Firefighters responding to the 3:45 a.m. blaze found one victim in a bedroom of the single-story, wooden home. The other was discovered near a door leading to the outside.

The women were the third and fourth people to die in house fires this year. Fourteen died in structure fires last year, the deadliest in the last quarter century, fire officials have said.

"I guess most of all, they loved to travel, to see the sights, seeing things different from home. They loved looking at other cultures and Evelyn loved to take photographs wherever they went," said Warren Miyake, a nephew whose home is in front of the sisters' house. His aunts had lived there for more than 40 years, he said.

Miyake said he was awakened about 3:45 a.m. yesterday by neighbors who were leaving for work.

Unable to get into his aunts' house, at 3273A Lincoln Ave., Miyake said he ran around the exterior, "pounding on the walls" trying to get his two aunts out of the burning building.

"The Fire Department was very quick to get here. We asked them to look specifically where the bedrooms were, but it was too late," he said.

Fire Capt. Kenison Tejada said eight units responded to the two-alarm blaze after the fire was reported. The first firefighters arrived at the scene within four minutes, he said.

"They were told right away that there were two women in the back house, but they had to do a forcible entry because of the security bars on the windows and had to fight the fire to gain entry into the various rooms in the house," Tejada said.

The fire was declared under control at 4:06 a.m.

Miyake credited his neighbors with doing what they could to battle the blaze with a garden hose, and firefighters who sprinted as fast as they could to hook their hoses to hydrants on the street and lay them out along the side of his house lot to the aunts' home in the back.

The nephew recalled two women who were "very outgoing and both had a lot of enthusiasm. Eleanore was still very sharp and Evelyn was very energetic. Both had traveled the world together and had just come back from a trip to Australia and New Zealand.

"They had a lot of friends here and on the Mainland and kept in touch with our relatives in Japan," Miyake said. "Both spoke Japanese, one more fluently than the other."

His aunts remained fiercely independent and had taken to catching the city bus at a stop about three blocks from their house, he said.

"Only one of them ever had a driver's license, and she gave it up long ago," he said. "My father — their brother — used to drive them all around, but he died quite a while ago."

Both women had been retired for 15 or 20 years and were spending time — when not traveling — watching their 15 or so nephews and nieces grow up.

"They were my father's elder sisters, the last remaining members of their generation," he said. "They were part of a family of eight siblings, nine if you count a sister that died at childbirth. They were all from Waialua.

"Their lives were all about what took place in Hawai'i during the 1920s to the 1940s, during World War II and building the city and county municipality in the '60s and '70s," he said.

The fire caused $150,000 worth of damage to the building and $40,000 to the contents.

Its cause was not known yesterday. Fire officials are focusing their investigation on the living room.