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.