Part 4

As we gather around the fireplace, Maby tells us stories of himself, and sailor yarns that interest us as regarding places we are looking to. One about Nukahiva has a flavour of Melville about it. It shows Maby landed there, and being told that he must (unless he wishes to behave suspiciously), report to the governor. This official receives the visit graciously, but requires a poll-tax of two dollars, not asking directly, but by the proper channel. Maby states that two dollars he has not, but offers to work it out; whereat he is taken at his word, and helps toward the completion, carpentering and painting, of the governor’s house; and after some long stay, at fair wages, offers to deduct his two dollars. But no, says the governor, he is now in government employ, and not liable to taxation.

In connection with this story, in my sleepy memory, is one of some expedition, with the governor and his army of _one_ gendarme (“jenny dee arms,” Maby calls it), into the interior, or, rather, along the shore, for the purpose of levying the tax. Money there is none at the first place they come to, so that the gendarme is ordered to take a pig or so in payment. But the country has been aroused. Men come flocking down with old flint-guns, a retreat along the beach to the boat is ordered, and the pigs are abandoned on the way. All this was capital, as was Maby’s delight at the absurdity of some savage who knew not of gold, and to whom an Englishman gave a piece of gold instead of silver. As he complained, Maby relieved him of his anxiety by taking it and giving him the desired shilling.

With many stories we sat up and went late to bed, looking out on a darkish night, wherein two slight illuminations at a distance meant the light of the volcano. But nothing looked propitious. Dana Lake was quiet; there was only a little fire on the edges of the lake. Maby spoke as if something must happen elsewhere from the quiet of the volcano here.

In the morning Adams woke me out of sound sleep; the air was cold, damp, and the room decidedly so during the night. As I came out the sun was rising. Before us was the volcano, still in shadow, but the walls of the crater lit up pink in the sun, and farther out the long line of Mauna Loa appearing to come right down to these cliffs, all clear and lit up except for the shadow of one enormous cloud that stretched half across the sky. The floor of the crater, of black lava, was almost all in shadow, so that as it stretched to its sunlit walls it seemed as if all below was shadow. In the centre of the space smoked the cones that rise from the bed of the crater. Through this vapour we saw the further walls, and on the other side of the flow, as it sloped away from us, more steam marked the lava openings at Dana Lake, invisible to us.

We sketched that day and lounged in the afternoon, the rain coming down and shutting out things; but in the noon I

[Illustration: CENTRAL CONE OF VOLCANO OF KILAUEA, HAWAII]

was able to make a sketch in the faint sunlight; and that was of no value, but as I looked and tried to match tints, I realized more and more the unearthly look that the black masses take under the light. A slight radiance from these surfaces of molten black glass gives a curious sheen, that far off in tones of mirage does anything that light reflected can do, and fills the eye with imaginary suggestions. Hence the delightful silver; hence the rosy coldness, that had made fairylands for us of the desert aridity. But nearer, the glitter is like that of the moon on a hard cold night, and the volcano crater I shall always think of as a piece of dead world, and far away in the prismatic tones of the mountain sides, I shall see a revelation of the landscapes of the moon.

Late in the afternoon the young Australian, or whatever he was, who had been with us, went down with a guide into the crater, and returned toward ten o’clock with a story that Dana Lake had broken. He had seen the grey surfaces move and tumble over like ice pack into the fire, and we were proportionately curious to see and unwilling to go. For I must own that it has been rather out of duty than otherwise that we have been here. Neither of us cares for climbing, and certainly the pleasure of seeing fire near by must be very exciting to amount to pleasure. Yet we went next day and toiled down to the surface of the crater, which is accessible from our side by a zigzag path. By and by one gets to the surface of the crater, which rises to the centre and (when one is on it) shows nothing but a desolate labyrinth of rocks. We walk over this tiresome surface that destroys the sole of the boot, following more or less in single file, because of crevasses that are deep, and at the end of a walk of some three miles, we approach the cones that rise high above us, perhaps seventy feet. Maby says that they are higher than they were, for this whole surface of lava is movable, and parts of it like the cones float over a molten surface underneath. Think of it as glass and you will just get the simile that it makes mentally. To the eyes it is rock; around the cones there are loose disorderly rocks piled up like loose stones in a fence--absolutely like it, which loose formation is called _a-a_ in Hawaiian, as the flowing, smooth lava, on which we have mainly walked, is called _pa-hoe-hoe_. Some of it is in crusts that are hollow to the tread, and that give way suddenly, to one’s annoyance, for it is hard to realize that it is still solid underneath. Especially as here our guide points out a small cone about a mile off, sticking out of a confusion or heap of broken rocks, or above the broken rocks that are before us and below us, for we are now walking on a colossal loose stone fence--far off, I say, in this confusion is a single cone, with a red glow in it. And now we cross a little more fence; the smooth and crusty surface is hot to the feet; we look down and see grey and red lines in the cracks below us that are fire; and then a few feet off, we look into and between some rocks, and see the lava flowing along, exactly like glass when it is cooling and growing red from former whiteness, a slow, viscous, sticky dropping into some hole below. Then we go back quickly and paddle along toward the other slope of the floor, where steam is rising; and by and by, as the light is waning after our two hours’ walk, we get within a short distance of the wall edge, and see a space apparently near higher rocks, some seventy feet high, I am told, which is Dana Lake. There is now only vapour; sulphurous fumes that float up and obscure the distance, and go up into the skies. But as the twilight begins, fires come out and the space is edged with fire that sometimes colours the clouds of vapour. At one side a small cone stands up, that burns with an eye of red fire. From time to time this opening spits out to one side a little vicious blotch of fire. The clouds of vapour rise so as to blur the distance, but near by the rocks are clear enough, and either black, or further off where they are cliffs, are greenish yellow with sulphur. Sizes become uncertain. I could swear that this lake was a thousand feet long and the cliffs were five hundred feet; but Awoki and the guide, walking along, reduce the lake to real proportions. Then it is only a small lake of some hundred and fifty to two hundred feet, perhaps. But the impression still remains--all is so thrown out of reference. The hole is so uncanny; the sky above, purple with the yellow of the afterglow, and partly covered by the yellowish tone of the hellish vapour, looks high up above us. I sit (and sketch) on the absurd rocks, and then we wait for something to happen. It has become night; we determine to give up hope of the breaking up of the lake, and we start. We have lanterns, but gradually these go out, and we have only one that has to be cherished, and we scramble along. By and by we halt, and looking back see greater lights, and our guide says that the lake has broken out. Still we are disinclined to return on the chance, for the vapours exaggerate everything; and after much scrambling we get back to the edge of the crater, after a seven hours’ tramp. As we go up the ascent the fires seem larger, and our host and the guides say that there is some breaking out. Still we are in doubt; we are disappointed and tired. And still I should not go back unless the most extraordinary conflagration occurred. Besides the undefined terror and spookiness of the thing, there is great boredom. There is nothing to take hold of, as it were--no centre of fire and terror--only inconvenience and a faint fear of one thing--but what?

But even without fire, the remainder of those dread hollows is something to affect the mind. Judge Dole was telling us

[Illustration: CRATER OF KILAUEA AND THE LAVA BED. HAWAII]

that he could not get out of his memory his having looked down the hollow of the pit of Halemaumau, then just extinct, and having seen an inverted hollow cone all in motion, with rock and débris rolling down to some indefinite centre far below.

I still have (as I write at Hilo) the scent of sulphur in my memory. From time to time, in our ride to Hilo next morning, this smell would come up, perhaps in reality. That was a bad ride, all over a sort of lava bed like a mountain torrent. Then it ended in the beginning of a road of red earth, soft and spongy, and up to the bellies of the horses. There we met, after fifteen miles of it, a carriage and horses that took us to Hilo, over a pretty road through a pretty tropical forest, to this little old place, the abode of quiet and cocoanut trees, where are very pleasant people; among them M. Furneaux, the artist, who shows us sketches, and talks to me of what I sympathize with--the being driven to means unusual to us, when we try to give an impression of the tone of colour here.

Ride from Hilo around the east of Island of Hawaii, September 19th to 22d.

It will be difficult to give you an account of our ride. As to the places, the names are indifferent, I think, and if I occasionally mention them, it is more for my own help than for yours.

Our ride was to be certainly for three days and more, over what is known as a very bad road; up and down through the gulches that edge the shore, breaking the line of our travel, and making little harbours where the surf ran in to meet the little torrents or runs that hurried to them in cascades or waterfalls. It was, for the first day or so, beautiful; not so very grand, except that the simplicity of the scene, consisting of the sea, high rocks, and some little river running down, had always that importance that belongs to the typical. Time and time again we had the high rocky banks of the little bays covered with trees; then in the centre of the shore, a little half island, with tall cocoanuts, and on one or both sides of it, the torrent and cascade rushing down, and the surf running in in a great lacelike spread over the black sand.

Once when I stopped to sketch for an hour or so, I enjoyed the essence of a type of scene that is with difficulty described, though every one knows it, and with difficulty painted, though any one might attempt it. From the hillside hidden in trees came over some very low rocks a cascade of two rills, and at its feet lay a little sheet of water, of perhaps some fifty yards in length and very narrow. On either side high rocks crowned with great ferns and much moss, and behind the few _lauhala_ (pandanus) trees upon them, and great banana leaves in some hollow. The rocks were black, spotted with green and white, and at their feet ran a little rim of sand. This for the land end of the basin. At the open sea end high rocks running far out into headlands, with many trees and bushes, so as to make walls, along which the sea rushed heavily to some little bar, at one end of which, on a small bluff with huts, grew a few cocoanut trees tossing in the wind: one would wish there were more. And the sea running far up over this sand melted with a cross current into the run of the little stream, so gently that each looked like a separate tide. Here the road crossed the ford, coming on either side from high-up banks. Near the rocks were the marked edges of the road, and up the stream, canoes, with white ends like the cusp of the moon, and white outriggers protected with thatch, lay on the grass.

[Illustration]

As I sat on some wet rocks near the sea, to sketch, I could see what happened during the day. Some wayfarer came down the slope, pushed across the stream his horse that put down its head to taste the brackish water; children and older natives crossed barefooted the less deep water; high up, some practised native in best dress, crossed at some well-known ford by adding a few stones. Later, loud cries, and the noise of a sail coming down. I could see them without looking, for I had to paint hard with my face turned the other way, and hurried by occasional showers. For our sky was all cloudy and wet, though faint drops of sunshine fell also here and there. But the horizon, as I sat so low, was all clear of that unearthly blue of the islands, against which danced the grey sea, and the triple line of grey surf, white perhaps otherwise, but dull against such a clearness of green aquamarine air.

Then the fishermen landed on the rocks and showed their fish, and all rushed that way, all but the girl who had come to sit behind me, and followed my work, perhaps to see what I was trying to make out. But she too succumbed when a half naked man held up a silvery fish of some mackerel shape right before me and her, and she ran off to the house near the cocoanut trees. Then the fishermen took off their ragged clothes, and washed them in the stream, within a foot or so of the tide-water; great strapping fellows when out of their clothes, with heavy muscles, splendid and brown like nuts, and sometimes with red _breech-clouts_, that brought out the olive of the wet skin. Then they bathed, plunging in the deeper channel, where the waves of their movement married the tide of the sea with the current of the stream. And later an old man with peaked grey beard sat down and washed his clothes, then walked in and lay down, he too as handsome in his nakedness, as he had looked broken down in his shabby clothes. Then he rose and slowly put on the wet clothes, to reappear later in a cleaner dress.

And a Chinaman charged across the stream on his mule, splashing the water about him. Then as the fishermen were gone, and all the boys and the women, probably to their meal just caught, all noise ceased, except the rush of the surf and the ripple of the tide, and in some interval the trickling of the little cascade. Above, the wind rustled at times the palms. Noonday and rest had come. And I left my work, and again on horseback trudged along the impossible road.

Sunday 21st.

As I went up the bank, a small furtive animal like a weasel ran up the perpendicular face of the big rock by the waterfall. It was a mongoose, an animal of a race imported to destroy the pest of rats, and now a plague in itself, and an example of the eternal story.

The lower part of the sky was clear, with small pearly clouds, the upper yet covered with heavy mist, so that the ocean was framed as above, and occasionally the view confined on the sides by the projecting rocks of the gulches, into which ran the sea and surf. Once, at Onomea, the cliff was hollowed into a great arch, beyond which the rock, all green with foliage, rose further out. Whether framed in by such cliffs, or stretched out beyond a single gaze, the ocean accompanied us most of the time--the _ocean_, distinctly, not recalling the seas of our shores, but the _great sea_, hiding the secret of its blue dyes in depths of full three thousand fathoms. And over its blue ran a perpetual story. Rarely during our few days was the whole surface under one influence. We saw faint mists and rain-clouds brushed over the water, often separated by intervals of sunny sapphire; the sky above still lit up and peaceful. Sometimes a part of the ocean was wiped out and became sky; sometimes great bars of grey broke across it; and again, as these rolled over the stilled edge of the waves, rainbows shone either where they joined the sea, or through their entire height, up into the upper air. For this great deceptive space seemed at our distance so peaceful, even when we could see the surf dashing in folds on the rocks and black beaches. Sometimes a solitary whitecap dotted it, or when the wind blew more, many spots of broken light threw a rosy bloom over the enchanted surface. Islands of reflected light, islands of purple shadow repeated the clouds above, and often the parent cloud, along with its reflected lights and its shadows, touched and melted into the waves, making enclosures, within which the eye could see vaguely, a trembling repetition of light and dark; and sometimes, perhaps most when

[Illustration: MEN BATHING IN THE RIVER NEAR THE SEA. ONOMEA, ISLAND OF HAWAII]

seen as a background to some trees or rocks, or grey native hut, with a figure in waving red or white framed in the blue opening through it, the distance and the sky melted into mere spaces of slightly different colour.

The eye never tired of this surface of blue below a greener sky, that repeated in the air that colour of greenness (blue-tint shade) that rests the sight. On land, meanwhile, our roads were good or bad, mostly bad, but not the terrors that we had heard of. Our poor nags struggled through deep mud at times, or slipped up and down in the rocks and loose stones of the gulches, or floundered in the river-beds, dropping up and down as they found footing on hidden boulders, or cantered in a tired way over some little piece of road near plantations. But their attention was mostly engaged in stepping along over the half-dried road, looking and feeling like our old “corduroy” roads, the logs being represented by bars of higher and drier mud. Over these we rose and sank, and I had plenty of time to meditate upon the idiocy of that sentimental animal, the horse, and his relative want of judgment. Never did our beasts step in any reasoned way upon these alternations of ground, though the little mule of our guide, as he trotted ahead, never going very fast, never very slow, showed his romantic relatives what pure intellect, devoid of emotions, can do in the practical line. With such nonsense I perforce diverted my mind, when confined within the limits of the road. But our horses had plenty of rest; we took four whole days for those ninety miles, stopping to sketch, and going to ask for lunch or dinner, and bed, at the plantations on our road. The only difficulty seemed to be our own hesitation at the impudence of our requests. But this is the custom. Our visit had been telephoned ahead by acquaintances; for the telephone, that most citylike of our contrivances, goes around the island, joining together places that are difficult to reach and out of the way.

And so we met pleasant people by chance, and heard about things accidentally by way of conversation, and were most kindly treated. Indeed, when on one occasion our amiable hostess asked us to remain over night, and we had listened to German music, and had talked with the doctor in charge of the plantations, and our host himself arrived from the fields, it seemed hard to go and break our feeling of content. Perhaps I ought to tell you something about the plantations, but that is too much like information--and what do you need it for? All that we saw was sugar, which occupies the east coast; on the other side of the island, as different as the other side of the continent, there are cattle ranches, and we were told that most of the sugar land that is available has been taken already. Most of the low land, I suppose; for the upper land further from the sea is often reclaimed and used, but it is less favourable. The yield by the acre below, at the highest, has been about eight tons, while the upper is not more than five; all this upon land which a few years ago was forest--wide downs now--covered either with sugar-cane or grass, and dotted with trees, were all covered to the sea edge, which, where I write now is a cliff fully eight hundred feet high.