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"Yes," he replied. "Thank you."
    He'd been around the world enough to know he should be mindful of local customs, so hungry though he was, John watched how the Islanders ate, how they sat upon their mats, how they talked with each other, and questioned him. It surprised him that so many of them spoke English, and in a reasonably good form. Even more surprising was that some of them could read, in both English and their native Hawaiian language.
    "It is the missionaries," said Kekoa. "Now we are all learning English."
    John glanced at Hiapo, serenely sitting on his woven mat beside his aged wife.
    "Him, too," Kekoa added. "But he does not speak it. He is of the Ali'i, but he eats with his wife in the new tradition. His great aunt was the wife of our last king of Oahu. Tonight the singer will tell the story of the last king, in the old language, and I will tell it to you."
    That evening, John Wall was given a place of honor at what appeared to him to be a feast, where the men and women sat together and ate, and he was told of the old ways when it was kapu for men and women to eat together.
    The drums played a heavy rhythm that thrummed in his chest. An Islander whose face was heavily weathered by many years in the sun sat upon his mat and chanted in monotoned verse the story of the first King Kamehameha who came with his army and battled the Oahu king, driving him and his warriors up into the mountains and over the Pali to their deaths. Pali, Kekoa said, meant cliff.
    John slept that night in the old man's grass house, which he learned was not grass at all, but covered in the thin-leafed fronds of the coconut palms.
    The next morning he thought he ought to go find Honolulu, but he could not make himself want to return to the civilized world of the white men. How could he explain himself? They would think him crazy. Here, at least, these pleasant people who moved with leisurely grace seemed to understand him in some way, and revere him in another, as if he had been touched by their goddess of the sea with the very long name.
    He could not go farther than the sand on the beach, not so much as touch his toe in the sometimes heavy surf, before one or another Islander would gently tug him back, imploring him with their lyrical fractured English. The angry Namaka-o-Kaha'i would snatch him away, they said. It was hard to understand why they were so kind to him. He knew all too well how the white man treated natives all over the world. But always, he felt welcome among the Islanders of Hiapo's village.
    Daily, when the rains came, he stood near the cliff and watched the waves rush against the rocks, remembering the times when Siren had walked on the wave crests, singing her song that rang with the beauty of golden bells. He could still hear it echoing in his mind, and its sound made his heart ache so deeply, he thought he would die from the pain.
    He was restless at night, and often left the chief's hut to walk, but he did not go near the water. They called him sometimes the haole who walks, for he could not be still, and they tried to give him solace, for they said his heart would never be free of the sea goddess.
    Finally he asked for a place to be alone, apologizing for so often disturbing them, and then they, too, thought him perhaps a bit crazy. But as he did not want to re-join the white men with their whaling ships, they helped him build a small shelter for only himself and the dreams that came to him every night, and left him shouting and calling out. They did not know what to do with such a man. They did not want him to be alone, but they thought maybe he needed to be alone with the gods. They were Christians, they said, but they had not forgotten the Old Ones. And so he had his little shack, away from the village beneath the high cliff.
    At night, every night, he dreamed. Always he heard Siren calling to him.
    "Come to me, John Wall."
    Even when he knew it was a dream, the feel of her smooth hands on his flesh haunted him. He