20 A mau i ke kai loa.
He loa o ka hiki'na.
A ua noa, a ua noa.
[Page 217]

[Translation]

Lo, the rain, the rain!
The rain is approaching;
The dance-hall is murky,
The great hall of Lono.
5 Listen! its mountain walls
Are stunned with the clatter,
As when in October,
Heaven's thunderbolts shatter.
Then follows Welehu,
10 The month of the Pleiads.
Scanty the work then done,
Save as one's driven.
Spur comes with the sun,
When day has arisen.
15 Now comes the Heaven-born;
The whole land doth shake,
As with an earthquake;
Sleep quits then my bed:
How shall this maw be fed!
20 Great maw of the shark--
Eyes that gleam in the dark
Of the boundless sea!
Rare the king's visits to me.
All is free, all is free!

If the author of this Hawaiian idyl sought to adapt its
descriptive imagery to the features of any particular
landscape, it would almost seem as if he had in view the very
region in which Kauikeaouli found himself in the year 1847 as
he listened to the mele of this unknown Hawaiian Theocritus.
Under the spell of this poem, one is transported to the
amphitheater of Mauna-wili, a valley separated from Waimanalo
only by a rampart of hills. At one's back are the abrupt
walls of Konahuanui; at the right, and encroaching so as
almost to shut in the front, stands the knife-edge of
Olomana; to the left range the furzy hills of Ulamawao;
while directly to the front, looking north, winds the green
valley, whose waters, before reaching the ocean, spread out
into the fish-ponds and duck swamps of Kailua. It would seem
as if this must have been the very picture the idyllic poet
had in mind. This smiling, yet rock-walled, amphitheater was
the vast dance-hall of Lono--_Halau loa o Lono_ (verse
4)--whose walls were deafened, stunned (_pa-a-a_, verse 6),
by the tumult and uproar of the multitud