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CHAPTER VIII - THE HOUSE OF THE SUN
There are hosts of people who journey like restless spirits round
and about this earth in search of seascapes and landscapes and the
wonders and beauties of nature. They overrun Europe in armies; they
can be met in droves and herds in Florida and the West Indies, at
the Pyramids, and on the slopes and summits of the Canadian and
American Rockies; but in the House of the Sun they are as rare as
live and wriggling dinosaurs. Haleakala is the Hawaiian name for
"the House of the Sun." It is a noble dwelling, situated on the
Island of Maui; but so few tourists have ever peeped into it, much
less entered it, that their number may be practically reckoned as
zero. Yet I venture to state that for natural beauty and wonder the
nature-lover may see dissimilar things as great as Haleakala, but no
greater, while he will never see elsewhere anything more beautiful
or wonderful. Honolulu is six days' steaming from San Francisco;
Maui is a night's run on the steamer from Honolulu; and six hours
more if he is in a hurry, can bring the traveller to Kolikoli, which
is ten thousand and thirty-two feet above the sea and which stands
hard by the entrance portal to the House of the Sun. Yet the
tourist comes not, and Haleakala sleeps on in lonely and unseen
grandeur.
Not being tourists, we of the Snark went to Haleakala. On the
slopes of that monster mountain there is a cattle ranch of some
fifty thousand acres, where we spent the night at an altitude of two
thousand feet. The next morning it was boots and saddles, and with
cow-boys and pack-horses we climbed to Ukulele, a mountain ranch-
house, the altitude of which, fifty-five hundred feet, gives a
severely temperate climate, compelling blankets at night and a
roaring fireplace in the living-room. Ukulele, by the way, is the
Hawaiian for "jumping flea" as it is also the Hawaiian for a certain
musical instrument that may be likened to a young guitar. It is my
opinion that the mountain ranch-house was named after the young
guitar. We were not in a hurry, and we spent the day at Ukulele,
learnedly discussing altitudes and barometers and shaking our
particular barometer whenever any one's argument stood in need of
demonstration. Our barometer was the most graciously acquiescent
instrument I have ever seen. Also, we gathered mountain
raspberries, large as hen's eggs and larger, gazed up the pasture-
covered lava slopes to the summit of Haleakala, forty-five hundred
feet above us, and looked down upon a mighty battle of the clouds
that was being fought beneath us, ourselves in the bright sunshine.
Every day and every day this unending battle goes on. Ukiukiu is
the name of the trade-wind that comes raging down out of the north-
east and hurls itself upon Haleakala. Now Haleakala is so bulky and
tall that it turns the north-east trade-wind aside on either hand,
so that in the lee of Haleakala no trade-wind blows at all. On the
contrary, the wind blows in the counter direction, in the teeth of
the north-east trade. This wind is called Naulu. And day and night
and always Ukiukiu and Naulu strive with each other, advancing,
retreating, flanking, curving, curling, and turning and twisting,
the conflict made visible by the cloud-masses plucked from the
heavens and hurled back and forth in squadrons, battalions, armies,
and great mountain ranges. Once in a while, Ukiukiu, in mighty
gusts, flings immense cloud-masses clear over the summit of
Haleakala; whereupon Naulu craftily captures them, lines them up in
new battle-formation, and with them smites back at his ancient and
eternal antagonist. Then Ukiukiu sends a great cloud-army around
the eastern-side of the mountain. It is a flanking movement, well
executed. But Naulu, from his lair on the leeward side, gathers the
flanking army in, pulling and twisting and dragging it, hammering it
into shape, and sends it charging back against Ukiukiu around the
western side of the mountain. And all the while, above and below
the main battle-field, high up the slopes toward the sea, Ukiukiu
and Naulu are continually sending out little wisps of cloud, in
ragged skirmish line, that creep and crawl over the ground, among
the trees and through the canyons, and that spring upon and capture
one another in sudden ambuscades and sorties. And sometimes Ukiukiu
or Naulu, abruptly sending out a heavy charging column, captures the
ragged little skirmishers or drives them skyward, turning over and
over, in vertical whirls, thousands of feet in the air.
But it is on the western slopes of Haleakala that the main battle
goes on. Here Naulu masses his heaviest formations and wins his
greatest victories. Ukiukiu grows weak toward late afternoon, which
is the way of all trade-winds, and is driven backward by Naulu.
Naulu's generalship is excellent. All day he has been gathering and
packing away immense reserves. As the afternoon draws on, he welds
them into a solid column, sharp-pointed, miles in length, a mile in
width, and hundreds of feet thick. This column he slowly thrusts
forward into the broad battle-front of Ukiukiu, and slowly and
surely Ukiukiu, weakening fast, is split asunder. But it is not all
bloodless. At times Ukiukiu struggles wildly, and with fresh
accessions of strength from the limitless north-east, smashes away
half a mile at a time of Naulu's column and sweeps it off and away
toward West Maui. Sometimes, when the two charging armies meet end-
on, a tremendous perpendicular whirl results, the cloud-masses,
locked together, mounting thousands of feet into the air and turning
over and over. A favourite device of Ukiukiu is to send a low,
squat formation, densely packed, forward along the ground and under
Naulu. When Ukiukiu is under, he proceeds to buck. Naulu's mighty
middle gives to the blow and bends upward, but usually he turns the
attacking column back upon itself and sets it milling. And all the
while the ragged little skirmishers, stray and detached, sneak
through the trees and canyons, crawl along and through the grass,
and surprise one another with unexpected leaps and rushes; while
above, far above, serene and lonely in the rays of the setting sun,
Haleakala looks down upon the conflict. And so, the night. But in
the morning, after the fashion of trade-winds, Ukiukiu gathers
strength and sends the hosts of Naulu rolling back in confusion and
rout. And one day is like another day in the battle of the clouds,
where Ukiukiu and Naulu strive eternally on the slopes of Haleakala.
Again in the morning, it was boots and saddles, cow-boys, and
packhorses, and the climb to the top began. One packhorse carried
twenty gallons of water, slung in five-gallon bags on either side;
for water is precious and rare in the crater itself, in spite of the
fact that several miles to the north and east of the crater-rim more
rain comes down than in any other place in the world. The way led
upward across countless lava flows, without regard for trails, and
never have I seen horses with such perfect footing as that of the
thirteen that composed our outfit. They climbed or dropped down
perpendicular places with the sureness and coolness of mountain
goats, and never a horse fell or baulked.
There is a familiar and strange illusion experienced by all who
climb isolated mountains. The higher one climbs, the more of the
earth's surface becomes visible, and the effect of this is that the
horizon seems up-hill from the observer. This illusion is
especially notable on Haleakala, for the old volcano rises directly
from the sea without buttresses or connecting ranges. In
consequence, as fast as we climbed up the grim slope of Haleakala,
still faster did Haleakala, ourselves, and all about us, sink down
into the centre of what appeared a profound abyss. Everywhere, far
above us, towered the horizon. The ocean sloped down from the
horizon to us. The higher we climbed, the deeper did we seem to
sink down, the farther above us shone the horizon, and the steeper
pitched the grade up to that horizontal line where sky and ocean
met. It was weird and unreal, and vagrant thoughts of Simm's Hole
and of the volcano through which Jules Verne journeyed to the centre
of the earth flitted through one's mind.
And then, when at last we reached the summit of that monster
mountain, which summit was like the bottom of an inverted cone
situated in the centre of an awful cosmic pit, we found that we were
at neither top nor bottom. Far above us was the heaven-towering
horizon, and far beneath us, where the top of the mountain should
have been, was a deeper deep, the great crater, the House of the
Sun. Twenty-three miles around stretched the dizzy wells of the
crater. We stood on the edge of the nearly vertical western wall,
and the floor of the crater lay nearly half a mile beneath. This
floor, broken by lava-flows and cinder-cones, was as red and fresh
and uneroded as if it were but yesterday that the fires went out.
The cinder-cones, the smallest over four hundred feet in height and
the largest over nine hundred, seemed no more than puny little sand-
hills, so mighty was the magnitude of the setting. Two gaps,
thousands of feet deep, broke the rim of the crater, and through
these Ukiukiu vainly strove to drive his fleecy herds of trade-wind
clouds. As fast as they advanced through the gaps, the heat of the
crater dissipated them into thin air, and though they advanced
always, they got nowhere.
It was a scene of vast bleakness and desolation, stern, forbidding,
fascinating. We gazed down upon a place of fire and earthquake.
The tie-ribs of earth lay bare before us. It was a workshop of
nature still cluttered with the raw beginnings of world-making.
Here and there great dikes of primordial rock had thrust themselves
up from the bowels of earth, straight through the molten surface-
ferment that had evidently cooled only the other day. It was all
unreal and unbelievable. Looking upward, far above us (in reality
beneath us) floated the cloud-battle of Ukiukiu and Naulu. And
higher up the slope of the seeming abyss, above the cloud-battle, in
the air and sky, hung the islands of Lanai and Molokai. Across the
crater, to the south-east, still apparently looking upward, we saw
ascending, first, the turquoise sea, then the white surf-line of the
shore of Hawaii; above that the belt of trade-clouds, and next,
eighty miles away, rearing their stupendous hulks out of the azure
sky, tipped with snow, wreathed with cloud, trembling like a mirage,
the peaks of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa hung poised on the wall of
heaven.
It is told that long ago, one Maui, the son of Hina, lived on what
is now known as West Maui. His mother, Hina, employed her time in
the making of kapas. She must have made them at night, for her days
were occupied in trying to dry the kapas. Each morning, and all
morning, she toiled at spreading them out in the sun. But no sooner
were they out, than she began taking them in, in order to have them
all under shelter for the night. For know that the days were
shorter then than now. Maui watched his mother's futile toil and
felt sorry for her. He decided to do something--oh, no, not to help
her hang out and take in the kapas. He was too clever for that.
His idea was to make the sun go slower. Perhaps he was the first
Hawaiian astronomer. At any rate, he took a series of observations
of the sun from various parts of the island. His conclusion was
that the sun's path was directly across Haleakala. Unlike Joshua,
he stood in no need of divine assistance. He gathered a huge
quantity of coconuts, from the fibre of which he braided a stout
cord, and in one end of which he made a noose, even as the cow-boys
of Haleakala do to this day. Next he climbed into the House of the
Sun and laid in wait. When the sun came tearing along the path,
bent on completing its journey in the shortest time possible, the
valiant youth threw his lariat around one of the sun's largest and
strongest beams. He made the sun slow down some; also, he broke the
beam short off. And he kept on roping and breaking off beams till
the sun said it was willing to listen to reason. Maui set forth his
terms of peace, which the sun accepted, agreeing to go more slowly
thereafter. Wherefore Hina had ample time in which to dry her
kapas, and the days are longer than they used to be, which last is
quite in accord with the teachings of modern astronomy.
We had a lunch of jerked beef and hard poi in a stone corral, used
of old time for the night-impounding of cattle being driven across
the island. Then we skirted the rim for half a mile and began the
descent into the crater. Twenty-five hundred feet beneath lay the
floor, and down a steep slope of loose volcanic cinders we dropped,
the sure-footed horses slipping and sliding, but always keeping
their feet. The black surface of the cinders, when broken by the
horses' hoofs, turned to a yellow ochre dust, virulent in appearance
and acid of taste, that arose in clouds. There was a gallop across
a level stretch to the mouth of a convenient blow-hole, and then the
descent continued in clouds of volcanic dust, winding in and out
among cinder-cones, brick-red, old rose, and purplish black of
colour. Above us, higher and higher, towered the crater-walls,
while we journeyed on across innumerable lava-flows, turning and
twisting a devious way among the adamantine billows of a petrified
sea. Saw-toothed waves of lava vexed the surface of this weird
ocean, while on either hand arose jagged crests and spiracles of
fantastic shape. Our way led on past a bottomless pit and along and
over the main stream of the latest lava-flow for seven miles.
At the lower end of the crater was our camping spot, in a small
grove of olapa and kolea trees, tucked away in a corner of the
crater at the base of walls that rose perpendicularly fifteen
hundred feet. Here was pasturage for the horses, but no water, and
first we turned aside and picked our way across a mile of lava to a
known water-hole in a crevice in the crater-wall. The water-hole
was empty. But on climbing fifty feet up the crevice, a pool was
found containing half a dozen barrels of water. A pail was carried
up, and soon a steady stream of the precious liquid was running down
the rock and filling the lower pool, while the cow-boys below were
busy fighting the horses back, for there was room for one only to
drink at a time. Then it was on to camp at the foot of the wall, up
which herds of wild goats scrambled and blatted, while the tent
arose to the sound of rifle-firing. Jerked beef, hard poi, and
broiled kid were the menu. Over the crest of the crater, just above
our heads, rolled a sea of clouds, driven on by Ukiukiu. Though
this sea rolled over the crest unceasingly, it never blotted out nor
dimmed the moon, for the heat of the crater dissolved the clouds as
fast as they rolled in. Through the moonlight, attracted by the
camp-fire, came the crater cattle to peer and challenge. They were
rolling fat, though they rarely drank water, the morning dew on the
grass taking its place. It was because of this dew that the tent
made a welcome bedchamber, and we fell asleep to the chanting of
hulas by the unwearied Hawaiian cowboys, in whose veins, no doubt,
ran the blood of Maui, their valiant forebear.
The camera cannot do justice to the House of the Sun. The
sublimated chemistry of photography may not lie, but it certainly
does not tell all the truth. The Koolau Gap may be faithfully
reproduced, just as it impinged on the retina of the camera, yet in
the resulting picture the gigantic scale of things would be missing.
Those walls that seem several hundred feet in height are almost as
many thousand; that entering wedge of cloud is a mile and a half
wide in the gap itself, while beyond the gap it is a veritable
ocean; and that foreground of cinder-cone and volcanic ash, mushy
and colourless in appearance, is in truth gorgeous-hued in brick-
red, terra-cotta rose, yellow ochre, and purplish black. Also,
words are a vain thing and drive to despair. To say that a crater-
wall is two thousand feet high is to say just precisely that it is
two thousand feet high; but there is a vast deal more to that
crater-wall than a mere statistic. The sun is ninety-three millions
of miles distant, but to mortal conception the adjoining county is
farther away. This frailty of the human brain is hard on the sun.
It is likewise hard on the House of the Sun. Haleakala has a
message of beauty and wonder for the human soul that cannot be
delivered by proxy. Kolikoli is six hours from Kahului; Kahului is
a night's run from Honolulu; Honolulu is six days from San
Francisco; and there you are.
We climbed the crater-walls, put the horses over impossible places,
rolled stones, and shot wild goats. I did not get any goats. I was
too busy rolling stones. One spot in particular I remember, where
we started a stone the size of a horse. It began the descent easy
enough, rolling over, wobbling, and threatening to stop; but in a
few minutes it was soaring through the air two hundred feet at a
jump. It grew rapidly smaller until it struck a slight slope of
volcanic sand, over which it darted like a startled jackrabbit,
kicking up behind it a tiny trail of yellow dust. Stone and dust
diminished in size, until some of the party said the stone had
stopped. That was because they could not see it any longer. It had
vanished into the distance beyond their ken. Others saw it rolling
farther on--I know I did; and it is my firm conviction that that
stone is still rolling.
Our last day in the crater, Ukiukiu gave us a taste of his strength.
He smashed Naulu back all along the line, filled the House of the
Sun to overflowing with clouds, and drowned us out. Our rain-gauge
was a pint cup under a tiny hole in the tent. That last night of
storm and rain filled the cup, and there was no way of measuring the
water that spilled over into the blankets. With the rain-gauge out
of business there was no longer any reason for remaining; so we
broke camp in the wet-gray of dawn, and plunged eastward across the
lava to the Kaupo Gap. East Maui is nothing more or less than the
vast lava stream that flowed long ago through the Kaupo Gap; and
down this stream we picked our way from an altitude of six thousand
five hundred feet to the sea. This was a day's work in itself for
the horses; but never were there such horses. Safe in the bad
places, never rushing, never losing their heads, as soon as they
found a trail wide and smooth enough to run on, they ran. There was
no stopping them until the trail became bad again, and then they
stopped of themselves. Continuously, for days, they had performed
the hardest kind of work, and fed most of the time on grass foraged
by themselves at night while we slept, and yet that day they covered
twenty-eight leg-breaking miles and galloped into Hana like a bunch
of colts. Also, there were several of them, reared in the dry
region on the leeward side of Haleakala, that had never worn shoes
in all their lives. Day after day, and all day long, unshod, they
had travelled over the sharp lava, with the extra weight of a man on
their backs, and their hoofs were in better condition than those of
the shod horses.
The scenery between Vieiras's (where the Kaupo Gap empties into the
sea) and Lana, which we covered in half a day, is well worth a week
or month; but, wildly beautiful as it is, it becomes pale and small
in comparison with the wonderland that lies beyond the rubber
plantations between Hana and the Honomanu Gulch. Two days were
required to cover this marvellous stretch, which lies on the
windward side of Haleakala. The people who dwell there call it the
"ditch country," an unprepossessing name, but it has no other.
Nobody else ever comes there. Nobody else knows anything about it.
With the exception of a handful of men, whom business has brought
there, nobody has heard of the ditch country of Maui. Now a ditch
is a ditch, assumably muddy, and usually traversing uninteresting
and monotonous landscapes. But the Nahiku Ditch is not an ordinary
ditch. The windward side of Haleakala is serried by a thousand
precipitous gorges, down which rush as many torrents, each torrent
of which achieves a score of cascades and waterfalls before it
reaches the sea. More rain comes down here than in any other region
in the world. In 1904 the year's downpour was four hundred and
twenty inches. Water means sugar, and sugar is the backbone of the
territory of Hawaii, wherefore the Nahiku Ditch, which is not a
ditch, but a chain of tunnels. The water travels underground,
appearing only at intervals to leap a gorge, travelling high in the
air on a giddy flume and plunging into and through the opposing
mountain. This magnificent waterway is called a "ditch," and with
equal appropriateness can Cleopatra's barge be called a box-car.
There are no carriage roads through the ditch country, and before
the ditch was built, or bored, rather, there was no horse-trail.
Hundreds of inches of rain annually, on fertile soil, under a tropic
sun, means a steaming jungle of vegetation. A man, on foot, cutting
his way through, might advance a mile a day, but at the end of a
week he would be a wreck, and he would have to crawl hastily back if
he wanted to get out before the vegetation overran the passage way
he had cut. O'Shaughnessy was the daring engineer who conquered the
jungle and the gorges, ran the ditch and made the horse-trail. He
built enduringly, in concrete and masonry, and made one of the most
remarkable water-farms in the world. Every little runlet and
dribble is harvested and conveyed by subterranean channels to the
main ditch. But so heavily does it rain at times that countless
spillways let the surplus escape to the sea.
The horse-trail is not very wide. Like the engineer who built it,
it dares anything. Where the ditch plunges through the mountain, it
climbs over; and where the ditch leaps a gorge on a flume, the
horse-trail takes advantage of the ditch and crosses on top of the
flume. That careless trail thinks nothing of travelling up or down
the faces of precipices. It gouges its narrow way out of the wall,
dodging around waterfalls or passing under them where they thunder
down in white fury; while straight overhead the wall rises hundreds
of feet, and straight beneath it sinks a thousand. And those
marvellous mountain horses are as unconcerned as the trail. They
fox-trot along it as a matter of course, though the footing is
slippery with rain, and they will gallop with their hind feet
slipping over the edge if you let them. I advise only those with
steady nerves and cool heads to tackle the Nahiku Ditch trail. One
of our cow-boys was noted as the strongest and bravest on the big
ranch. He had ridden mountain horses all his life on the rugged
western slopes of Haleakala. He was first in the horse-breaking;
and when the others hung back, as a matter of course, he would go in
to meet a wild bull in the cattle-pen. He had a reputation. But he
had never ridden over the Nahiku Ditch. It was there he lost his
reputation. When he faced the first flume, spanning a hair-raising
gorge, narrow, without railings, with a bellowing waterfall above,
another below, and directly beneath a wild cascade, the air filled
with driving spray and rocking to the clamour and rush of sound and
motion--well, that cow-boy dismounted from his horse, explained
briefly that he had a wife and two children, and crossed over on
foot, leading the horse behind him.
The only relief from the flumes was the precipices; and the only
relief from the precipices was the flumes, except where the ditch
was far under ground, in which case we crossed one horse and rider
at a time, on primitive log-bridges that swayed and teetered and
threatened to carry away. I confess that at first I rode such
places with my feet loose in the stirrups, and that on the sheer
walls I saw to it, by a definite, conscious act of will, that the
foot in the outside stirrup, overhanging the thousand feet of fall,
was exceedingly loose. I say "at first"; for, as in the crater
itself we quickly lost our conception of magnitude, so, on the
Nahiku Ditch, we quickly lost our apprehension of depth. The
ceaseless iteration of height and depth produced a state of
consciousness in which height and depth were accepted as the
ordinary conditions of existence; and from the horse's back to look
sheer down four hundred or five hundred feet became quite
commonplace and non-productive of thrills. And as carelessly as the
trail and the horses, we swung along the dizzy heights and ducked
around or through the waterfalls.
And such a ride! Falling water was everywhere. We rode above the
clouds, under the clouds, and through the clouds! and every now and
then a shaft of sunshine penetrated like a search-light to the
depths yawning beneath us, or flashed upon some pinnacle of the
crater-rim thousands of feet above. At every turn of the trail a
waterfall or a dozen waterfalls, leaping hundreds of feet through
the air, burst upon our vision. At our first night's camp, in the
Keanae Gulch, we counted thirty-two waterfalls from a single
viewpoint. The vegetation ran riot over that wild land. There were
forests of koa and kolea trees, and candlenut trees; and then there
were the trees called ohia-ai, which bore red mountain apples,
mellow and juicy and most excellent to eat. Wild bananas grew
everywhere, clinging to the sides of the gorges, and, overborne by
their great bunches of ripe fruit, falling across the trail and
blocking the way. And over the forest surged a sea of green life,
the climbers of a thousand varieties, some that floated airily, in
lacelike filaments, from the tallest branches others that coiled and
wound about the trees like huge serpents; and one, the ei-ei, that
was for all the world like a climbing palm, swinging on a thick stem
from branch to branch and tree to tree and throttling the supports
whereby it climbed. Through the sea of green, lofty tree-ferns
thrust their great delicate fronds, and the lehua flaunted its
scarlet blossoms. Underneath the climbers, in no less profusion,
grew the warm-coloured, strangely-marked plants that in the United
States one is accustomed to seeing preciously conserved in hot-
houses. In fact, the ditch country of Maui is nothing more nor less
than a huge conservatory. Every familiar variety of fern
flourishes, and more varieties that are unfamiliar, from the tiniest
maidenhair to the gross and voracious staghorn, the latter the
terror of the woodsmen, interlacing with itself in tangled masses
five or six feet deep and covering acres.
Never was there such a ride. For two days it lasted, when we
emerged into rolling country, and, along an actual wagon-road, came
home to the ranch at a gallop. I know it was cruel to gallop the
horses after such a long, hard journey; but we blistered our hands
in vain effort to hold them in. That's the sort of horses they grow
on Haleakala. At the ranch there was great festival of cattle-
driving, branding, and horse-breaking. Overhead Ukiukiu and Naulu
battled valiantly, and far above, in the sunshine, towered the
mighty summit of Haleakala.
Content of CHAPTER VIII - THE HOUSE OF THE SUN [Jack London's book: The Cruise of the Snark]
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