!

[Footnote 512: _Hae-hae_. Heaven's eastern gate; the portal in the solid walls that supported the heavenly dome, through which the sun entered in the morning.]

[Footnote 513: _Kau-lana-ka-la_. When the setting sun, perhaps by an optical illusion drawn out into a boatlike form, appeared to be floating on the surface of the ocean, the Hawaiians named the phenomenon _Kau-lana-ka-la_--the floating of the sun. Their fondness for personification showed itself in the final conversion of this phrase into something like a proper name, which they applied to the locality of the phenomenon.]

[Footnote 514: _Pae opua i ke kai_. Another instance of name-giving, applied to the bright clouds that seem to rest on the horizon, especially to the west.]

[Footnote 515: _Nihoa_ (Bird island). This small rock to the northwest of Kauai, though far below the horizon, is here spoken of as if it were in sight.]

[Footnote 516: _Punohu_ A red luminous cloud, or a halo, regarded as an omen portending some sacred and important event.]

[Footnote 517: _Ua-koko_. Literally b.l.o.o.d.y rain, a term applied to a rainbow when lying near the ground, or to a freshet-stream swollen with the red muddy water from the wash of the hillsides. These were important omens, claimed as marking the birth of tabu chiefs.]

[Footnote 518: _Wai kau a Kane me Ka.n.a.loa_. Once when Kane and Ka.n.a.loa were journeying together Ka.n.a.loa complained of thirst. Kane thrust his staff into the pali near at hand, and out flowed a stream of pure water that has continued to the present day. The place is at Keanae, Maui.]

[Translation]

_The Water of Kane_

A query, a question, I put to you: Where is the water of Kane?

At the Eastern Gate 5 Where the Sun comes in at Hae-hae; There is the water of Kane.

A question I ask of you: Where is the water of Kane?

Out there with the floating Sun, [Page 259] 10 Where cloud-forms rest on Ocean's breast, Uplifting their forms at Nihoa, This side the base of Lehua; There is the water of Kane.

One question I put to you: 15 Where is the water of Kane?

Yonder on mountain peak, On the ridges steep, In the valleys deep, Where the rivers sweep; 20 There is the water of Kane.

This question I ask of you: Where, pray, is the water of Kane?

Yonder, at sea, on the ocean, In the driving rain, 25 In the heavenly bow, In the piled-up mist-wraith, In the blood-red rainfall, In the ghost-pale cloud-form; There is the water of Kane.

30 One question I put to you: Where, where is the water of Kane?

Up on high is the water of Kane, In the heavenly blue, In the black piled cloud, 35 In the black-black cloud, In the black-mottled sacred cloud of the G.o.ds; There is the water of Kane.

One question I ask of you: Where flows the water of Kane?

10 Deep in the ground, in the gus.h.i.+ng spring, In the ducts of Kane and Loa, A well-spring of water, to quaff, A water of magic power-- The water of life!

45 Life! O give us this life!

[Page 260]

XLII.--GENERAL REVIEW

In this preliminary excursion into the wilderness of Hawaiian literature we have covered but a small part of the field; we have reached no definite boundaries; followed no stream to its fountain head; gained no high point of vantage, from which to survey the whole. It was indeed outside the purpose of this book to make a delimitation of the whole field of Hawaiian literature and to mark out its relations to the formulated thoughts of the world.

Certain provisional conclusions, however, are clearly indicated: that this unwritten speech-literature is but a peninsula, a semidetached, outlying division of the Polynesian, with which it has much in common, the whole running back through the same lines of ancestry to the people of Asia. There still lurk in the subliminal consciousness of the race, as it were, vague memories of things that long ago pa.s.sed from sight and knowledge. Such, for instance, was the _mo'o_; a word that to the Hawaiian meant a nondescript reptile, which his imagination vaguely pictured, sometimes as a dragonlike monster belching fire like a chimera of mythology, or swimming the ocean like a sea-serpent, or multiplied into a manifold pestilential swarm infesting the wilderness, conceived of as gifted with superhuman powers and always as the malignant foe of mankind, Now the only Hawaiian representatives of the reptilian cla.s.s were two species of harmless lizards, so that it is not conceivable that the Hawaiian notion of a mo'o was derived from objects present in his island home. The word _mo'o_ may have been a coinage of the Hawaiian speechcenter, but the thing it stood for must have been an actual existence, like the python and cobra of India, or the pterodactyl of a past geologic period. May we not think of it as an ancestral memory, an impress, of Asiatic sights and experiences?

In this connection, it will not, perhaps, lead us too far afield, to remark that in the Hawaiian speech we find the chisel-marks of Hindu and of Aryan scoring deep-graven. For instance, the Hawaiian, word _pali_, cliff or precipice, is the very word that Young-husband--following, no doubt, the native speech of the region, the Pamirs--applies to the mountain-walls that b.u.t.tress off Tibet and the central plateaus of Asia from northern India. Again the Hawaiian word _mele_, which we have used so often in these chapters as to make it seem almost like a household word, corresponds in form, in sound, and in meaning to the Greek. [Greek: melos: [Page 261] ta mele], lyric poetry (Liddell and Scott). Again, take the Hawaiian word _i'a_, fish--Maori, _ika_; Malay, _ikan_; Java, _iwa_; Bouton, _ikani_ (Edward Tregear: The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary). Do not these words form a chain that links the Hawaiian form to the [Greek: ichthus] of cla.s.sic Greece? The subject is fascinating, but it would soon lead us astray. These examples must suffice.

If we can not give a full account of the tangled woodland of Hawaiian literature, it is something to be able to report on its fruits and the manner of men and beasts that dwelt therein. Are its fruits good for food, or does the land we have explored bring forth only poisonous reptiles and the deadly upas? Is it a land in which the very principles of art and of human nature are turned upside down? Its language the babble of Bander-log?

This excursion into the jungle of Hawaiian literature should at least impress us with the oneness of humanity; that its roots and springs of action, and ours, draw their sustenance from one and the same primeval mold; that, however far back one may travel, he will never come to a point where he can say this is "common or unclean;" so that he may without defilement "kill and eat" of what the jungle provides. The wonder is that they in Hawaii of the centuries past, shut off by vast s.p.a.ces of sea and land from our world, yet accomplished so much.

Test the ancient Hawaiians by our own weights and measures.

The result will not be to their discredit. In practical science, in domestic arts, in religion, in morals, in the raw material of literature, even in the finished article--though, unwritten--the showing would not be such as to give the superior race cause for self-gratulation.

Another lesson--a corollary to the above--is the debt of recognition we owe to the virtues and essential qualities of untutored human nature itself. Imagine a portion of our own race cut off from the thought-currents of the great world and stranded on the island-specks of the great ocean, as the Polynesians have been for a period of centuries that would count back to the times of William the Conqueror or Charlemagne, with only such outfit of the world's goods as might survive a 3,000-mile voyage in frail canoes, reenforced by such flotsam of the world's metallic stores as the tides of ocean might chance to bring them--and, with such limited capital to start with in life, what, should we judge, would have been the outcome of the experiment in religion, in morals, in art, in mechanics, in civilization, or in the production of materials for literature, as compared with what the white man found in Hawaii at its discovery in the last quarter of the eighteenth century?