Roughing It
in the path these were all worn away. So he put the lantern behind him,
and began to search with his boots instead of his eyes. It was good
sagacity. The first time his foot touched a surface that did not grind
under it he announced that the trail was found again; and after that we
kept up a sharp listening for the rasping sound and it always warned us
in time.
It was a long tramp, but an exciting one. We reached the North Lake
between ten and eleven o’clock, and sat down on a huge overhanging lava-
shelf, tired but satisfied. The spectacle presented was worth coming
double the distance to see. Under us, and stretching away before us, was
a heaving sea of molten fire of seemingly limitless extent. The glare
from it was so blinding that it was some time before we could bear to
look upon it steadily.
It was like gazing at the sun at noon-day, except that the glare was not
quite so white. At unequal distances all around the shores of the lake
were nearly white-hot chimneys or hollow drums of lava, four or five
feet high, and up through them were bursting gorgeous sprays of lava-
gouts and gem spangles, some white, some red and some golden—a ceaseless
bombardment, and one that fascinated the eye with its unapproachable
splendor. The mere distant jets, sparkling up through an intervening
gossamer veil of vapor, seemed miles away; and the further the curving
ranks of fiery fountains receded, the more fairy-like and beautiful they
appeared.
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Now and then the surging bosom of the lake under our noses would calm
down ominously and seem to be gathering strength for an enterprise; and
then all of a sudden a red dome of lava of the bulk of an ordinary
dwelling would heave itself aloft like an escaping balloon, then burst
asunder, and out of its heart would flit a pale-green film of vapor, and
float upward and vanish in the darkness—a released soul soaring homeward
from captivity with the damned, no doubt. The crashing plunge of the
ruined dome into the lake again would send a world of seething billows
lashing against the shores and shaking the foundations of our perch. By
and by, a loosened mass of the hanging shelf we sat on tumbled into the
lake, jarring the surroundings like an earthquake and delivering a
suggestion that may have been intended for a hint, and may not. We did
not wait to see.
We got lost again on our way back, and were more than an hour hunting
for the path. We were where we could see the beacon lantern at the look-
out house at the time, but thought it was a star and paid no attention
to it. We reached the hotel at two o’clock in the morning pretty well
fagged out.
Kilauea never overflows its vast crater, but bursts a passage for its
lava through the mountain side when relief is necessary, and then the
destruction is fearful. About 1840 it rent its overburdened stomach and
sent a broad river of fire careering down to the sea, which swept away
forests, huts, plantations and every thing else that lay in its path.
The stream was _five miles broad_, in places, and _two hundred feet
deep_, and the distance it traveled was forty miles. It tore up and bore
away acre-patches of land on its bosom like rafts—rocks, trees and all
intact. At night the red glare was visible a hundred miles at sea; and
at a distance of forty miles fine print could be read at midnight. The
atmosphere was poisoned with sulphurous vapors and choked with falling
ashes, pumice stones and cinders; countless columns of smoke rose up and
blended together in a tumbled canopy that hid the heavens and glowed
with a ruddy flush reflected from the fires below; here and there jets
of lava sprung hundreds of feet into the air and burst into rocket-
sprays that returned to earth in a crimson rain; and all the while the
laboring mountain shook with Nature’s great palsy and voiced its
distress in moanings and the muffled booming of subterranean thunders.
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Fishes were killed for twenty miles along the shore, where the lava
entered the sea. The earthquakes caused some loss of human life, and a
prodigious tidal wave swept inland, carrying every thing before it and
drowning a number of natives. The devastation consummated along the
route traversed by the river of lava was complete and incalculable. Only
a Pompeii and a Herculaneum were needed at the foot of Kilauea to make
the story of the irruption immortal.
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CHAPTER LXXVI.
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.
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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 falling 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 cañon 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?
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But the chief pride of Maui is her dead volcano of Haleakala—which