making. Hina took small bundles of the wet inner bark and laid them
on the kua or heavy tapa board, pounding them together into a pulpy mass
with her round clubs. Then using the four-sided mallets, she beat this
pulp into thin sheets. Beautiful tapa, soft as silk, was made by adding
pulpy mass to pulpy mass and beating it day after day until the fibres
were lost and a sheet of close-woven bark cloth was formed. Although
Hina was a goddess and had a family possessing miraculous power, it
never entered the mind of the Hawaiian legend tellers to endow her with
ease in producing wonderful results. The legends of the Southern Pacific
Islands show more imagination. They say that Ina (Hina) was such a
wonderful artist in making beautiful tapas that she was placed in the
skies, where she beat out glistening fine tapas, the white and glorious
clouds. When she stretches these cloud sheets out to dry, she places
stones along the edges, so that the fierce winds of the heavens shall
not blow them away. When she throws these stones aside, the skies
reverberate with thunder. When she rolls her cloud sheets of tapa
together, the folds glisten with flashes of light and lightning leaps
from sheet to sheet.

The Hina of Hilo was grieved as she toiled because after she had pounded
the sheets out so thin that they were ready to be dried, she found it
almost impossible to secure the necessary aid of the sun in the drying
process. She would rise as soon as she could see and hasten to spread
out the tapa made the day before. But the sun always hurried so fast
that the sheets could not dry. He leaped from the ocean waters in the
earth, rushed across the heavens and plunged into the dark waters again
on the other side of the island before she could even turn her tapas so
that they might dry evenly. This legend of very short days is strange
because of its place not only among the myths of Hawaii but also because
it belongs to practically all the tropical islands of the Pacific Ocean.
In Tahiti the legends said that the sun rushed across the sky very
rapidly. The days were too short for fruits to ripen or for work to be
finished. In Samoa the "mats" made by Sina had no time to dry. The
ancestors of the Polynesians sometime somewhere must have been in the
region of short days and long nights. Hina found that her incantations
had no influence with the sun. She could not prevail upon him to go
slower and give her more time for the completion of her t