azed and columns of grey smoke went up. From some of these little
islands streams of blazing lava rolled down into the lake of fire. The
air was filled with the roar of the furnaces of flame.

Even the fearless Kapiolani stood in awe as she looked. But she did
not flinch, though here and there, as she walked, the crust of the
lava cracked under her feet and the ground was hot with hidden fire.

She came to the very edge of the crater. To come so far without
offering hogs and fish to the fiery goddess was in itself enough to
bring a fiery river of molten lava upon her. Kapiolani offered nothing
save defiance. Audacity, they thought, could go no further.

Here, a priestess of Pele came, and raising her hands in threat
denounced death on the head of Kapiolani if she came further.
Kapiolani pulled from her robe a book. In it--for it was her
New Testament--she read to the priestess of the one true, loving
Father-God.

Then Kapiolani did a thing at which the very limbs of those who
watched trembled and shivered. She went to the edge of the crater and
stepped over onto a jutting rock and let herself down and down toward
the sulphurous burning lake. The ground cracked under her feet and
sulphurous steam hissed through crevices in the rock, as though the
demons of Pele fumed in their frenzy. Hundreds of staring, wondering
eyes followed her, fascinated and yet horrified.

Then she stood on a ledge of rock, and, offering up prayer and praise
to the God of all, Who made the volcano and Who made her, she cast the
Pele berries into the lake, and sent stone after stone down into the
flaming lava. It was the most awful insult that could be offered to
Pele! Now surely she would leap up in fiery anger, and, with a hail
of burning stones, consume Kapiolani. But nothing happened; and
Kapiolani, turning, climbed the steep ascent of the crater edge and at
last stood again unharmed among her people. She spoke to her people,
telling them again that Jehovah made the fires. She called on them all
to sing to His praise and, for the first time, there rang across the
crater of Kilawea the song of Christians. The power of the priests
was gone, and from that hour the people all over that island who had
trembled and hesitated between Pele and Christ turned to the worship
of our Lord Jesus, the Son of God the Father Almighty.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 24: Pay-lay.]

[Footnote 25: Hah-wye-ee.]

[Footnote 26: Discovered by Captain Cook in 1778. T