_, as some navigators have said." The word _Heavoo_ is
probably identical with the word _heiau_, which other writers
give as the Hawaiian name for a temple. As to the form of the
temples see also A. Campbell, _Voyage round the World_, pp. 175
_sq._: "Their Morais, or places of worship, consist of one large
house or temple, with some smaller ones round it, in which are
the images of their inferior gods. The tabooed or consecrated
precincts are marked out by four square posts, which stand
thirty or forty yards from the building. In the inside of the
principal house there is a screen or curtain of white cloth,
hung across one end within which the image of Etooah [_atua_,
_akua_] is placed." Remy (_op. cit._ p. xl) describes the
Hawaiian temples as "simple enclosures of stones, roofless,
where the religious ceremonies were performed."

The images of the gods were usually carved of wood. When a new idol was
to be made, a royal and priestly procession went forth, with great
ceremony, to the destined tree, where the king himself, with a stone
axe, struck the first blow at the root. After the tree was felled, a man
or a hog was killed and buried on the spot where it had grown.[108]
Sometimes, apparently, the direction to carve an idol out of a
particular tree was given by a god in a dream. There is a tradition that
once when the woodmen were felling such a tree with their stone axes,
the chips flew out and killed two of them; whereupon the other woodmen
covered their faces with masks, and cut down the tree with their
daggers.[109] Another famous idol was said to be made of wood so
poisonous, that if chips of it were steeped in water, and anybody drank
of the water, he would die in less than twenty-four hours.[110] The
Hawaiians seem to have made their idols hideous on purpose to inspire
terror.[111] The features of some of the images were violently
distorted, their mouths set with a double row of the fangs of dogs,
their eyes made of large pearl oysters with black nuts in the middle;
some had long pieces of carved wood, shaped like inverted cones, rising
from the top of their heads;[112] some had tongues of a monstrous size,
others had no tongues at all; some had mouths that reached from ear to
ear; the heads of some were a great deal larger than their bodies.[113]
Some of the idols were stones. In the island of Hawaii there is a pebbly
beach from which pebbles used to be carr