Waipi'o, whom he had robbed, assembled with arms to bar his
retreat and to deal vengeance upon him, he charged upon the
multitude, overthrew them with great slaughter, and escaped
with his plunder.

Toward Pele Kama-pua'a assumed the attitude of a lover, whose
approaches she at one time permitted to her peril. The
incident took place in one of the water caves--volcanic
bubbles--in Puna, and at the level of the ocean; but when he
had the audacity to invade her privacy and call to her as she
reposed in her home at Kilauea she repelled his advances and
answered his persistence with a fiery onset, from which he
[Page 232] fled in terror and discomfiture, not halting until he had put
the width of many islands and ocean channels between himself
and her.

In seeking an explanation of this myth of Pele, the volcano
god and Kama-pua'a, who, on occasion, was a sea-monster,
there is no necessity to hark back to the old polemics of
Asia. Why not account for this remarkable myth as the
statement in terms of passion familiar to all Hawaiians of
those impressive natural phenomena that were daily going on
before them? The spectacle of the smoking mountain pouring
out its fiery streams, overwhelming river and forest, halting
not until they had invaded the ocean; the awful turmoil as
fire and water came in contact; the quick reprisal as the
angry waves overswept the land; then the subsiding and
retreat of the ocean to its own limits and the restoration of
peace and calm, the fiery mount still unmoved, an apparent
victory for the volcanic forces. Was it not this spectacular
tournament of the elements that the Hawaiian sought to embody
and idealize in his myth of Pele and Kama-pua'a?[451]

[Footnote 451: "The Hawaiian tradition of _Pele_, the dread
goddess of the volcanic fires," says Mr. Fornander,
"analogous to the Samoan _Fe'e_, is probably a local
adaptation in aftertimes of an elder myth, half forgotten and
much distorted. The contest related in the legend between
Pele and _Kamapua'a_, the eight-eyed monster demigod,
indicates, however, a confused kn