“Pele is nought,” she declared, “I will go to Kilawea,[29] the mountain of the fires where the smoke and stones go up, and Pele shall not touch me.  My God, Jehovah, made the mountain and the fires within it too, as He made us all.”

So it was noised through the island that Kapiolani, the queenly, would defy Pele the goddess.  The priests threatened her with awful torments of fire from the goddess; her people pleaded with her not to dare the fires of Kilawea.  But Kapiolani pressed on, and eighty of her people made up their minds to go with her.  She climbed the mountain paths, through lovely valleys hung with trees, up and up to where the hard rocky lava-river cut the feet of those who walked upon it.

Day by day they asked her to go back, and always she answered, “If I am destroyed you may believe in Pele; if I live you must all believe in the true God, Jehovah.”

As she drew nearer to the crater she saw the great cloud of smoke that came up from the volcano and felt the heat of its awful fires.  But she did not draw back.

As she climbed upward she saw by the side of the path low bushes, and on them beautiful red and yellow berries, growing in clusters.  The berries were like large currants.

“It is chelo,"[30] said the priests, “it is Pele’s berry.  You must not touch them unless we ask her.  She will breathe fire on you.”

Kapiolani broke off a branch from one of the bushes regardless of the horrified faces of the priests.  And she ate the berries, without stopping to ask the goddess for her permission.

She carried a branch of the berries in her hand.  If she had told them what she was going to do they would have been frenzied with fear and horror.

Up she climbed until the full terrors of the boiling crater of Kilawea burst on her sight.  Before her an immense gulf yawned in the shape of the crescent moon, eight miles in circumference and over a thousand feet deep.  Down in the smoking hollow, hundreds of feet beneath her, a lake of fiery lava rolled in flaming waves against precipices of rock.  This ever-moving lake of molten fire is called:  “The House of Everlasting Burning.”  This surging lake was dotted with tiny mountain islets, and, from the tops of their little peaks, pyramids of flame blazed 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.