About thirty natives are sitting about me, all staring, laughing,
and chattering, and I am the only white person in the region. We
have all had a meal, sitting round a large calabash of poi and a
fowl, which was killed in my honour, and roasted in one of their
stone ovens. I have forgotten my knife, and have had to help myself
after the primitive fashion of aborigines, not without some fear,
for some of them I am sure are in an advanced stage of leprosy. The
brown tattooed limbs of one man are stretched across the mat, the
others are sitting cross-legged, making lauhala leis. One man is
making fishing-lines of a beautifully white and marvellously
tenacious fibre, obtained from an Hawaiian "flax" plant (possibly
Urtica argentea), very different from the New Zealand Phormium
tenax. Nearly all the people of the valley are outside, having come
to see the wahine haole: only one white woman, and she a resident
of Hawaii, having been seen in Waimanu before. I am really alone,
miles of mountain and gulch lie between me and the nearest whites.
This is a wonderful place: a ravine about three miles long and
three-quarters of a mile wide, without an obvious means of ingress,
being walled in by precipices from 2000 to 4000 feet high.
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