I
On the edge of the world my islands lie," sings Mrs. Frear in her little lyric on the Hawaiian Islands.
"On the edge of the world my islands lie,
Under the sun-steeped sky;
And their waving palms
Are bounteous alms
To the soul-spent passer-by.
"On the edge of the world my islands sleep
In a slumber soft and deep.
What should they know
Of a world of woe,
And myriad men that weep?"
On the rim of the world my fancy seemed to see them that May day when we went aboard the huge Pacific steamship in San Francisco Harbor, and she pointed her prow westward toward the vast wilderness of the Pacific--on the edge of the world, looking out and down across the vast water toward Asia and Australia. I wondered if the great iron ship could find them, and if we should realize or visualize the geography or the astronomy when we got there, and see ourselves on the huge rotundity of the globe not far above her equatorial girdle.
Yes, on the rim of the world they lie to the traveler steaming toward them, and on the rim of the world they lie in his memory after his return, basking there in that tropical sunlight, forever fanned by those cooling trade winds, and encompassed by that morning-glory sea. With my mind's eye I behold them rising from that enormous abyss of the Pacific, fire-born and rain-carved, vast volcanic mountains miles deep under the sea, and in some cases miles high above it, clothed with verdure and teeming with life, the scene of long-gone cosmic strife and destruction, now the abode of rural and civic peace and plenty.
The Pacific treated me so much better than the Atlantic ever had that I am probably inclined to overestimate everything I saw on the voyage. It was the first trip at sea that ever gave me any pleasure. The huge vessels are in themselves a great comfort, and in the placid waters and the sliding down the rotund side of the great globe under warmer and warmer skies one gains a very agreeable experience. The first day's run must have carried us out and over that huge Pacific abyss, the Tuscarora Deep, where there were nearly four miles of water under us. Some of our aeroplanes have gone up half that distance and disappeared from sight. I fancy that our ship, more than six hundred feet long, would have appeared a very small object, floating across this briny firmament, could one have looked up at it from the bottom of that sea.
The Hawaiian Islands rise from the border of that vast deep, and one can fancy how that huge pot must have boiled back in Tertiary times, when the red-hot lava of which they are mainly built up was poured from the interior of the globe.
Softer and more balmy grew the air every day, more and more placid and richly tinted grew the sea, till, on the morning of the sixth day, we saw ahead of us, low on the horizon, the dim outlines of the mountains of Molokai. The island of Oahu, upon which Honolulu is situated, was soon in sight. It was not long before we saw Diamond Head, a vast crater bowl, eight hundred feet high on its ocean side, and half a mile across, sitting there upon the shore like some huge, strange work of man's hand, running back through the hills with a level rim, and seaward with a sloping base, brown and ribbed, and in every way unique and striking.
We were approaching a land the child of tropic seas and volcanic lava, and many of the features were new and strange to us. The mountains looked familiar in outline, but the colors of the landscape, the soft lilacs, greens, and browns, and the whole atmosphere of the scene, were unlike anything we had ever before seen. And Diamond Head, what a feature it was! Had it only had a head, one could easily have seen in it a suggestion of a couchant lion, bony, huge, and tawny, looking seaward, and guarding the harbor of Honolulu which lies just behind it. Into this harbor, in the soft morning air, our ship soon found its way, and the monotony of the vast, unpeopled sea was quickly succeeded by human scenes of the most varied and animated character, not the least novel of which were the swarms of half-amphibious native boys who surrounded the vessel as she lay at the wharf, and with brown, upturned faces and beckoning hands tempted the passengers to toss dimes into the water. As the coins struck the surface they would dive with the ease and quickness of seals, and seize the silver apparently before it had gone a yard toward the bottom. Holding the coins up to view between the thumb and finger, they would slip them into their mouths and solicit more.
On shore we were greeted with the music of the Royal Hawaiian Band, and a motley crowd of Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and Americans, bearing colored leis, or wreaths of flowers, which they waved at friends on board, and with which they bedecked them as soon as they came off the gangplank. It was a Babel of tongues in which the strange, vowel-choked language of the Hawaiians was conspicuous.
Honolulu is a beautiful city, clean, bright, well ordered, and well appointed,--electric lights, good streets, electric cars, fine hotels and clubs, excellent fire protection, mountain water, libraries, parks, handsome buildings, attractive homes,--in fact, all that we boast of in our home cities. Embosomed in palms, with mangoes, and other tropical trees, with a profusion of gorgeously colored vines and hedges, with spacious, well-kept grounds about the large and comfortable houses in the residential portion--these features, with the ready hospitality of the people, made our hearts warm towards it at once.
Volcanic heights on all the land side look down upon the city. Mount Tantalus, rising four thousand feet above the sea, is just back of it, with its long slopes of volcanic ash and sand now clothed by forests and fertile fields, and a huge ancient crater called the Punch Bowl, born probably on the selfsame day, the geologists think, as Diamond Head, dominates the city in the immediate foreground. If the Punch Bowl were again to overflow with the fiery liquid, the city would soon go up in smoke. But its bowl-like interior is now covered with grass and trees, and presents a scene of the most peaceful, rural character.
The Orient and the Occident meet in Honolulu. There Asia and America join hands. The main features of the city are decidedly American, but the people seen upon the street and at work indoors and out are more than half Oriental. The native population cuts only a small figure. The real workers--carpenters, masons, field hands, and house servants--are mostly Japanese. Virtually all the work of the immense sugar plantations is done by the little brown men and women, while China supplies some of the merchants in the city and the sailors and stewards on the ocean steamers. What admirable servants the Chinese make, so respectful, so prompt, so silent, so quick to comprehend! The Japanese house servants on the islands also give efficient and gracious service.
I had gone to Honolulu reluctantly, but tarried there joyfully. The fine climate, with its even temperature of about eighty degrees Fahrenheit, and with all that is enervating or oppressive in that degree of heat winnowed out of it by the ceaseless trade winds; the almost unbroken sunshine, perfumed now and then by a sprinkle of sunlit rain from the mountains; the wonderful sea laving the shores on the one hand and the cool, cloud-capped, and rain-drenched heights within easy reach on the other; the green, cozy valleys; the broad sweep of plain; the new, strange nature on every side; the novel and delicious fruits; the pepsin-charged papaya, or tree melon, which tickles the palate while it heals and renews the whole digestive system; the mangoes (oh, the mangoes!); the cordiality of the people; the inviting bungalows; the clean streets; the good service everywhere--all made me feel how mistaken was my reluctance.
Most of the Americans one meets there are descendants of the missionaries who went out from New England and New York early in the last century, and one feels at home with them at once. Many of the residents there have been educated in the States. The Governor, Mr. Frear, is a graduate of Yale; his wife is a graduate of Wellesley. One day a charming Southern woman, president of the College Club, invited us to meet the college women of the city. The gathering took place under the trees upon the lawn of one of the older homesteads. There were forty college women present, many of them teachers, from Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Bryn Mawr, and Barnard. Among them were two girls who had visited me at my cabin, "Slabsides," while they were at Vassar.
Wide as is the world, the traveler is pretty sure to strike threads of relation with his home country wherever he goes. I made the acquaintance in Honolulu of a man from my own county; another, who showed us great kindness, was from an adjoining county; while one day upon the street I was called by name by a man whom I had known as a boy in the town where I now live.
One Saturday a walking-club, largely made up of men and women teachers, whose native Hawaiian name meant "Walkers in Unfrequented Places," asked us to join them in a walk up Palola Valley to the site of an extinct crater well up in the mountains. These walkers in unfrequented places proved to be real walkers, and gave us all and more than we had bargained for--more mud and wet and slippery trails through clinging vines and rank lantana scrub than was good for our shoes and garments or for the bodies inside them. It was a long pull of many miles, at first up the valley over a fair highway, then into the woods on the mountain-side along a trail that was muddy and slippery from the recent showers, and most of the time was buried out of sight beneath the high, coarse stag-horn fern and a thick growth of lantana that met above it as high as our shoulders. A more discouraging mountain climb I never undertook. The vegetation was all novel, but it had that barbaric rankness of all tropical woods, with nothing of the sylvan sweetness and simplicity of our home woods. There were no fine, towering trees, but low, gnarled, and tortuous ones, which, with their hanging vines, like the broken ropes of a ship's rigging, and their parasitic growths, presented a riotous, disheveled appearance.
Nature in the tropics, left to herself, is harsh, aggressive, savage; looks as though she wanted to hang you with her dangling ropes, or impale you on her thorns, or engulf you in her ranks of gigantic ferns. Her mood is never as placid and sane as in the North. There is a tree in the Hawaiian woods that suggests a tree gone mad. It is called the hau-tree. It lies down, squirms, and wriggles all over the ground like a wounded snake; it gets up, and then takes to earth again. Now it wants to be a vine, now it wants to be a tree. It throws somersaults, it makes itself into loops and rings, it rolls, it reaches, it doubles upon itself. Altogether it is the craziest vegetable growth I ever saw. Where you can get it up off the ground and let it perform its antics on a broad skeleton framework, it makes a cover that no sunbeam can penetrate, and forms a living roof to the most charming verandas--or lanais, as they are called in the islands--that one can wish to see.
But I saw and heard one thing on this walk that struck a different note: it was one of the native birds, the Oahu thrush. The moment I heard it I was reminded of our brown thrasher, though the song, or whistle, was much finer and richer in tone than that of our bird. The glimpse I got of the bird showed it to be of about the size and shape of our thrasher, but much brighter in color. It seems as though the two species must have had a common origin some time, somewhere. I was attracted by no other native bird on this walk. In the valley below we had seen and heard the Chinese workmen going about their rice-fields making strange sounds to drive away the rice-birds, a small, brown species that has been introduced from India.
When we reached the mountain-top, we found it enveloped in fog and mist, and the scene was cold and cheerless. We looked down through a screen of foliage into a deep valley that seemed almost beneath us, and which is supposed to have been an ancient crater. There, on the brink, the walkers had a rude cabin, where we ate our lunch beside a fire and tried to dry our bedraggled garments.
From this point some of the party continued their walk, looking for more unfrequented places, but some of us had longings the other way, and retraced our steps toward the sunlight and the drier winds we had left. We reached town footsore and bedraggled, and the little Japanese who cleaned and pressed my suit of clothes, and made them look as good as new for seventy-five cents, well earned his money.
The walk of eight or ten miles which we took two weeks later with Governor Frear and his wife, up the new Castle trail to the mountain-top behind Tantalus, had some features in common with the first walk,--the increasing mist and coolness as we entered the mountains, the dripping bushes, and the slippery paths,--but we got finer views, and found a better-kept trail. Our walk ended on the top of a narrow ridge of the mountain, where we ate our lunch in a cold, driving mist and were a bit uncomfortable. I was interested in the character of the ridge upon which we sat. It was not more than six feet wide, a screen of volcanic rock worn almost to an edge, and separated two valleys six or seven hundred feet deep. The Governor said he could take me where the dividing ridge between the two valleys was so narrow that one could literally sit astride of it, so that one leg would point to one valley and the other to the other. This is a feature of a new country geologically; the rains and other agents of erosion have whittled the mountains to sharp edges, but have not yet rounded or leveled them.
The northeast trade winds which blow upon these islands nine months in the year bring a burden of moisture from the Pacific which is condensed into rain and mist by the mountains, and which, with the rank vegetation that it fosters, carves them and sharpens them like a great grindstone revolving against their sides. At a place called the Pali--and at the Needles, on the island of Maui--it has worn through the mountain-chain and made deep and very picturesque gorges where, in the case of the Pali, the wind is so strong and steady that you can almost lie down upon it.
It was near the Pali that I saw what I had never seen or heard of before--a waterfall reversed, going up instead of down. It suggested Stockton's story of negative gravity. A small brook comes down off the mountain and attempts to make the leap down a high precipice; but the winds catch it and carry it straight up in the air like smoke. It is translated; it becomes a mere wraith hovering above the beetling crag. Night and day this goes on, the wind snatching from the mountains in this summary way the water it has brought them.
On the walk with the Governor we made the acquaintance of some of the land shells for which these islands are famous--pretty, pearl-like little whorls living on the largest trees, and about the size of a chipping sparrow's egg, with pointed ends, variously colored. There are more than two hundred species on the different islands, I think, each valley having varieties peculiar to itself, showing what a factor isolation is in the evolution of new species. The Governor and his wife, and a young man who had specialized in conchology, plucked them from nearly every bush and tree; but my eye, being untrained in this kind of work, was very slow in finding them.
Coming down from these Hawaiian mountains is like coming out of a dripping tent of clouds into the clear, warm sunshine. The change is most delightful. Your clothing dries very quickly, and chilliness gives place to genial warmth. And the prospects that open before you, the glimpses down into these deep, yellow-green, crater-like valleys, checkered with neat little Chinese farms, the panorama of the city and the sea unrolling as you come down, and always Diamond Head standing guard there to the east--how the vision of it all lingers in the memory!
In climbing the heights, it was always a surprise to me to see the Pacific rise up as I rose, till it stood up like a great blue wall there against the horizon. A level plain unrolls in the same way as we mount above it, but it does not produce the same illusion of rising up like a wall or a mountain-range; the blue, facile water cheats the eye.
One of the novel pleasures in which most travelers indulge while in Honolulu is surf-riding at Waikiki, near Diamond Head. The sea, with a floor of lava and coral, is here shallow for a long distance out, and the surf comes in at intervals like a line of steeds cantering over a plain. We went out in our bathing-suits in a long, heavy dugout, with a lusty native oarsman in each end. When several hundred yards from shore, we saw, on looking seaward, the long, shining billows coming, whereupon our oarsmen headed the canoe toward shore, and plied their paddles with utmost vigor, uttering simultaneously a curious, excited cry. In a moment the breaker caught us and, in some way holding us on its crest, shot us toward the shore like an arrow. The sensation is novel and thrilling. The foam flies; the waters leap about you. You are coasting on the sea, and you shout with delight and pray for the sensation to continue. But it is quickly over. The hurrying breaker slips from under you, and leaves you in the trough, while it goes foaming on the shore. Then you turn about and row out from the shore again, and wait for another chance to be shot toward the land on the foaming crest of a great Pacific wave.
I suppose the trick is in the skill of the oarsmen in holding the boat on the pitch of the billow so that in its rush it takes you with it. The native boys do the feat standing on a plank. I was tempted to try this myself, but of course made a comical failure.
One of my pleasant surprises in Honolulu--one that gave the touch of nature which made me feel less a stranger there--was learning that the European skylark had been introduced and was thriving on the grassy slopes back of the city. The mina, a species of starling from India as large as our robin and rather showily dressed, with a loud, strident voice, I had seen and heard everywhere both in town and country, but he was a stranger and did not appeal to me. But the thought of the skylark brought Shelley and Wordsworth, and English downs and meadows, near to me at once, and I was eager to hear it. So early one morning we left the Pleasanton, our tarrying-place, and climbed the long, pastoral slope above the city, where cattle and horses were grazing, and listened for this minstrel from the motherland. We had not long to wait. Sure enough, not far from us there sprang from the turf Shelley's bird, and went climbing his invisible spiral toward the sky, pouring out those hurried, ecstatic notes, just as I had heard him above the South Downs of England. It was a moment of keen delight to me. The bird soared and hovered, drifting about, as it were, before the impetuous current of his song, with all the joy and abandon with which the poets have credited him. It was like a bit of English literature vocal in the air there above these alien scenes. Presently another went up, and then another, and still another, the singers behaving in every respect as they do by the Avon and the Tweed, and for a moment I seemed to be breathing the air that Wordsworth and Shelley breathed.
If our excursion had taken us only to the island of Oahu and its beautiful city, it would have been eminently worth while, but the last week in May we took what is called the inter-island trip, a six days' voyage among the various islands, when we visited the great extinct crater of Haleakala on Maui, and the active volcano Kilauea on Hawaii. It is a voyage over several rough channels in a small steamer, and my friends said, "If you have not yet paid tribute to Neptune, you will pay it now." But I did not. My companions were prostrated, but I see Neptune respects age, and my slumbers were undisturbed. A wireless message had gone to Mr. Aiken, on the island of Maui, to meet us with his automobile in the morning at the landing at Kahului. We were taken to the shore on a lighter, along with the horses and cargo, and there found our new friend awaiting us.
The great mountain of Haleakala rose up in a long line against the sky on the left, and the deeply eroded and canyoned mountains of the older, or west, end of the island on our right. Toward the latter our guide took us. It was a pleasant spin along the good roads, in the fresh morning air, near the beach, to Wailuku, the shire town of the island, two or three miles distant. Here we were most hospitably entertained in the home of Mr. Penhallow, the director of a large sugar plantation.
Here for the first time in my life I saw a gang of steam plows working, pulled by a stationary engine at each end of the field, and turning over the red, heavy volcanic soil. The work was mainly in the hands of Japanese, and was well done. We afterward saw Japanese by the score, both men and women, planting a large area of newly plowed land with sugar-cane.
After we were rested and refreshed, and had sampled the mangoes that had fallen from a tree near the house, Mr. Aiken took us in his automobile up into the famous Iao Valley, at the mouth of which Wailuku is situated. It is a deep, striking chasm carved out of the mountain by the stream, rank with verdure of various kinds, and looked down upon by sharp peaks and ridges five or six thousand feet high. We soon reached the clear rapid, brawling stream, as bright as a Catskill mountain trout brook, and after a mile or two along its course we came to the end of the road, where we left the machine and took a trail that wound onward and upward over a slippery surface and through dripping bushes, for we here began to reach the skirts of the little showers that almost constantly career over and about the interior of these mountains. I neither saw nor heard a bird or other live thing. Guava apples lay on the ground all along the trail, and one could eat them and not make faces. Some of the sharp, knife-blade ridges that cut down toward us from the higher peaks were very startling, and so steep and high that they could be successfully scaled only by the aid of ropes and ladders. A more striking object-lesson in erosion by rain would be hard to find. There were no naked rocks; short, thick vegetation covered even the steepest slopes, and the vegetable acids which this generated, and the perpetual rains, weathered the mountains down. It soon became so wet that we stopped far short of the head of the valley, and turned back. I wished to look into the great, deep, green amphitheatre which seems to lie at the head, but had glimpses of it only from a distance. How many millenniums will it be, I said to myself, before erosion will have completed its work here, and these thin, high mountain-walls will be in ruins? Surely not many.
We returned to the hospitable home we had left, and passed the midday there. In the afternoon Mr. Aiken, guiding our eyes by the forms of trees that cut the horizon-line on the huge flank of Haleakala, pointed out the place of his own homestead, twenty or more miles away. From this point the great mountain appeared like a vast landscape tilted up at an easy angle against the horizon. One could hardly believe it was ten thousand feet high. The machine climbed easily more than half the distance to Mr. Aiken's plantation, which we reached in good time in the afternoon, and where we passed a very enjoyable night. It was a surprise to find swarms of mosquitoes at this altitude, so free from all mosquito-breeding waters. But the house was well protected against them. Mosquitoes, as well as flies and vermin, are not native to the island. They came in ships not very long ago, and are now very troublesome in certain parts. They came round the Horn. Mr. Aiken's house itself came round the Horn seventy or eighty years ago. It is a quaint, New England type of house, and has a very homelike look. In front of it, near the gate, stands a Japanese pine which is an object of veneration to all Japanese who chance to come that way. Often their eyes fill with tears on beholding it, so responsive are the little yellow men to associations of home.
In the morning Mr. Aiken drove us in a wagon to a place he has called "Idlewild," six miles farther up the great slope of the mountain. This slope of Haleakala is like a whole township, diversified with farms and woods, valleys and hills, resting on its elbows, so to speak, and looking out over the Pacific. We could look up to the cloud-line, about seven thousand feet above the sea, and occasionally get a glimpse of the long line of the summit through rifts in the clouds. At Idlewild our expedition, consisting of six mules and four people, was fitted out, and in the early afternoon we started on the trail up the mountain.
For several miles our way led over grassy slopes where cattle were grazing, and above which skylarks were singing. This was one of the happy surprises of the trip--the soaring and singing skylarks. All the way till we reached the cloud-belt, we had the larks pouring down their music from the sky above us. They seemed specially jubilant. It was May in England, too, and they sang as though the spirit of those downs and fells was stirring in their hearts, under alien skies, but true to the memories of home.
Before we reached the summit we came upon another introduction from overseas--the English pheasant. One started up from some bushes only a few yards from the trail, went booming away, and disappeared in a deep gully. A little later another sprang up, uttering a cackling cry as it flew away. We saw three altogether. The only home thing we saw was white clover in patches here and there, and it gave a most welcome touch to the unfamiliar scenes.
The cattle we passed on the way were suffering dreadfully from another introduction from the States--the Texas horn-fly, which had recently made its appearance. The poor beasts were driven half-crazy by it, as their sunken eyes and poor condition plainly showed.
The trail became rougher and steeper as we ascended, and the grass and trees gave place to low, scrubby bushes. We were half an hour or more in the cloud-belt, where the singing skylarks did not follow us. The clouds proved to be as loose of texture and as innocent as any summer fog that loiters in our valleys; but it was good to emerge into the sunshine again, and see the jagged line of the top sensibly nearer, and the canopy of clouds unroll itself beneath us. Far ahead of us and near the summit we saw a band of wild goats--twenty-two, I counted--leisurely grazing along, and now and then casting glances down upon us. They were domestic animals gone wild, and still retained their bizarre colors of white and black. One big black leader with a long beard looked down at us and shook his head threateningly. We reached the summit before the sun reached the horizon, and our eyes looked forth upon a strange world, indeed. On one hand the vast sea of cloud, into which the sun was about to drop, rolled away from the mountain below us, with its white surface and the irregular masses rising up from it, suggesting a sea of floating ice. Through rifts in it we caught occasional glimpses of the Pacific--blue, vague, mystical gulfs that seemed filled with something less substantial than water. On the other hand was the vast crater of Haleakala, two thousand feet deep, and many miles across, in which the shadows were deepening, and which looked like some burned-out Hades.
We stood or sat on the jagged edge and saw the day depart and the night come down, the glory of cloud and sea and sunset on the one hand, and on the other side the fearful chasm of the extinct volcano, red and black and barren, with the hosts of darkness gathering in it. It was like a seat between heaven and hell. Then later, when the Southern Cross came out and rose above the awful gulf, the scene was most impressive.
The crater of Haleakala is said to be the largest extinct crater in the world. To follow all its outlines would lead one a distance of more than twenty miles, but it is so irregular in shape that one gets only a poor conception of its extent in a view from its brink. At its widest part it cannot be more than four or five miles across. It was evidently formed by the whole top of the mountain having been blown out or else sunk down in recent geologic times. The fragments of jagged rock that thickly strew the surface all about the summit look as if they might have fallen there. The floor of the interior of the crater is thickly studded with many minor craters, through which the internal fires found vent after the crater as a whole had ceased to act. They are of the shape of huge haystacks, with a hole in the top, and looked soft and yielding in outline, and in color as though they were composed of soot and brick-dust. One of them is much larger than any of the rest. I thought it might be two hundred feet high. "It is eight hundred," said our guide; yet its summit was more than a thousand feet below the rim upon which we sat.
There has been no eruption in Haleakala since early in the last century. Over a large area of the interior the black lava, cracked and crumpled, meets the eye. Miles down one of its great arms toward the sea, we could see the green lines of vegetation, mostly rank ferns, advancing like an invading army. Far ahead were the skirmishers, loose bands of ferns, with individual plants here and there pushing on over the black, uneven surface toward the secondary craters of the centre. Vegetation was also climbing down the ragged sides of the crater, dropping from rock to rock like an invading host. The ferns, those pioneers of the vegetable world, appear to come first. Their giant progenitors subdued the rocks and made the soil in Carboniferous times, and prepared the way for higher vegetable forms, and now these striplings take up the same task in this primitive world of the crater of Haleakala. Their task is a long and arduous one, much more so than in those parts of the island where the rainfall is more copious; but give them time enough, and the barren lava will all be clothed with verdure. When decomposed and ripened by time, it makes a red, heavy soil that supports many kinds of plants and trees.
The ferns come slowly marching in from without, but in the centre of the crater, on the slopes of the red cones and at their bases, is another plant that seems indigenous, born of the ash and the scoria of the volcano, and that apparently has no chlorophyl in its make-up. This is a striking plant, called the silver sword, from the shape and color of its long, narrow leaves. They are the color of frosted silver, and are curved like a sword. It is a strange apparition, white and delicate and rare, springing up in the crater of a slumbering volcano. A more striking contrast with the atmosphere of the surroundings would be hard to find--a suggestion of peace and purity above the graves of world-destroying forces, an angel of light nourished by the ashes of the demons of death and darkness.
It is claimed by the people of the island that this plant is found in no other place on the globe, but this can hardly be possible. If its evolution took place in one crater, it would take place in another. It consists of a great mass of silvery-white, bristling leaves resting upon the ground, from which rises a stalk, strung with flowers, to the height of five or six feet. It is evidently of the Yucca type of plant, and has met with a singular transformation in the sleeping volcano's mouth, all its harsh and savage character turned into gentleness and grace, its armament of needles and daggers giving place to a soft, silvery down. We did not see the plant growing except at a great distance, through field-glasses, but we saw a photograph of it and a dried specimen after we came down from the summit.
It is an all day's trip down into the crater and back, climbing over sliding sands and loose scoria, and our time was too limited to undertake it. We passed the night on the summit in a rude stone hut, which had a fireplace where the guide made coffee, but we had only the volcanic rock for floor. Upon this we spread our ample supply of blankets, and got such sleep as is to be had on high, cold mountain-tops, where the ribs of the mountain prove to be so much harder than one's own ribs--not a first-class quality of sleep, but better than none.
I arose about two o'clock, and made my way out into the star-blazing night. Such glory of the heavens I had never before seen. I had never before been lifted up so near them, and hence had never before seen them through so rarefied an atmosphere. The clouds and vapors had disappeared, and all the hosts of heaven were magnified. The Milky Way seemed newly paved and swept. There was no wind and no sound. The mighty crater was a gulf of blackness, but the sky blazed with light.
The dawn comes early on such a mountain-top, and before four o'clock we were out under the fading stars. As we had seen the day pass into night, surrounded by these wonderful scenes, now we saw the night pass into day, and the elemental grandeur on every hand reborn before us. There was not a wisp of cloud or fog below us or about us to blur the great picture. The sun came up from behind the vast, long, high wall of the Pacific that filled the eastern horizon, and the shadows fled from the huge pile of mountain in the west. We hung about the rim of the great crater or sat upon the jagged rocks, wrapped in our blankets, till the sun was an hour high.
We got another glimpse of the band of goats picking their way from ledge to ledge far below us on the side of the crater. I saw and heard two or three mina birds fly past, apparently seeking new territory to occupy. These birds are more enterprising than the English sparrows, which also swarm in the island towns but do not brave the mountain-heights. The bird from India seems at home everywhere.
After breakfast we still haunted for an hour or more the brink of the great abyss, where one seemed to feel the pulse of primal time, loath to tear ourselves away, loath also to take a last view of the panorama of land and sea, lit by the morning sun, which spread out far below us. To the southeast we could dimly see the outlines of the island of Hawaii, with a faint gleam of snow on its great mountain Mauna Loa, nearly fourteen thousand feet high. In the northwest a dim, dark mass low in the horizon marked the place of Oahu. The ocean rose in the vast horizon and blended with the sky. The eye could not tell where one ended and the other began.
The mules had had a comfortable night in a rude stone stable against the rocks, and were more eager to hit the down trail than were we. The descent proved more fatiguing than the ascent, the constant plunging motion of the animals' shoulders being a sore trial. We dropped down through the belt of clouds that had begun to form, and out into the grassy region of the singing skylarks, past herds of grazing cattle, and at noon were again at Idlewild, resting our weary limbs and comforting the inner man.
In the afternoon Mr. Aiken drove us back to his home farm, where we again passed a very pleasant night. In the morning I walked with him through his pineapple plantation. It was a new kind of farming and fruit-growing to me. I forget now how many hundred thousand plants his field contained. They are set and cultivated much as cabbage is with us, but present a strangely stiff and forbidding aspect. The first cutting is when the plants are about eighteen months old, one large solid apple from each plant. The second crop is called the "raggoon" crop, and yields two apples from each plant, but smaller and less valuable than the first. The field is then reset. I also walked with Mr. Aiken over some new land he was getting ready for pineapples. It had been densely covered with lantana scrub, and clearing it and grubbing it out had been an heroic task. The lantana takes complete possession of the soil, grows about four or five feet high, and makes a network of roots in the soil that defies anything but a steam plow. The soil is a red, heavy clay, and it made the farmer in me sweat to think of the expenditure of labor necessary to turn a lantana bush into a pineapple field. The redness of this volcanic soil is said to be owing to the fact that the growth of vegetation brings the iron into new combinations with organic acids.
Later in the day we visited the large Baldwin pineapple-canning plant, and were shown the whole process of preparing and canning the fruit, and all but surfeited with the most melting and delicious pineapples it was ever my good luck to taste. The Hawaiian pineapple probably surpasses all others in tenderness and lusciousness, and it loses scarcely any of these qualities in the cans. Ripened in the field, where it grew on the flanks of great Haleakala, and eaten out of hand, it is a dream of tropic lusciousness. The canning is done by an elaborate system of machinery managed by Japanese men and women, the naked hand never coming in contact with the peeled fruit, but protected from it by long, thin rubber gloves. There ought to be a great future for this industry, when Eastern consumers really find out the superior quality of the Hawaiian product.
From Mr. Aiken's house one has a view of the great wall of mountains that form the western and older--older geologically--end of the island, in which lies the famous Iao Valley, which I have already described. We judge, from the much deeper marks of rain erosion, that this end of the island is vastly older than the butt end upon which Haleakala is situated. Haleakala is eroded comparatively little. On all its huge northern slope there is only one considerable gash or gully, and this is probably not many thousand years old; but the northwestern end of the island is worn and carved in the most striking manner. Looking at it that morning, I compared it to my extended, relaxed hand, the northern end being gashed and grooved like the sunken spaces between the fingers, while the southwest end, not more than ten miles distant, was only slightly grooved and more like the solid wrist and back hand. All the rains brought by the northeast trades fall upon the northeast end of the islands. The mountain-peaks on the end hold the clouds and strip them dry, so that little or no rain falls upon the south and southwest sides. This is true of all the islands. One end of each is arid and barren, while the other is wet and verdant. One of the smaller islands, Kahoolawe, I believe, dominated by Maui on the northeast, is said to be drying up and blowing away by inches.
What a spell the mountains do lay upon the clouds everywhere,--the robber mountains,--in these islands exacting the last drop of water of all the ocean-born vapors that pass over them! On the northeast side of the Lahaina district there are valleys four or five thousand feet deep; on the southwest side there are no valleys worth mentioning. The difference in this respect was forcibly brought home to me when, later in the day, we made an automobile trip from Wailuku to Lahaina on the southwest side; in going less than twenty miles we quickly passed from the region of verdant valleys and mountain-slopes into a hard, raw, barren, unweathered region, where there was no soil, and where the rocks looked as crude and forbidding as they must have looked the day they flowed out from the depths as molten lava. In outline the island of Maui suggests a truncated statue, the west end representing the head, very old and wrinkled and grooved by time and trouble, the peninsula the well-proportioned neck, and broad-breasted Haleakala forming the trunk. What a torso it is, fire-born and basking there in the tropic seas!
The oldest island of the Hawaiian group is Kauai, called the garden island, because it has much the deepest and most fertile soil. It shows much more evidence of erosion than any of the other islands. The next in point of erosion, and hence in point of age, is Oahu, upon which Honolulu is situated. Then come Molokai and Maui, the two ends of the latter being of vastly unequal age. Hawaii, the largest of them all, nearly as large as Connecticut, is the youngest of the group, and shows the least effects of erosion. When it is as old as Kauai is now, its two huge mountains, Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, will probably be cut up into deep valleys and canons and sharp, high ridges, as are the mountains of Kauai and Oahu. The lapse of time required to bring about such a result is beyond all human calculation. Whether one million or two millions of years would do it, who knows? Those warm tropical rains, aided by the rank vegetation which they beget and support, dissolve the volcanic rock slowly but inevitably.
Through the courtesy of Mr. Lowell, the superintendent, we had that day the pleasure of going through a large sugar-making plant at Paia--one that turns out nearly fifty thousand tons of sugar a year. We saw the cane come in from the fields in one end of the plant, and the dry, warm product being put up in bags at the other. All the latest devices and machinery for sugar-making we saw here in full operation, affording a contrast to the crude and wasteful methods I had seen in the island of Jamaica a few years before.
In the afternoon we availed ourselves of the five or six miles of narrow-gauge railway, the only one on the island, to go from Paia to Wailuku, where we were met by another automobile, which hurried us to Lahaina, where we were to meet the steamer that was to convey us to Hilo, on Hawaii. I say "hurried," but before the journey of twenty-odd miles was half over, we realized the truth of the old adage, "The more haste, the less speed." The automobile began to sulk and finally could be persuaded to go only on the low gear, and to rattle along at about the speed of a man with a horse and buggy. We reached Lahaina just as the boat was entering the harbor.
The next morning we found ourselves steaming along past the high, verdant shores of Hawaii. For fifty miles or more the land presented one unbroken expanse of sugar-cane, suggesting fields of some gigantic yellow-green grass. At Hilo the sun was shining between brief showers, and the air was warm and muggy. It is said to rain there every day in the year, and the lush vegetation made the statement seem credible. Judge Andrews met us at the steamer, and took us to his home for rest and dinner, and was extremely kind to us.
In the mid-afternoon we took the train for Glenwood, thirty miles on our way to the volcano of Kilauea. A large part of the way the road leads through sugar plantations, newly carved out of the koa and tree-fern wilderness that originally covered the volcanic soil. Clusters of the little houses of the Japanese laborers, perched high above the ground on slender posts, were passed here and there. Everywhere we saw wooden aqueducts, or flumes, winding around the contours of the hills and across the little valleys, often on high trestle-work, and partly filled with clear, swift-running water, in which the sugar-cane was transported to the mills.
At Glenwood stages meet the tourists and convey them over a fairly good road that winds through the tree-fern forests to the Volcano House, ten miles away. The beauty of that fern-lined forest, the long, stately plumes of the gigantic ferns meeting the eye everywhere, I shall not soon forget. I saw what appeared to be a large, showy red raspberry growing by the roadside, but I did not find it at all tempting to the taste.
It was dark when we reached the Volcano House, and we saw off to the left a red glow upon the fog-clouds, like the reflected light from a burning barn or house in the country, and inferred at once that it came from the volcano, which it did. From my window that night, as I lay in bed, I could see this same angry glow upon the clouds. The smell of sulphur was in the air about the hotel, and very hot steam was issuing from cracks in the rocks. A party of tourists on horseback, in the spirit of true American hurry, visited the volcano that night, but we chose to wait until the morrow.
The next morning the great crater of Kilauea was filled with fog, but it lifted, and the sun shone before noon. We passed a pleasant forenoon strolling along the tree-fringed brink, looking down eight or nine hundred feet upon its black lava floor, and plucking ohelo berries, which grew there abundantly, a kind of large, red huckleberry that one could eat out of hand, but that one could not get excited over. They were better in a pie than in the hand. Their name seemed to go well with the suggestion of the scenes amid which they grew. Kilauea is a round extinct crater about three miles across and seven or eight hundred feet deep. It has been the scene of terrific explosions in past ages, but it has now dwindled to the small active crater of Halemaumau, which is sunk near the middle of it like a huge pot, two hundred or more feet deep and a thousand feet across.
In the mid-afternoon a party of eight or ten of us on horseback set out to visit the volcano. The trail led down the broken and shelving side of the crater, amid trees and bushes, till it struck the floor of lava at the bottom. In going down I was aware all the time of a beautiful bird-song off on my left, a song almost as sweet as that of our hermit thrush, but of an entirely different order. I think it was the song of one of the honey-suckers, a red bird with black wings that in flight looked like our scarlet tanager.
Our course took us out over the cracked and contorted lava-beds, where no green thing was growing. The forms of the lava-flow suggested mailed and writhing dragons, with horrid, gaping mouths and vicious claws. The lava crunched beneath the horses' feet like shelly and brittle ice. At one point we passed over a wide, jagged crack on a bridge. As we neared the crater, the rocks grew warm, and sulphur and other fumes streaked the air.
When a half-mile from the crater we dismounted, and, leaving our horses in charge of the guide, proceeded on foot over the cracked and heated lava rocks toward the brink of this veritable devil's caldron. The sulphur fumes are so suffocating that it can be approached only on the windward side. The first glance into that fearful pit is all that your imagination can picture it. You look upon the traditional lake of brimstone and fire, and if devils were to appear skipping about over the surface with pitchforks, turning their victims as the cook turns her frying crullers in the sputtering fat, it would not much astonish you. This liquid is rather thick and viscid, but it is boiling furiously. Great masses of it are thrown up forty or fifty feet, and fall with a crash like that of the surf upon the shore. Livid jets are thrown up many feet high against the sides and drip back, cooling quickly as the lava descends. We sat or stood upon the brink, at times almost letting our feet hang over the sides, and shielding our faces from the intense heat with paper masks and veils. It is probably the only place in the world where you can come face to face with the heart of an active volcano. There are no veils of vapor to hide it from you. It appears easy enough to cast a stone into the midst of it, but none of us could quite do it.
The mass of boiling lava is said to be about one and one half acres in extent. Its surface is covered with large masses of floating crust, black and smooth, like leather or roofing-paper, and between these masses, or islands, the molten lava shows in broad, vivid lines. It is never quiet. When not actually boiling, there is a slow circulatory movement, and the great flakes of black crust, suggesting scum, drift across from one end to the other and are drawn under the rocks. At one moment only this movement is apparent, then suddenly the mass begins to boil furiously all over the surface, and you hear dimly the sound of the bursting bubbles and the crash of the falling lava. When this takes place, the black floating masses are broken up and scattered as they are in boiling maple-syrup, but they quickly reunite, and are carried on by the current as before.
Looking upon this scene with the thought of the traditional lake of fire and brimstone of our forefathers in mind, you would say that these black, filthy-looking masses floating about on the surface were the accumulation of all the bad stuff that had been fried out of the poor sinners since hell was invented. How much wickedness and uncharity and evil thought it would represent! If the poor victims were clarified and made purer by the process, then it would seem worth while.
At the Volcano House they keep a book in which tourists write down their impressions of the volcano. A distinguished statesman had been there a few days before us, and had written a long account of his impressions, closing with this oratorical sentence: "No pen, however gifted, can describe, no brush, however brilliant, can portray, the wonders we have been permitted to behold." I could not refrain from writing under it, "I have seen the orthodox hell, and it's the real thing."
That huge kettle of molten metal, mantling and bubbling, how it is impressed upon my memory! It is a vestige of the ancient cosmic fire that once wrapped the whole globe in its embrace. It had a kind of brutal fascination. One could not take one's eyes from it. That network of broad, jagged, fiery lines defining those black, smooth masses, or islands, of floating matter told of a side of nature we had never before seen. We lingered there on the brink of the fearful spectacle till night came on, and the sides of the mighty caldron, and the fog-clouds above it, glowed in the infernal light. Not so white as the metal pouring from a blast furnace, not so hot, a more sullen red, but welling up from the central primordial fires of the earth. This great pot has boiled over many times in the recent past, as the lava-beds we traveled over testify, and it will probably boil over again. It has been unusually active these last few years.
About nine o'clock we rode back, facing a cold, driving mist, the back of each rider, protected by the shining yellow "slickers," glowing to the one behind him, in the volcano's light, till we were a mile or more away.
The next morning came clear, and the sight of the mighty slope of Mauna Loa, lit up by the rising sun, was a grand spectacle. It looked gentle and easy of ascent, wooded here and there, and here and there showing broad, black streaks from the lava overflows at the summit in recent years; but remembering that it was nearly four thousand feet higher than Haleakala, I had no desire to climb it. This mountain and its companion, Mauna Kea, are the highest island mountains in the world.
The stage rolled us back through the fern forest to the railway station and thence on to Hilo again, where in good time, in the afternoon, we went aboard the steamer; and the next morning we were again in the harbor of Honolulu, glad we had made the inter-island trip, and above all glad that we had seen Haleakala.
[The end]
John Burroughs's essay: Holidays In Hawaii