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