through the following motions: He first pointed upward, to
indicate the heaven-born one, the king; then he brought his
hands to his body and threw his face into a painful grimace.
To indicate the death of the long he threw his hands upward
toward the sky, as if to signify a removal by flight. He
admitted the accuracy of the gesture, previously described,
in which the hands are moved toward the ground.

There are, of course, imitative and mimetic gestures galore,
as of paddling, swimming, diving, angling, and the like,
[Page 179] which one sees every day of his life and which are to be
regarded as parts of that universal shorthand vocabulary of
unvocalized speech that is used the world over from Naples to
Honolulu, rather than stage-conventions of the halau. It will
suffice to mention one motion or gesture of this sort which
the author has seen used with dramatic effect. An old man was
describing the action of Hiiaka (the little sister of Pele)
while clearing a passage for herself and her female companion
with a great slaughter of the reptilian demon-horde of _ma'o_
that came out in swarms to oppose the progress of the goddess
through their territory while she was on her way to fetch
Prince Lohiau. The goddess, a delicate piece of humanity in
her real self, made short work of the little devils who
covered the earth and filled the air. Seizing one after
another, she bit its life out, or swallowed it as if it had
been a shrimp. The old man represented the action most
vividly: pressing his thumb, forefinger, and middle finger
into a cone, he brought them quickly to his mouth, while he
snapped his jaws together like a dog seizing a morsel, an
action that pictured the story better than any words.

It might seem at first blush that facial expression,
important as it is, owing to its short range of
effectiveness, should hardly be put in the same category with
what may be called the major stage-gestures that were in
vogue in the halau. But such a judgment would certainly be
mistaken. The Greek use of masks on the stage for their
"carrying power" testi