given
way to drinking habits. Then she had become a Christian, giving up her
drinking and sending away all her husbands save one. She had thrown
away her idols and now taught the people in their huts the story of
Christ.

"Pele is nought," she declared, "I will go to Kilawea,[29] the
mountain of the fires where the smoke and stones go up, and Pele shall
not touch me. My God, Jehovah, made the mountain and the fires within
it too, as He made us all."

So it was noised through the island that Kapiolani, the queenly, would
defy Pele the goddess. The priests threatened her with awful torments
of fire from the goddess; her people pleaded with her not to dare the
fires of Kilawea. But Kapiolani pressed on, and eighty of her people
made up their minds to go with her. She climbed the mountain paths,
through lovely valleys hung with trees, up and up to where the hard
rocky lava-river cut the feet of those who walked upon it.

Day by day they asked her to go back, and always she answered, "If I
am destroyed you may believe in Pele; if I live you must all believe
in the true God, Jehovah."

As she drew nearer to the crater she saw the great cloud of smoke that
came up from the volcano and felt the heat of its awful fires. But she
did not draw back.

As she climbed upward she saw by the side of the path low bushes, and
on them beautiful red and yellow berries, growing in clusters. The
berries were like large currants.

"It is chelo,"[30] said the priests, "it is Pele's berry. You must not
touch them unless we ask her. She will breathe fire on you."

Kapiolani broke off a branch from one of the bushes regardless of
the horrified faces of the priests. And she ate the berries, without
stopping to ask the goddess for her permission.

She carried a branch of the berries in her hand. If she had told them
what she was going to do they would have been frenzied with fear and
horror.

Up she climbed until the full terrors of the boiling crater of Kilawea
burst on her sight. Before her an immense gulf yawned in the shape of
the crescent moon, eight miles in circumference and over a thousand
feet deep. Down in the smoking hollow, hundreds of feet beneath her, a
lake of fiery lava rolled in flaming waves against precipices of
rock. This ever-moving lake of molten fire is called: "The House of
Everlasting Burning." This surging lake was dotted with tiny mountain
islets, and, from the tops of their little peaks, pyramids of flame
bl