I can't.
There's too much of that long--
I mean, they're telling stories all the way up,
and there's too much to read to you in the time that we have.
But I want to do a little bit about her going down
into the valley, and then her coming to the grave
and realizing that he had-- that it's been untouched.
And it sort of picks up the whole of the earlier
story at that point.
"And Kaleimanu went to him and embraced him,
laying his head against cool stomach.
And then asked him if this was the stream where it happened.
'Where what happened?' Kua asked him.
'Where they met the soldiers,' Kaleimanu said.
This is the stream, Kua told him, but this is not the place.
Kaleimanu said, 'Will you tell me the story once more,
right here?'
And they stood in a ring in the wind,
listening to Kua tell of Lahi, the boy who ate birds,
and his uncle, Kanealohi, Slow Man.
And he tells him that story.
And after the story, it was then that Kua had led Kaleimanu
to the edge of the cliff where the light rose from the valley,
and it showed him those two rocks that were the children
of Naiwi and said to him, 'that is where the right trail goes
down.'
And he pointed to a thread like a goat track
following the knife edge of one of the fins out in the clouds.
'That is the one that goes all the way,' he said.
'The others end in nothing.'
And he hugged the child and told him,
'but it is not good to look back.'
Then he went to help them load themselves
with the few things they would be carrying, Pi'ilani stood
looking down at the clear water gliding in front of her
toward the fall, its surface not appearing to move.
She knelt in the wet moss to put her mouth to the cold pane
and drink from it, with her eyes open at first.
And then she closed them and plunged her head and hands
into the unseen current for a long breath,
overhearing the voices in the water talking.
And then she sat up and ate a few pieces of taro
and drank again, and lifted her head
to stare at the face below her in the stream
with the sky under it and the eyes
burning from their dark places.
She looked at it, feeling that she know nothing about it.
And then she stood up in the day and walked
to where the right trail disappeared over the edge
into Kalalau.
And as she comes down--
she finally comes down, this terrifying trip down the cliffs,
she remembers, of course, his dying before she buries him.
" And it was in the night that he had died,
just as the I'a, the Fish, the Milky Way was turning,
and Pi'ilani, after his breath had stopped,
when his pulse was no longer there,
had put her head down on his chest with her hair across his
body and had listened to the darkness below her
and the darkness above her while the last embers of the small
fire among the rocks at their feet went out.
And the cold of his hands deepened,
and her tears kept turning cold when they ran down onto him.
She heard the darkness of the mountain under her all the way
to the underside of the streef-- of the sea floor.
And through her hair, she heard the night winds,
high in the valley, rising and leaving.
And she heard 'uwa'u 'uwa'u, the cry of the petrels echoing
in the cliffs, the stream whispering over the rocks,
and the faint sounds some said were crickets,
and others said were land snails singing.
And they were spirits.
And when the wind was quiet, she could hear the sea
far below her, where all the waves ended.
She sat up in the dark and saw where the stars had come.
She picked up a shell and started to pat it,
rocking slowly forward and back, chanting under her breath.
First she chatted to him by name,
by the name that she had called him all her life.
And already, she could hear the difference.
Ko'olau, Ko'olau, you are going.
You are going now.
You are still here.
You are going.
You are not sick anymore.
You are not dying now.
But if you want to come back, Ko'olau, come back.
Come back.
Then it had been dark, and once more she had chanted to him,
Ko'olau, now it is night for me and it is night for you.
Now we are in the night, Ko'olau.
There is only night where we are.
When the chant had ebbed in her breath, she had got to her feet
and gone down to the stream, again stepping like a stranger
as though she were feeling her route through a rolling cloud.
She had come to the water running cold from the cliff.
She had heard it come up to her, talking to itself, not to her.
Not to her, even then.
Not to her, yet.
She had stepped down into it and knelt among the big stones,
slipping between them.
She had lain down among them, letting the breathless
touch glide over her until she could feel it no longer.
While the colorless syllables still hurried past her,
she had got to her feet and followed the stream
through the dark, knowing her way down the valley.
It had been years since she had spoken to anyone except him,
and in an earlier time, Kaleimanu.
But some who had lived in the valley had come back.
People they had known once had come back,
a few of them at a time.
She had seen one or two of them approaching the floors of ashes
that had been their houses, had seen new grass roofs later,
and backs in the taro ponds.
She had heard the voices and slipped close to listen.
And that night, she could see small fires down
in the valley near the east headland.
And she had wanted to be with people,
but she had gone past the fires to where the current rattled
across the shingle.
She had felt the canoes drawn up there.
She had walked slowly along the rocks to the white stream
were unfurling on the tops of the low breakers,
and she had sunk down into the night surf
to be washed clean in the darkness.
She moved cautiously to the grave, breaking nothing,
making scarcely a sound until she
could kneel beside the flat stone in the shadow of ferns
and touch the green moss just above ground.
There she waited.
Birds were speaking in branches close to her--
'elepaios curious, not singing--
and she waited.
And then she lay down, breaking nothing,
and put her ear to the ground and listened
as she did each time she came.
And in one ear she heard the leaves, and the birds,
and the branches.
And in the other ear, the one note of the mountain of Kane,
the silence under the forty forms,
the darkness under the day.
It had not changed, and she closed her eyes
and was filled with it.
And at last, she stood up slowly.
And with the same care, went along
to the cleft in the rock wall and the bushes
of 'ulei that had grown over the mouth of the low cave
at the foot of the cliff where they had buried Kaleimanu.
The small green leaves were shining like eyes,
and the white flowers were hiding among them,
and slender branches were swaying slowly out over them
into empty air.
And she put her ear to the warm stone and stood listening there,
then sat against the rock wall beside the 'ulei
and saw the shadow rising on the cliff,
and heard the birds that were not
the ones Kaleimanu had listened to telling
their day and its passing.
And when she felt the shadow, she
unwrapped the last of the cold taro and ate.
And then she lay down and heard the sleep of the mountain."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]