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On the Makaloa Mat by Jack London
page 51 of 199 (25%)
reef-sheltered, placid beach. There was that in her manner of walk
that was big and queenlike, like the motion of the forces of
nature, like the rhythmic flow of lava down the slopes of Kau to
the sea, like the movement of the huge orderly trade-wind seas,
like the rise and fall of the four great tides of the year that may
be like music in the eternal ear of God, being too slow of
occurrence in time to make a tune for ordinary quick-pulsing,
brief-living, swift-dying man.

"Anapuni was nearest. But she looked at me. Have you ever heard a
call, Kanaka Oolea, that is without sound yet is louder than the
conches of God? So called she to me across that circle of the
drinking. I half arose, for I was not yet full drunken; but
Anapuni's arm caught her and drew her, and I sank back on my elbow
and watched and raged. He was for making her sit beside him, and I
waited. Did she sit, and, next, dance with him, I knew that ere
morning Anapuni would be a dead man, choked and drowned by me in
the shallow surf.

"Strange, is it not, Kanaka Oolea, all this heat called 'love'?
Yet it is not strange. It must be so in the time of one's youth,
else would mankind not go on."

"That is why the desire of woman must be greater than the desire of
life," Pool concurred. "Else would there be neither men nor
women."

"Yes," said Kumuhana. "But it is many a year now since the last of
such heat has gone out of me. I remember it as one remembers an
old sunrise--a thing that was. And so one grows old, and cold, and
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