We rode horseback all around the island of Hawaii (the crooked
road making the distance two hundred miles), and enjoyed the
journey very much. We were more than a week making the trip,
because our Kanaka horses would not go by a house or a hut
without stopping—whip and spur could not alter their minds about
it, and so we finally found that it economized time to let them
have their way. Upon inquiry the mystery was explained: the
natives are such thorough-going gossips that they never pass a
house without stopping to swap news, and consequently their
horses learn to regard that sort of thing as an essential part of
the whole duty of man, and his salvation not to be compassed
without it. However, at a former crisis of my life I had once
taken an aristocratic young lady out driving, behind a horse that
had just retired from a long and honorable career as the moving
impulse of a milk wagon, and so this present experience awoke a
reminiscent sadness in me in place of the exasperation more
natural to the occasion. I remembered how helpless I was that
day, and how humiliated; how ashamed I was of having intimated to
the girl that I had always owned the horse and was accustomed to
grandeur; how hard I tried to appear easy, and even vivacious,
under suffering that was consuming my vitals; how placidly and
maliciously the girl smiled, and kept on smiling, while my hot
blushes baked themselves into a permanent blood-pudding in my
face; how the horse ambled from one side of the street to the
other and waited complacently before every third house two
minutes and a quarter while I belabored his back and reviled him
in my heart; how I tried to keep him from turning corners and
failed; how I moved heaven and earth to get him out of town, and
did not succeed; how he traversed the entire settlement and
delivered imaginary milk at a hundred and sixty-two different
domiciles, and how he finally brought up at a dairy depot and
refused to budge further, thus rounding and completing the
revealment of what the plebeian service of his life had been;
how, in eloquent silence, I walked the girl home, and how, when I
took leave of her, her parting remark scorched my soul and
appeared to blister me all over: she said that my horse was a
fine, capable animal, and I must have taken great comfort in him
in my time—but that if I would take along some milk-tickets next
time, and appear to deliver them at the various halting places,
it might expedite his movements a little. There was a coolness
between us after that.
In one place in the island of Hawaii, we saw a laced and
ruffled cataract of limpid water leaping from a sheer precipice
fifteen hundred feet high; but that sort of scenery finds its
stanchest ally in the arithmetic rather than in spectacular
effect. If one desires to be so stirred by a poem of Nature
wrought in the happily commingled graces of picturesque rocks,
glimpsed distances, foliage, color, shifting lights and shadows,
and failing water, that the tears almost come into his eyes so
potent is the charm exerted, he need not go away from America to
enjoy such an experience. The Rainbow Fall, in Watkins Glen
(N.Y.), on the Erie railway, is an example. It would recede into
pitiable insignificance if the callous tourist drew on arithmetic
on it; but left to compete for the honors simply on scenic grace
and beauty—the grand, the august and the sublime being barred
the contest—it could challenge the old world and the new to
produce its peer.
In one locality, on our journey, we saw some horses that had
been born and reared on top of the mountains, above the range of
running water, and consequently they had never drank that fluid
in their lives, but had been always accustomed to quenching their
thirst by eating dew-laden or shower-wetted leaves. And now it
was destructively funny to see them sniff suspiciously at a pail
of water, and then put in their noses and try to take a bite out
of the fluid, as if it were a solid. Finding it liquid, they
would snatch away their heads and fall to trembling, snorting and
showing other evidences of fright. When they became convinced at
last that the water was friendly and harmless, they thrust in
their noses up to their eyes, brought out a mouthful of water,
and proceeded to chew it complacently. We saw a man coax, kick
and spur one of them five or ten minutes before he could make it
cross a running stream. It spread its nostrils, distended its
eyes and trembled all over, just as horses customarily do in the
presence of a serpent—and for aught I know it thought the
crawling stream was a serpent.
In due course of time our journey came to an end at Kawaehae
(usually pronounced To-a-hi—and before we find fault with this
elaborate orthographical method of arriving at such an
unostentatious result, let us lop off the ugh from our word
“though”). I made this horseback trip on a mule. I paid ten
dollars for him at Kau (Kah-oo), added four to get him shod, rode
him two hundred miles, and then sold him for fifteen dollars. I
mark the circumstance with a white stone (in the absence of
chalk—for I never saw a white stone that a body could mark
anything with, though out of respect for the ancients I have
tried it often enough); for up to that day and date it was the
first strictly commercial transaction I had ever entered into,
and come out winner. We returned to Honolulu, and from thence
sailed to the island of Maui, and spent several weeks there very
pleasantly. I still remember, with a sense of indolent luxury, a
picnicing excursion up a romantic gorge there, called the Iao
Valley. The trail lay along the edge of a brawling stream in the
bottom of the gorge—a shady route, for it was well roofed with
the verdant domes of forest trees. Through openings in the
foliage we glimpsed picturesque scenery that revealed ceaseless
changes and new charms with every step of our progress.
Perpendicular walls from one to three thousand feet high guarded
the way, and were sumptuously plumed with varied foliage, in
places, and in places swathed in waving ferns. Passing shreds of
cloud trailed their shadows across these shining fronts, mottling
them with blots; billowy masses of white vapor hid the turreted
summits, and far above the vapor swelled a background of gleaming
green crags and cones that came and went, through the veiling
mists, like islands drifting in a fog; sometimes the cloudy
curtain descended till half the canon wall was hidden, then
shredded gradually away till only airy glimpses of the ferny
front appeared through it—then swept aloft and left it glorified
in the sun again. Now and then, as our position changed, rocky
bastions swung out from the wall, a mimic ruin of castellated
ramparts and crumbling towers clothed with mosses and hung with
garlands of swaying vines, and as we moved on they swung back
again and hid themselves once more in the foliage. Presently a
verdure-clad needle of stone, a thousand feet high, stepped out
from behind a corner, and mounted guard over the mysteries of the
valley. It seemed to me that if Captain Cook needed a monument,
here was one ready made—therefore, why not put up his sign here,
and sell out the venerable cocoanut stump?
But the chief pride of Maui is her dead volcano of
Haleakala—which means, translated, “the house of the sun.” We
climbed a thousand feet up the side of this isolated colossus one
afternoon; then camped, and next day climbed the remaining nine
thousand feet, and anchored on the summit, where we built a fire
and froze and roasted by turns, all night. With the first pallor
of dawn we got up and saw things that were new to us. Mounted on
a commanding pinnacle, we watched Nature work her silent wonders.
The sea was spread abroad on every hand, its tumbled surface
seeming only wrinkled and dimpled in the distance. A broad valley
below appeared like an ample checker-board, its velvety green
sugar plantations alternating with dun squares of barrenness and
groves of trees diminished to mossy tufts. Beyond the valley were
mountains picturesquely grouped together; but bear in mind, we
fancied that we were looking up at these things—not down. We
seemed to sit in the bottom of a symmetrical bowl ten thousand
feet deep, with the valley and the skirting sea lifted away into
the sky above us! It was curious; and not only curious, but
aggravating; for it was having our trouble all for nothing, to
climb ten thousand feet toward heaven and then have to look up at
our scenery. However, we had to be content with it and make the
best of it; for, all we could do we could not coax our landscape
down out of the clouds. Formerly, when I had read an article in
which Poe treated of this singular fraud perpetrated upon the eye
by isolated great altitudes, I had looked upon the matter as an
invention of his own fancy.
I have spoken of the outside view—but we had an inside one,
too. That was the yawning dead crater, into which we now and then
tumbled rocks, half as large as a barrel, from our perch, and saw
them go careering down the almost perpendicular sides, bounding
three hundred feet at a jump; kicking up cast-clouds wherever
they struck; diminishing to our view as they sped farther into
distance; growing invisible, finally, and only betraying their
course by faint little puffs of dust; and coming to a halt at
last in the bottom of the abyss, two thousand five hundred feet
down from where they started! It was magnificent sport. We wore
ourselves out at it.
The crater of Vesuvius, as I have before remarked, is a modest
pit about a thousand feet deep and three thousand in
circumference; that of Kilauea is somewhat deeper, and ten miles
in circumference. But what are either of them compared to the
vacant stomach of Haleakala? I will not offer any figures of my
own, but give official ones—those of Commander Wilkes, U.S.N.,
who surveyed it and testifies that it is twenty-seven miles in
circumference! If it had a level bottom it would make a fine site
for a city like London. It must have afforded a spectacle worth
contemplating in the old days when its furnaces gave full rein to
their anger.
Presently vagrant white clouds came drifting along, high over
the sea and the valley; then they came in couples and groups;
then in imposing squadrons; gradually joining their forces, they
banked themselves solidly together, a thousand feet under us, and
totally shut out land and ocean—not a vestige of anything was
left in view but just a little of the rim of the crater, circling
away from the pinnacle whereon we sat (for a ghostly procession
of wanderers from the filmy hosts without had drifted through a
chasm in the crater wall and filed round and round, and gathered
and sunk and blended together till the abyss was stored to the
brim with a fleecy fog). Thus banked, motion ceased, and silence
reigned. Clear to the horizon, league on league, the snowy floor
stretched without a break—not level, but in rounded folds, with
shallow creases between, and with here and there stately piles of
vapory architecture lifting themselves aloft out of the common
plain—some near at hand, some in the middle distances, and
others relieving the monotony of the remote solitudes. There was
little conversation, for the impressive scene overawed speech. I
felt like the Last Man, neglected of the judgment, and left
pinnacled in mid-heaven, a forgotten relic of a vanished
world.
While the hush yet brooded, the messengers of the coming
resurrection appeared in the East. A growing warmth suffused the
horizon, and soon the sun emerged and looked out over the
cloud-waste, flinging bars of ruddy light across it, staining its
folds and billow-caps with blushes, purpling the shaded troughs
between, and glorifying the massy vapor-palaces and cathedrals
with a wasteful splendor of all blendings and combinations of
rich coloring.
It was the sublimest spectacle I ever witnessed, and I think
the memory of it will remain with me always.
