deck by the guards, the children ill with the rolling, for we pass
several channels between islands, each one a pretext for the wind to
give us a dance. And in the steerage people lay like herrings. It was
picturesque; a few Chinese, the rest Hawaiian, with much colour and
abundance of flowers and leaves that they like, and all eating on the
spot, apparently without moving--guitars playing--we had two guitars
aboard, and part of the night and morning somebody strummed; sometimes a
man appearing from a cabin, posing guitarero-way, touching a few chords
and going away again. Once, some fellow playing, squatted on the deck,
apparently for the baby, and the other babies, who inspected the guitar
inquiringly and approvingly--sometimes some of the women. In the late
afternoon, as the sun struck this mass of colour against a blue sea of
unnamable blue, at least two dozen of the people all in colours were
eating watermelon all red down to the rind. The appearance of a palette
well littered was only a symbol to it. And there was one beauty with
long nose and the rounded end suggesting the aquiline, the black
eyebrows _under_ the frontal bone, the pouting lip, and heavy chin and
long slope of jaw, and what they all have, even the ugly (like the Jap
girls), a pretty setting of ears and neck and black-hair’s growth. But
the children were prettier. We had a neighbour who had many and who
looked so plaintive, and another, though sick, was jolly and smiling.
And another was like a chieftain (or “chiefess”) with three great
furrows down her forehead above her nose. But they all smiled with great
sweetness, and I wish our women could do as much. All sullenness or
sternness or disdain disappeared from the face. They talked in English,
partly for convenience, but a little, I thought, for the gallery,
the children mixing their languages, and their mothers gliding
back occasionally to it. But the talk was just what it is
everywhere--schools, and how dear, and what ideas are put into the
children’s heads and whether there is a distinction between those who
pay more or less, or have scholarships and something about prices in
general. One is reading “Sabina Zembra” and we talk a little while the
ship rolls, rendered sympathetic by suffering, and I am sure that two of
my good ladies do not consider themselves _kanaka_, at least if I am to
judge by their reference to _kanaka_ and such like; but they are brown
like berries, one light, the other sallow.
[Illustration: “The Chiefess”]
Later in the afternoon I go forward in the dance of our passage to the
next island of Maui; the island lies before us across the sea, so
sky-like that it is difficult to realize that the vast slopes are of
earth; that the greenish hue, now and then, under the violet of the bank
of heavy clouds, all brilliant and shining like satin, is not thicker
air--just such tones make the island as with us make winter skies. Far
off to the southeast stretches under clouds another line, that of the
further Maui which ends above in Haleakala, the extinct volcano. As we
draw near, the sun is setting, the jib and mainsail curving before us in
shadow and light, as we drop a little to the south, repeat near to us
the colours of the island and of the clouds. These hang far forward
toward us, while the slope of green and peachy grey runs up behind it;
and we glide soon into more quiet waters, and stop off the town of
Lahaina. Then long hours are spent in unloading and loading, so that
when we sail again, we only faintly see the mass of Haleakala. But in
the morning, with the dawn which has no colour, but in which, to the
east, stand up, in some sort of richer violet shade, the outlines of
Hawaii, we see further the great slopes of Mauna Loa, so gentle that it
is difficult to tell where the flat top is reached, and where the slopes
begin again on the other side; and then we stop in the early sunlight. A
fisherman comes up with fish; other boats (outriggers all) with fruit,
and we see what I was telling you when I began to write. And later we
have come to a great bank of black rock running out to sea, and
precipices of black spotted with a green all of one colour, which is
where Cook was killed, and where they have put up a little monument to
him. This is Kaawaloa. We try the land, for the roll of the ship is
disagreeable, as it waits, and we run in over the transparent water. It
is too deep just by the landing for anchorage. The sea jumps from light
aquamarine to the colour of a peacock’s breast in the shadow. We go up
the black lava that looks as if it had been run out on the road, not
under it, and sit in the shade a moment, and exchange a few words with
our fellow passengers now on land--a little flock of tired children and
mother, and our “chiefess.” And it is hot--the heights have shut off the
wind, and all is baking. Horses and donkeys, saddled, stand about near
the shadow of fences, left to themselves, while the cargo is landed.
Higher up on the heights some planters tell us it is cool. They wear
enormous hats, and have a planter-like appearance that suggests our
being different.
As I look around on this green and black, and the few cocoanuts, and the
dark blue-green olive water, I think that it is not an unlikely place
for a man to have been killed in. The place has for Hawaiians another
interest: it was once a great place, and the high cliffs have many holes
where chiefs are buried, inaccessible and hidden. And a little way
beyond was a city of refuge--that is to say, a sacred city--where none
who took refuge could be injured. Even though the enemy came rushing up
to the last outlying landmark, the moment that it had been passed, the
pursued was safe, and after having sojourned according to due rite,
could depart in peace and safety.
After this, and the same story of like places below the edge of the
green table that slopes up to the sky and further on to the clouds, we
stop, and the white boat takes our last passengers in the blue water;
its white keel looking as if washed with blue. The people wait on the
shore under less and less shadow, and on the other side we have now the
enormous ocean opposed to this big slope, not as last evening, when
always we had an island, now before, now behind, now to our side, as if
we were in some inland sea. That is to say that now the sea occupies
more than half of the whole circle that we can sweep, though we are only
a few rods from shore. Do you realize the difference?
At last we are on the outlying edge of the group, and will soon this
afternoon round the island, and stop at the place where we take the road
to the volcano of Kilauea.
Sunday night.
At the volcano of Kilauea.
As I wrote I had no notion of the importance and eventfulness of a
landing at night. As we came around the hard black cape marked with lava
flow it was already dark, so we could not distinctly see the shore,
though above were great slopes and some buttresses and heavy hills
standing out from the mass. We could see lights at the place called
Punaluu, where we were to land. The steamer shrieked and stopped as we
prepared to leave it and come down the companion ladder to the heavy
boat dancing below it. Women were first dropped in, and one by one
gradually we men jumped into the hollow, half packed with trunks and
boxes and men balancing themselves in the rolling. Perhaps had I been
more accustomed to these forms of landing I might have seen less of a
picture; but when I had got down, and watched the next passengers from
below, and danced high up to them, and heard them told “Now!” or “Not
yet!” as we came too high or too low or struck the bottom of the ladder,
(so as to make one wonder whether we should not capsize in a rougher
sea), when I could look at their foreshortening, and saw the heavy lower
forms of the _kanaka_ ladies, under their flowing drapery, and then saw
them tuck their one long outer garment between those legs in a great
bunch, to be untied at the next step and heard their discussions, I
enjoyed the play, even if I was part of it.
The talk was in _kanaka_, but its meaning was plain: the two ladies
objected to jumping just then or before or after, and it was now too
high, now too low, and in general they expressed all possible doubts
regarding the process. One of them especially, whom I had seen much of
during the day, a massive archaic person, with the manners and features
that might have belonged to an Eve of some other, more cannibalistic
tradition than ours, poured all this out with a voice heavier than the
roar of the water or the grinding of the boat’s gunwale against the
companionway and her declamation was answered by a chorus from the
boatmen, with the accompaniment of shifting lights, so that my simile of
a play was but natural.
At length we were all stowed in and departed, one sailor still standing
as he had from the beginning, balanced with a child in his arms. At the
little wharf the scene was repeated on a small scale, while above us the
one lantern lit the legs of an expectant multitude; and at length we
were singled out by the host who was to take care of us, and who had the
one single hotel or house, to which we were sent up with a lantern.
Then we rested. Adams had suffered very much from the tossing, so much
so as to make me anxious, and I too was much the worse for the wear of
the last two hours of resting in harbour while waiting for boats to go
out and return. We had some food and rooms given us by the Chinaman
factotum, major-domo, cook, servant, etc.; and later our host appeared
in his shirt-sleeves, and asked our intentions and whether we were to go
right off in the morning to the volcano. Having ascertained these facts,
he selected one of the party--we were four, we three and some one
else--and to this some one he poured out some information, mainly about
the bad sides of the other way to the volcano--the Hilo way; its
raininess, and in general all the wrongfulness of Hilo people. With that
he also poured forth his bottom thoughts about the whole business that
he had charge of, the idiotic way in which people travelled to see the
volcano without sufficient practice on other volcanoes beforehand, so
that invalids (he called them inwalids) found it difficult to ride on
horseback, and some were sometimes thrown from mules, and in general he
showed the folly of trusting to the advertisements of his own
enterprise. For he is, I understand, a great man, who has this road and
runs it. All this I absorbed before going to bed, so as to prepare for
the next day, which began early with the Chinaman, and making for the
train.
The train is a little engine with two platforms on wheels, that runs to
a plantation some few miles off. One platform had a roof for the gentry;
the other was loaded with the common people, consisting of some Swedish
women and children, some Hawaiians, and one or two young people who
belonged to our side, but preferred riding thus, thereby escaping the
smoke that we got. We had a watchman and a Chinaman on the engine. At
the start we were requested to trim our weights. The Hawaiian lady who
had been a tragedy the evening before, was on our side, and whatever
side she had taken, that would have been the heavy one. But still we
risked it, and ran along the little road which occasionally passed over
trestling and did have something of a reason for trimming.
The ride was lovely except for the smoke. We had left the shore at which
we had landed the night before, for the car ran to the little jetty,
where the sand was as black as ink--volcano dust, with a fringe of white
like teeth. Then we slowly gained some heights, and saw behind us the
great blue sea and white headlands; black lava looking grey in the
sunshine, and to our left the great hills and slopes. And we ran by the
sugar-cane and through a country with few or no trees, a great surface
of up and down of moors, until we came to the plantation, where we
stopped. Everybody had reached home except ourselves, and our accidental
companion. We found a covered wagon with two mules and two horses, into
which we were packed with difficulty, as our luggage was bulkier than is
customary, owing to my not having been able to persuade our host to
allow me to reship some that we did not want. He could not “fuss with
such matters.” In fact he was right. The whole affair is merely for the
convenience of travellers; on the part of the people who undertake it,
there is no need of it and one feels indebted to them for the courtesy
they show in allowing one to pass through their place, even though they
charge for the same.
So we rolled slowly over the great downs, upon some sort of a trail,
occasionally perturbed by some stones, or perhaps banked up with no
incident. The great mountain was being covered with clouds, but the sea
spread far below us, the capes at the corner, and the east of the shore
glistening as if silvered, and white upon their local blackness. It was
as Newport beaches might look upon a gigantic scale. Here and there a
few trees (the _ohia_), stood up, orange-brown butterflies, Parnassians,
flew continually across our path, spotting the entire landscape all busy
with their loves. A few birds, plovers, I believe, rose at a distance,
or flew across, or with a cry, peewits waved to and fro on the slopes
below us.
By and by, at noon, we came to more trees; the landscape became more
shut in, the sea disappeared behind the slopes we were leaving, and we
took lunch at a convenient shanty where we were well treated, and tasted
the native _ohia_ berries. Then we entered a rockier soil, much broken
up, with much black dust, and with many trees, all small and as if lost,
something like little back country lanes--anywhere.
And this went on and on, and we walked sometimes, in despair of our
mules and horses, driven by a driver who urged them with word and whip,
and occasionally with stones, without being able to get them much out of
a walk, broken by an occasional trot. Then things were colder, and on a
landscape of no shape, with blocks of lava thrown over the soil as if by
the spade of journeyman or maker of worlds; with ever so many queerly
conventional trees,--the _ohia_ before mentioned, which has yellow
trumpet flowers--and many others; and at last many ferns, and more
ferns, and the tree ferns. We saw on our right some cloudy forms of
smoke rising toward the clouds of only a little warmer tint than they,
and that was the smoke and steam of Kilauea--which was really below us,
hidden under the edge of the desolate plateau we were driving on.
Then we came to more vegetation and many ferns, and we suddenly saw the
glance of a sulphur bank, yellow, green, and white, like the surface of
certain beans; and we drove up toward the house that stands by the
volcano. It was not yet dark, but dark enough to see confusedly the
crater just below us, only a few yards away, a mass of black, and high
walls around it, and three cones apparently in the distance, with steam
about them, and steam issuing near them in many places, so that the
further wall was dim. And steam near us came out of crevices at our
feet, and on our road, and a little everywhere, where ferns grew
richer--and we had arrived.
We went in to make our host’s acquaintance, and got our simple rooms in
a sort of rough farmhouse, with doors opening on the verandah, and in
front of the crater of the volcano. And we sat later at dinner, and
after dinner by the fire (for a fire was pleasant in the damp, cold
air), and heard him talk, and spoke to him about Mr. Dana’s book, and
the changes in the crater, and all the volcano talk that can come out of
the absorption of much reading and much hearing. Maby (our host) talks
of danger to his children from the steam fissures just mentioned.
Kilauea--The Volcano.
Maby, the keeper of the hotel, is not the old gentleman of Dana’s book,
but a person whom I should describe if I had the time. He is a New
Yorker, and has been away since the early war, and has sailed about much
in this part of the world. The type is a well known one to us, and
amusing enough. He is married to a Hawaiian woman, also shrewd-looking,
good-looking, reminding one of many people with us, with a high forehead
and thick lips; and has many children who play about, and make the place
seem less showlike.
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.