Koolau the Leper

Jack London

"Because we are sick they take away our liberty. We have obeyed the law. We have done no

wrong. And yet they would put us in prison. Molokai is a prison. That you know. Niuli,

there, his sister was sent to Molokai seven years ago. He has not seen her since. Nor will he

ever see her. She must stay there until she dies. This is not her will. It is not Niuli's will. It

is the will of the white men who rule the land. And who are these white men?

"We know. We have it from our fathers and our fathers' fathers. They came like lambs,

speaking softly. Well might they speak softly, for we were many and strong, and all the

islands were ours. As I say, they spoke softly. They were of two kinds. The one kind asked

Kanaka be hungry, they sneer and say, 'Well, why don't you work? There are the

plantations.'

Koolau paused. He raised one hand, and with gnarled and twisted fingers lifted up the

blazing wreath of hibiscus that crowned his black hair. The moonlight bathed the scene in

silver. It was a night of peace, though those who sat about him and listened had all the

seeming of battle-wrecks. Their faces were leonine. Here a space yawned in a face where

should have been a nose, and there an arm-stump showed where a hand had rotted off. They

were men and women beyond the pale, the thirty of them, for upon them had been placed

the mark of the beast.

They sat, flower-garlanded, in the perfumed, luminous night, and their lips made uncouth

there were features which the mad god had smeared half away, and one woman wept

scalding tears from twin pits of horror, where her eyes once had been. Some were in pain

and groaned from their chests. Others coughed, making sounds like the tearing of tissue.

Two were idiots, more like huge apes marred in the making, until even an ape were an

angel. They mowed and gibbered in the moonlight, under crowns of drooping, golden

blossoms. One, whose bloated ear-lobe flapped like a fan upon his shoulder, caught up a

gorgeous flower of orange and scarlet and with it decorated the monstrous ear that flip-

flapped with his every movement.

And over these things Koolau was king. And this was his kingdom,--a flower-throttled

gorge, with beetling cliffs and crags, from which floated the blattings of wild goats. On

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three sides the grim walls rose, festooned in fantastic draperies of tropic vegetation and

pierced by cave-entrances--the rocky lairs of Koolau's subjects. On the fourth side the earth

fell away into a tremendous abyss, and, far below, could be seen the summits of lesser

peaks and crags, at whose bases foamed and rumbled the Pacific surge. In fine weather a

"Brothers," Koolau began.

But one of the mowing, apelike travesties emitted a wild shriek of madness, and Koolau

waited while the shrill cachination was tossed back and forth among the rocky walls and

echoed distantly through the pulseless night.

"Brothers, is it not strange? Ours was the land, and behold, the land is not ours. What did

these preachers of the word of God and the word of Rum give us for the land? Have you

received one dollar, as much as one dollar, any one of you, for the land? Yet it is theirs, and

in return they tell us we can go to work on the land, their land, and that what we produce by

our toil shall be theirs. Yet in the old days we did not have to work. Also, when we are sick,

they take away our freedom."

cane where once our horses pastured, they brought the Chinese slaves from overseas. And

with them came the Chinese sickness--that which we suffer from and because of which they

would imprison us on Molokai. We were born on Kauai. We have been to the other islands,

some here and some there, to Oahu, to Maui, to Hawaii, to Honolulu. Yet always did we

come back to Kauai. Why did we come back? There must be a reason. Because we love

Kauai. We were born here. Here we have lived. And here shall we die--unless- -unless--

there be weak hearts amongst us. Such we do not want. They are fit for Molokai. And if

there be such, let them not remain. Tomorrow the soldiers land on the shore. Let the weak

hearts go down to them. They will be sent swiftly to Molokai. As for us, we shall stay and

fight. But know that we will not die. We have rifles. You know the narrow trails where men

he was a hunted rat, a creature outside the law, sunk so deep in the mire of human horror

that he was above the law as well as beneath it. His face was featureless, save for gaping

orifices and for the lidless eyes that burned under hairless brows.

"Let us not make trouble," he began. "We ask to be left alone. But if they do not leave us

alone, then is the trouble theirs and the penalty. My fingers are gone, as you see." He held

up his stumps of hands that all might see. "Yet have I the joint of one thumb left, and it can

pull a trigger as firmly as did its lost neighbour in the old days. We love Kauai. Let us live

here, or die here, but do not let us go to the prison of Molokai. The sickness is not ours. We

have not sinned. The men who preached the word of God and the word of Rum brought the

sickness with the coolie slaves who work the stolen land. I have been a judge. I know the

law and the justice, and I say to you it is unjust to steal a man's land, to make that man sick

with the Chinese sickness, and then to put that man in prison for life."

"Life is short, and the days are filled with pain," said Koolau. "Let us drink and dance and

be happy as we can."

From one of the rocky lairs calabashes were produced and passed round. The calabashes

were filled with the fierce distillation of the root of the ti-plant; and as the liquid fire

coursed through them and mounted to their brains, they forgot that they had once been men

and women, for they were men and women once more. The woman who wept scalding tears

from open eye-pits was indeed a woman apulse with life as she plucked the strings of an

ukulele and lifted her voice in a barbaric love-call such as might have come from the dark

forest-depths of the primeval world. The air tingled with her cry, softly imperious and

their brains were maggots crawling of memory and desire. And with the woman on the mat

danced a slender maid whose face was beautiful and unmarred, but whose twisted arms that

rose and fell marked the disease's ravage. And the two idiots, gibbering and mouthing

strange noises, danced apart, grotesque, fantastic, travestying love as they themselves had

been travestied by life.

But the woman's love-cry broke midway, the calabashes were lowered, and the dancers

ceased, as all gazed into the abyss above the sea, where a rocket flared like a wan phantom

through the moonlit air.

"It is the soldiers," said Koolau. "Tomorrow there will be fighting. It is well to sleep and be

prepared."

The lepers obeyed, crawling away to their lairs in the cliff, until only Koolau remained,

sitting motionless in the moonlight, his rifle across his knees, as he gazed far down to the

scant twelve inches wide. On either side yawned the abyss. A slip, and to right or left the

man would fall to his death. But once across he would find himself in an earthly paradise. A

sea of vegetation laved the landscape, pouring its green billows from wall to wall, dripping

from the cliff-lips in great vine-masses, and flinging a spray of ferns and air-plants in to the

Koolau had been driven to this refuge from the lower valley by the beach. And if he were

down through a tangled screen of foliage at the soldiers on the beach. He noted that they

had large guns with them, from which the sunshine flashed as from mirrors. The knife-

edged passage lay directly before him. Crawling upward along the trail that led to it he

could see tiny specks of men. He knew they were not the soldiers, but the police. When they

failed, then the soldiers would enter the game.

He affectionately rubbed a twisted hand along his rifle barrel and made sure that the sights

were clean. He had learned to shoot as a wild-cattle hunter on Niihau, and on that island his

skill as a marksman was unforgotten. As the toiling specks of men grew nearer and larger,

he estimated the range, judged the deflection of the wind that swept at right angles across

the line of fire, and calculated the chances of overshooting marks that were so far below his

"You must go back," Koolau said.

"Who are you?" the sheriff asked.

"I am Koolau, the leper," was the reply.

"Then come out. We want you. Dead or alive, there is a thousand dollars on your head. You

cannot escape."

Koolau laughed aloud in the thicket.

"Come out!" the sheriff commanded, and was answered by silence.

He conferred with the police, and Koolau saw that they were preparing to rush him.

"Koolau," the sheriff called. "Koolau, I am coming across to get you."

"Then look first and well about you at the sun and sea and sky, for it will be the last time

you behold them."

"That's all right, Koolau," the sheriff said soothingly. "I know you're a dead shot. But you

running along the knife-edge. At the same instant the rest of the posse opened fire on the

thicket. It was madness. Five times Koolau pulled the trigger, so rapidly that his shots

constituted a rattle. Changing his position and crouching low under the bullets that were

biting and singing through the bushes, he peered out. Four of the police had followed the

climbed higher and higher, until he doubted his judgment and sent for Kiloliana, who

crawled in beside him.

"The goats?" Koolau questioned.

Then high up on the cliff overhead the shell burst in a fountain of black smoke. The rock

experience with shell-fire, and this was more dreadful than anything he had imagined.

"One," said Kapahei, suddenly bethinking himself to keep count.

A second and a third shell flew screaming over the top of the wall, bursting beyond view.

Kapahei methodically kept the count. The lepers crowded into the open space before the

follow. But at the first pitch of the wall his helplessness overcame him and he fell back.

"It would be better to kill him," said Koolau to Kapahei, who still sat in the same place.

three--twenty-four."

The idiot whined sharply when he saw the rifle levelled at him. Koolau hesitated, then

"It is a hard thing to do," he said.

"You are a fool, twenty-six, twenty-seven," said Kapahei. "Let me show you."

He arose, and with a heavy fragment of rock in his hand, approached the wounded thing. As

he lifted his arm to strike, a shell burst full upon him, relieving him of the necessity of the

his head again to watch the trail.

gaze fell upon the body of the murdered maid, and he kept silent. When six had ventured on

the knife-edge, he opened fire. Nor did he cease when the knife-edge was bare. He emptied

his magazine, reloaded, and emptied it again. He kept on shooting. All his wrongs were

blazing in his brain, and he was in a fury of vengeance. All down the goat-trail the soldiers

were firing, and though they lay flat and sought to shelter themselves in the shallow

inequalities of the surface, they were exposed marks to him. Bullets whistled and thudded

about him, and an occasional ricochet sang sharply through the air. One bullet ploughed a

crease through his scalp, and a second burned across his shoulder-blade without breaking

the skin.

along their wounded. As Koolau picked them off he became aware of the smell of burnt

meat. He glanced about him at first, and then discovered that it was his own hands. The heat