the slippery lip of a precipice, slipping, slipping, and you were
able to do nothing. That was just it. I could do nothing. I saw
it coming, and I could do nothing. My God, man, what could I do?
There it was, malignant and incontestable, the mark of the thing on
his brow. No one else saw it. It was because I loved him so, I do
believe, that I alone saw it. I could not credit the testimony of
my senses. It was too incredibly horrible. Yet there it was, on
his brow, on his ears. I had seen it, the slight puff of the
earlobes--oh, so imperceptibly slight. I watched it for months.
Then, next, hoping against hope, the darkening of the skin above
both eyebrows--oh, so faint, just like the dimmest touch of sunburn.
I should have thought it sunburn but that there was a shine to it,
such an invisible shine, like a little highlight seen for a moment
and gone the next. I tried to believe it was sunburn, only I could
not. I knew better. No one noticed it but me. No one ever noticed
it except Stephen Kaluna, and I did not know that till afterward.
But I saw it coming, the whole damnable, unnamable awfulness of it;
but I refused to think about the future. I was afraid. I could
not. And of nights I cried over it.

"He was my friend. We fished sharks on Niihau together. We hunted
wild cattle on Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. We broke horses and branded
steers on the Carter Ranch. We hunted goats through Haleakala. He
taught me diving and surfing until I was nearly as clever as he, and
he was cleverer than the average Kanaka. I have seen him dive in
fifteen fathoms, and he could stay down two minutes. He was an
amphibian and a mountaineer. He could climb wherever a goat dared
climb. He was afraid of nothing. He was on the wrecked Luga, and
he swam thirty miles in thirty-six hours in a heavy sea. He could
fight his way out through breaking combers that would batter you and