76. 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.
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 canñon 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.