And so, out of all incests and lusts of the primitive cultures and
beast-man's gropings toward the stature of manhood, out of all red
murders, and brute battlings, and matings with the younger brothers
of the demigods, world-polished, Oxford-accented, twentieth century
to the tick of the second, comes Prince Akuli, Prince Squid, pure-
veined Polynesian, a living bridge across the thousand centuries,
comrade, friend, and fellow-traveller out of his wrecked seven-
thousand-dollar limousine, marooned with me in a begonia paradise
fourteen hundred feet above the sea, and his island metropolis of
Olokona, to tell me of his mother, who reverted in her old age to
ancientness of religious concept and ancestor worship, and
collected and surrounded herself with the charnel bones of those
who had been her forerunners back in the darkness of time.
"King Kalakaua started this collecting fad, over on Oahu," Prince
Akuli continued. "And his queen, Kapiolani, caught the fad from
him. They collected everything--old makaloa mats, old tapas, old
calabashes, old double-canoes, and idols which the priests had
saved from the general destruction in 1819.
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