Roughing It
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.
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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.
CHAPTER LXXVII.
I stumbled upon one curious character in the Island of Maui. He became a
sore annoyance to me in the course of time. My first glimpse of him was
in a sort of public room in the town of Lahaina. He occupied a chair at
the opposite side of the apartment, and sat eyeing our party with
interest for some minutes, and listening as critically to what we were
saying as if he fancied we were talking to him and expecting him to
reply. I thought it very sociable in a stranger. Presently, in the
course of conversation, I made a statement bearing upon the subject
under discussion—and I made it with due modesty, for there was nothing
extraordinary about it, and it was only put forth in illustration of a
point at issue. I had barely finished when this person spoke out with
rapid utterance and feverish anxiety:
“Oh, that was certainly remarkable, after a fashion, but you ought to
have seen _my_ chimney—you ought to have seen _my_ chimney, sir! Smoke!
I wish I may hang if—Mr. Jones, _you_ remember that chimney—_you_ must
remember that chimney! No, no—I recollect, now, you warn’t living on
this side of the island then. But I am telling you nothing but the
truth, and I wish I may never draw another breath if that chimney didn’t
smoke so that the smoke actually got _caked_ in it and I had to dig it
out with a pickaxe! You may smile, gentlemen, but the High Sheriff’s got
a hunk of it which I dug out before his eyes, and so it’s perfectly easy
for you to go and examine for yourselves.”
The interruption broke up the conversation, which had already begun to
lag, and we presently hired some natives and an out-rigger canoe or two,
and went out to overlook a grand surf-bathing contest.
Two weeks after this, while talking in a company, I looked up and
detected this same man boring through and through me with his intense
eye, and noted again his twitching muscles and his feverish anxiety to
speak. The moment I paused, he said:
“_Beg_ your pardon, sir, beg your pardon, but it can only be considered
remarkable when brought into strong outline by isolation. Sir,
contrasted with a circumstance which occurred in my own experience, it
instantly becomes commonplace. No, not that—for I will not speak so
discourteously of any experience in the career of a stranger and a
gentleman—but I am _obliged_ to say that you could not, and you _would_
not ever again refer to this tree as a _large_ one, if you could behold,
as I have, the great Yakmatack tree, in the island of Ounaska, sea of
Kamtchatka—a tree, sir, not one inch less than four hundred and fifteen
feet in solid diameter!—and I wish I may die in a minute if it isn’t so!
Oh, you needn’t look so questioning, gentlemen; here’s old Cap Saltmarsh
can say whether I know what I’m talking about or not. I showed him the
tree.”
_Captain Saltmarsh_.—“Come, now, cat your anchor, lad—you’re heaving too
taut. You _promised_ to show me that stunner, and I walked more than
eleven mile with you through the cussedest jungle _I_ ever see, a
hunting for it; but the tree you showed me finally warn’t as big around
as a beer cask, and _you_ know that your own self, Markiss.”
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“Hear the man talk! Of _course_ the tree was reduced that way, but
didn’t I _explain_ it? Answer me, didn’t I? Didn’t I say I wished you
could have seen it when _I_ first saw it? When you got up on your ear
and called me names, and said I had brought you eleven miles to look at
a sapling, didn’t I _explain_ to you that all the whale-ships in the
North Seas had been wooding off of it for more than twenty-seven years?
And did you s’pose the tree could last for-_ever_, con-_found_ it? I
don’t see why you want to keep back things that way, and try to injure a
person that’s never done _you_ any harm.”
Somehow this man’s presence made me uncomfortable, and I was glad when a
native arrived at that moment to say that Muckawow, the most
companionable and luxurious among the rude war-chiefs of the Islands,
desired us to come over and help him enjoy a missionary whom he had
found trespassing on his grounds.
I think it was about ten days afterward that, as I finished a statement
I was making for the instruction of a group of friends and
acquaintances, and which made no pretence of being extraordinary, a
familiar voice chimed instantly in on the heels of my last word, and
said:
“But, my dear sir, there was _nothing_ remarkable about that horse, or
the circumstance either—nothing in the world! I mean no sort of offence
when I say it, sir, but you really do not know anything whatever about
speed. Bless your heart, if you could only have seen my mare Margaretta;
_there_ was a beast!—_there_ was lightning for you! Trot! Trot is no
name for it—she flew! How she could whirl a buggy along! I started her
out once, sir—Colonel Bilgewater, _you_ recollect that animal perfectly
well—I started her out about thirty or thirty-five yards ahead of the
awfullest storm I ever saw in my life, and it chased us upwards of
eighteen miles! It did, by the everlasting hills! And I’m telling you
nothing but the unvarnished truth when I say that not one single _drop_
of rain fell on me—not a single drop, sir! And I swear to it! But my dog
was a-swimming behind the wagon all the way!”
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For a week or two I stayed mostly within doors, for I seemed to meet
this person everywhere, and he had become utterly hateful to me. But one
evening I dropped in on Captain Perkins and his friends, and we had a
sociable time. About ten o’clock I chanced to be talking about a
merchant friend of mine, and without really intending it, the remark
slipped out that he was a little mean and parsimonious about paying his
workmen. Instantly, through the steam of a hot whiskey punch on the
opposite side of the room, a remembered voice shot—and for a moment I
trembled on the imminent verge of profanity:
“Oh, my dear sir, really you expose yourself when you parade _that_ as a
surprising circumstance. Bless your heart and hide, you are ignorant of
the very A B C of meanness! ignorant as the unborn babe! ignorant as
unborn _twins_! You don’t know _anything_ about it! It is pitiable to
see you, sir, a well-spoken and prepossessing stranger, making such an
enormous pow-wow here about a subject concerning which your ignorance is
perfectly humiliating! Look me in the eye, if you please; look me in the
eye. John James Godfrey was the son of poor but honest parents in the
State of Mississippi—boyhood friend of mine—bosom comrade in later
years. Heaven rest his noble spirit, he is gone from us now. John James
Godfrey was hired by the Hayblossom Mining Company in California to do
some blasting for them—the “Incorporated Company of Mean Men,” the boys
used to call it.
“Well, one day he drilled a hole about four feet deep and put in an
awful blast of powder, and was standing over it ramming it down with an
iron crowbar about nine foot long, when the cussed thing struck a spark
and fired the powder, and scat! away John Godfrey whizzed like a