Koolau the Leper
"Because we are sick they take away our liberty. We have obeyed the law. We have done no wrong. And yet they would put us in prison. Molokai is a prison. That you know. Niuli, there, his sister was sent to Molokai seven years ago. He has not seen her since. Nor will he ever see her. She must stay there until she dies. This is not her will. It is not Niuli's will. It is the will of the white men who rule the land. And who are these white men?
"We know. We have it from our fathers and our fathers' fathers. They
came like lambs, speaking softly. Well might they speak softly, for we
were many and strong, and all the islands were ours. As I say, they
spoke softly. They were of two kinds. The one kind asked our
permission, our gracious permission, to preach to us the word of God. The
other kind asked our permission, our gracious permission, to trade with
us. That was the beginning. Today all the islands are theirs, all the
land, all the cattle--everything is theirs. They that preached the word
of God and they that preached the word of Rum have fore-gathered and
become great chiefs. They live like kings in houses of many rooms, with
multitudes of servants to care for them. They who had nothing have
everything, and if you, or I, or any Kanaka be hungry, they sneer and
say, 'Well, why don't you work? There are the plantations.'"
Koolau paused. He raised one hand, and with gnarled and twisted fingers
lifted up the blazing wreath of hibiscus that crowned his black hair. The
moonlight bathed the scene in silver. It was a night of peace, though
those who sat about him and listened had all the seeming of
battle-wrecks. Their faces were leonine. Here a space yawned in a face
where should have been a nose, and there an arm-stump showed where a hand
had rotted off. They were men and women beyond the pale, the thirty of
them, for upon them had been placed the mark of the beast.
They sat, flower-garlanded, in the perfumed, luminous night, and their
lips made uncouth noises and their throats rasped approval of Koolau's
speech. They were creatures who once had been men and women. But they
were men and women no longer. They were monsters--in face and form
grotesque caricatures of everything human. They were hideously maimed
and distorted, and had the seeming of creatures that had been racked in
millenniums of hell. Their hands, when they possessed them, were like
harpy claws. Their faces were the misfits and slips, crushed and bruised
by some mad god at play in the machinery of life. Here and there were
features which the mad god had smeared half away, and one woman wept
scalding tears from twin pits of horror, where her eyes once had been. Some were in pain and groaned from their chests. Others coughed, making sounds like the tearing of tissue. Two were idiots, more like huge apes marred in the making, until even an ape were an angel. They mowed and gibbered in the moonlight, under crowns of drooping, golden blossoms. One, whose bloated ear-lobe flapped like a fan upon his shoulder, caught up a gorgeous flower of orange and scarlet and with it decorated the monstrous ear that flip-flapped with his every movement.
And over these things Koolau was king. And this was his kingdom,--a
flower-throttled gorge, with beetling cliffs and crags, from which
floated the blattings of wild goats. On three sides the grim walls rose, festooned in fantastic draperies of tropic vegetation and pierced by cave- entrances--the rocky lairs of Koolau's subjects. On the fourth side the earth fell away into a tremendous abyss, and, far below, could be seen the summits of lesser peaks and crags, at whose bases foamed and rumbled the Pacific surge. In fine weather a boat could land on the rocky beach that marked the entrance of Kalalau Valley, but the weather must be very fine. And a cool-headed mountaineer might climb from the beach to the head of Kalalau Valley, to this pocket among the peaks where Koolau ruled; but such a mountaineer must be very cool of head, and he must know the wild-goat trails as well. The marvel was that the mass of human wreckage that constituted Koolau's people should have been able to drag its helpless misery over the giddy goat-trails to this inaccessible spot.
"Brothers," Koolau began.