Madame Pele, PartⅡ(4)

Madame Pele, PartⅡ(4)

To this day I cannot truthfully explain how that " aloha " sounded.

Something like a lover saying it to his love in the moonlight with the sound of the sea whispering on sands would be a fair attempt.

" What are you doing here ? " asked the sugar planter in an suthoritative voice.
After all, he owned this land.

" Just resting in the shade of the sugarcane, " the lady replied, giving us a radiant smile.

" No one is supposed to be in this area, " the scientist said.

" The national Guard evacuated everyone a week ago. Why did you stay behind ? You know you're trapped i between lava flows here. "

The Lady's smile just grew wilder as if that were answer enough.

" What's your name ? " I inquired, poising a pencil over my notebook.

She said something very musical in Hawaiian that sounded to me like the name of a fern.

I wrote it down phonetically, and it appears as " u'ulei " in my notes. ( Later, I looked the word up in a Hawaiian dictionary . It's a actually, uleci, a Hawai'i shrub with small white rose-like flowers. )

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