DEGENER: LEAVING HAWAII 73 



prayer "Father forgive them; for they know not what" .... but was cut 

 off the air abruptly ; next it blared for more doctors ; it ordered every one, 

 except employees at the electric power plant, to remain indoors at home ; it 

 reproduced the familiar voice, now uncannily serious and sometimes broken, 

 of his friend and former lawyer, Governor Poindexter, delivering a procla- 

 mation ; and it warned all to keep their radios tuned for further instructions. 

 The beach and roads swarmed with soldiers rushing about like a hill of 

 disturbed ants. Civilian cars were halted with threat of bayonet, and turned 

 back to their garages. The black-out at night was complete, with soldiers 

 shooting from outside through the window panes at any light bulb left 

 burning by some distraught or absent-minded civilian. Cigaret smoking was 

 kapu, or taboo. The speaker not only unscrewed the light fuses but also 

 turned off the electric switch for his entire house lest his 20-year old 

 Hawaiian servant, paroled to him from the home for feeble-minded, might 

 thoughtlessly light a light. Yet with all this man-made darkness, a volcano 

 on the Island of Hawaii treacherously tried to aid the enemy by bursting out 

 into a stream of red hot lava visible for hundreds of miles at sea. 



The night of December 7, 1941, the speaker, the dull kanaka servant, 

 the wide-awake protege, the all-hearing dog, watched the magnificent Fourth 

 of July spectacle of powerful searchlights sweeping over the ocean with 

 hazy beams in search of possible enemy landing parties. As a wave heaved 

 and heaved upward, it was darkly visible ; when it broke into an ever- 

 enlarging glare of combers with bubbles, fine foam and spray, it was a dumb- 

 founding sight to watch, while its reflection lit up the sky. The three human 

 beings, all the while with cold fear gnawing at their hearts, were fascinated 

 by the pitch blackness rhythmically followed by searchlight-swept spume. 

 The dog, devoid of appreciation for this beautiful dramatic sight, was all 

 ears. He was restlessly belligerent and noisily barked whenever he heard 

 the unfamiliar footsteps and commands of soldiers in the garden, his garden 

 whose every shrub and tree he knew and had personally blazed as his own 

 property. Though Life and Death might be hanging imminently in the 

 balance, the three human beings were helpless. Either nothing unusual 

 would happen or an invading party might appear over the crests of the 

 waves during the night and easily enough send them, with a few excruciating 

 bayonet jabs, botanizing asclepiads along the Milky Way. The three, tired 

 after a hectic day, lay down in vain to sleep ; the dog, beside his master's 

 couch, intermittently growling in stubborn defiance whenever footsteps 

 crunched in the sandy garden. 



Though the tropic night was comfortably warm, the inner side of the 

 speaker's thighs started their paroxysms of trembling, trembling like the 

 muscle of a horse that tries to dislodge a fly where neither weary head nor 



