It is a solemn pleasure to stand upon the summit of the extinct crater
of Haleakala, ten thousand feet above the sea, and gaze down into
its awful crater, 27 miles in circumference and ago feet deep, and to
picture to yourself the seething world of fire that once swept up out of
the tremendous abyss ages ago.
The prodigious funnel is dead and silent now, and even has bushes
growing far down in its bottom, where the deep-sea line could hardly
have reached in the old times, when the place was filled with liquid
lava. These bushes look like parlor shrubs from the summit where you
stand, and the file of visitors moving through them on their mules is
diminished to a detachment of mice almost; and to them you, standing so
high up against the sun, ten thousand feet above their heads, look no
larger than a grasshopper.
This in the morning; but at three or four in the afternoon a thousand
little patches of white clouds, like handfuls of wool, come drifting
noiselessly, one after another, into the crater, like a procession of
shrouded phantoms, and circle round and round the vast sides, and settle
gradually down and mingle together until the colossal basin is filled
to the brim with snowy fog and all its seared and desolate wonders are
hidden from sight.
And then you may turn your back to the crater and look far away upon the
broad valley below, with its sugar-houses glinting like white specks in
the distance, and the great sugar-fields diminished to green veils amid
the lighter-tinted verdure around them, and abroad upon the limitless
ocean. But I should not say you look down; you look up at these things.
You are ten thousand feet above them, but yet you seem to stand in a
basin, with the green islands here and there, and the valleys and the
wide ocean, and the remote snow-peak of Mauna Loa, all raised up before
and above you, and pictured out like a brightly tinted map hung at the
ceiling of a room.
You look up at everything; nothing is below you. It has a singular
and startling effect to see a miniature world thus seemingly hung in
mid-air.
But soon the white clouds come trooping along in ghostly squadrons and
mingle together in heavy masses a quarter of a mile below you and
shut out everything-completely hide the sea and all the earth save the
pinnacle you stand on. As far as the eye can reach, it finds nothing
to rest upon but a boundless plain of clouds tumbled into all manner of
fantastic shapes-a billowy ocean of wool aflame with the gold and purple
and crimson splendors of the setting sun! And so firm does this grand
cloud pavement look that you can hardly persuade yourself that you could
not walk upon it; that if you stepped upon it you would plunge headlong
and astonish your friends at dinner ten thousand feet below.
Standing on that peak, with all the world shut out by that vast plain of
clouds, a feeling of loneliness comes over a man which suggests to his
mind the last man at the flood, perched high upon the last rock, with
nothing visible on any side but a mournful waste of waters, and the ark
departing dimly through the distant mists and leaving him to storm and
night and solitude and death!