Well, now I want to devote what time we
have to The Folding Cliffs.
And first, I think I must tell you a bit about the story.
It's set in Hawaii is-- well, it covers a long period if you want
to do the whole thing, but the basic--
the main part of the story is set in the end of the 1980s
and the beginning of the 1990s--
1890s on the island of Kauai.
The bit of background that you should know-- there
are three main characters, Ko'olau,
who was the star cowboy of his generation on Kauai.
He was wonderful with horses, he was a crack shot, he was--
they said that Ko'olau was one of those shots, one
of the people who just always happened all by itself.
And he was the prized cowboy of a very remarkable man Valdemar
Knudsen, a Norwegian rancher, who
was a botanist, ornithologist, musician, a lot of linguists,
a lot of remarkable things, wonderful man.
And Ko'olau's wife was Pi'ilani, who
was supposed said to be very beautiful when
she was very young.
And they married in a perfectly Christian way
and had a little boy child, Kaleimanu.
There was a very ambitious young men who wanted to--
who you'd recognize from westerns
I mean, who had political ambitions
and who got himself made first justice of the peace and then
a Sheriff.
And he had all ambitions, but he detected signs of leprosy,
he thought, in Ko'olau, on his face.
And the-- Ko'olau was sent for inspection
and was diagnosed as having leprosy.
Well, the Hawaiians called the disease of leprosy,
in Hawaiian, the word for it is the separating sickness
because what happened was that the families were torn apart
and people with leprosy were sent to Kalaupapa.
And they were sent sometimes quite brutal ways,
there was some that would just be taken on a ship
and thrown off into the water at the beginning.
And if they got to shore, then, they did the best they could.
They got better than that later, but it was never anything
that any of us would sign up for, a club Mediterranean thing,
I mean.
And you never got out of Kalaupapa, you never left.
Ko'olau and Pi'ilani realize that the little boy also
had leprosy.
Ko'olau and Pi'ilani realized that their little boy also
had leprosy.
And they decided that they were not going to Kauai,
they were not going to go over there.
They mean, they would be taken apart I mean,
Ko'olau would be sent separately,
probably the little boy would be sent,
and they might not even see each other
though they were in Kalaupapa, and Pi'ilani
would be left alone.
They decided that they were not going to do this.
And they went over to the top of the mountain,
Wai'ale'ale, which is enormous wealth.
The whole of Kauai is really that mountain.
Over the top to this valley of Kalalau on the far side,
the north side, which is one of the most spectacular
places on Earth.
The cliffs are 4,000 feet high and it's like the Grand Canyon,
green with waterfalls in it.
And they joined a small band of fugitives
who also had leprosy in that valley
who were determined not to be taken
and not to be sent to Kalaupapa and they were armed.
And Ko'olau had let it be known that he and his family
were not going to be separated, and they were not
going to leave there alive, they would--
their lives were on the line, they were going to stay there.
So the shepherd-- the Sheriff decided
that he was going to make his political career by cleaning out
the Valley.
And of course, the whole thing builds up
and he starts going over and arresting people.
And when he tries to ambush Ko'olau at night,
Ko'olau shoots him, and then they
send in the army and Ko'olau holes up in the cliffs
and manages to hold off the army because it's a place where they
can only get in one man at a time
and as fast as they come in,
he just kills them until they finally give up,
that's basically the story then of course,
the father and son both die, the army
clears out the whole valley, and leaves them.
And they live on there while the father and son both die
and she buries them both, and then lives on there alone
by herself.
And finally goes back to--
that's the center of the story.
But it begins where she has heard,
she went back quite a few times into that valley
where she lived alone after all for some time
because she'd heard rumors that people had found his grave
and had dug him up.
And heard-- his grandmother never believes this
because she said, his name means the grave on the windward coast.
He can never be taken away from that.
She knows this for a fact, but Pi'ilani goes back until she too
is finally convinced.
But the story begins with her alone,
not going this time with anybody else, but going alone.
All night walk up the mountain and then the all day
walk down, down these terrifying cliffs into the--
where they lived and where the grave was.
And in doing that of course, she relives
some of the earlier story.
So I'm just going to read you some sections
from that first part in which she does that.