THE HOUSE OF THE SUN
There are hosts of people who journey like restless spirits round and
about this earth in search of seascapes and landscapes and the wonders
and beauties of nature. They overrun Europe in armies; they can be met
in droves and herds in Florida and the West Indies, at the Pyramids,
and on the slopes and summits of the Canadian and American Rockies; but
in the House of the Sun they are as rare as live and wriggling
dinosaurs. Haleakala is the Hawaiian name for “the House of the Sun.”
It is a noble dwelling, situated on the Island of Maui; but so few
tourists have ever peeped into it, much less entered it, that their
number may be practically reckoned as zero. Yet I venture to state that
for natural beauty and wonder the nature-lover may see dissimilar
things as great as Haleakala, but no greater, while he will never see
elsewhere anything more beautiful or wonderful. Honolulu is six days’
steaming from San Francisco; Maui is a night’s run on the steamer from
Honolulu; and six hours more if he is in a hurry, can bring the
traveller to Kolikoli, which is ten thousand and thirty-two feet above
the sea and which stands hard by the entrance portal to the House of
the Sun. Yet the tourist comes not, and Haleakala sleeps on in lonely
and unseen grandeur.
Not being tourists, we of the _Snark_ went to Haleakala. On the slopes
of that monster mountain there is a cattle ranch of some fifty thousand
acres, where we spent the night at an altitude of two thousand feet.
The next morning it was boots and saddles, and with cow-boys and
packhorses we climbed to Ukulele, a mountain ranch-house, the altitude
of which, fifty-five hundred feet, gives a severely temperate climate,
compelling blankets at night and a roaring fireplace in the
living-room. Ukulele, by the way, is the Hawaiian for “jumping flea” as
it is also the Hawaiian for a certain musical instrument that may be
likened to a young guitar. It is my opinion that the mountain
ranch-house was named after the young guitar. We were not in a hurry,
and we spent the day at Ukulele, learnedly discussing altitudes and
barometers and shaking our particular barometer whenever any one’s
argument stood in need of demonstration. Our barometer was the most
graciously acquiescent instrument I have ever seen. Also, we gathered
mountain raspberries, large as hen’s eggs and larger, gazed up the
pasture-covered lava slopes to the summit of Haleakala, forty-five
hundred feet above us, and looked down upon a mighty battle of the
clouds that was being fought beneath us, ourselves in the bright
sunshine.
Every day and every day this unending battle goes on. Ukiukiu is the
name of the trade-wind that comes raging down out of the north-east and
hurls itself upon Haleakala. Now Haleakala is so bulky and tall that it
turns the north-east trade-wind aside on either hand, so that in the
lee of Haleakala no trade-wind blows at all. On the contrary, the wind
blows in the counter direction, in the teeth of the north-east trade.
This wind is called Naulu. And day and night and always Ukiukiu and
Naulu strive with each other, advancing, retreating, flanking, curving,
curling, and turning and twisting, the conflict made visible by the
cloud-masses plucked from the heavens and hurled back and forth in
squadrons, battalions, armies, and great mountain ranges. Once in a
while, Ukiukiu, in mighty gusts, flings immense cloud-masses clear over
the summit of Haleakala; whereupon Naulu craftily captures them, lines
them up in new battle-formation, and with them smites back at his
ancient and eternal antagonist. Then Ukiukiu sends a great cloud-army
around the eastern-side of the mountain. It is a flanking movement,
well executed. But Naulu, from his lair on the leeward side, gathers
the flanking army in, pulling and twisting and dragging it, hammering
it into shape, and sends it charging back against Ukiukiu around the
western side of the mountain. And all the while, above and below the
main battle-field, high up the slopes toward the sea, Ukiukiu and Naulu
are continually sending out little wisps of cloud, in ragged skirmish
line, that creep and crawl over the ground, among the trees and through
the canyons, and that spring upon and capture one another in sudden
ambuscades and sorties. And sometimes Ukiukiu or Naulu, abruptly
sending out a heavy charging column, captures the ragged little
skirmishers or drives them skyward, turning over and over, in vertical
whirls, thousands of feet in the air.
But it is on the western slopes of Haleakala that the main battle goes
on. Here Naulu masses his heaviest formations and wins his greatest
victories. Ukiukiu grows weak toward late afternoon, which is the way
of all trade-winds, and is driven backward by Naulu. Naulu’s
generalship is excellent. All day he has been gathering and packing
away immense reserves. As the afternoon draws on, he welds them into a
solid column, sharp-pointed, miles in length, a mile in width, and
hundreds of feet thick. This column he slowly thrusts forward into the
broad battle-front of Ukiukiu, and slowly and surely Ukiukiu, weakening
fast, is split asunder. But it is not all bloodless. At times Ukiukiu
struggles wildly, and with fresh accessions of strength from the
limitless north-east, smashes away half a mile at a time of Naulu’s
column and sweeps it off and away toward West Maui. Sometimes, when the
two charging armies meet end-on, a tremendous perpendicular whirl
results, the cloud-masses, locked together, mounting thousands of feet
into the air and turning over and over. A favourite device of Ukiukiu
is to send a low, squat formation, densely packed, forward along the
ground and under Naulu. When Ukiukiu is under, he proceeds to buck.
Naulu’s mighty middle gives to the blow and bends upward, but usually
he turns the attacking column back upon itself and sets it milling. And
all the while the ragged little skirmishers, stray and detached, sneak
through the trees and canyons, crawl along and through the grass, and
surprise one another with unexpected leaps and rushes; while above, far
above, serene and lonely in the rays of the setting sun, Haleakala
looks down upon the conflict. And so, the night. But in the morning,
after the fashion of trade-winds, Ukiukiu gathers strength and sends
the hosts of Naulu rolling back in confusion and rout. And one day is
like another day in the battle of the clouds, where Ukiukiu and Naulu
strive eternally on the slopes of Haleakala.
Again in the morning, it was boots and saddles, cow-boys, and
packhorses, and the climb to the top began. One packhorse carried
twenty gallons of water, slung in five-gallon bags on either side; for
water is precious and rare in the crater itself, in spite of the fact
that several miles to the north and east of the crater-rim more rain
comes down than in any other place in the world. The way led upward
across countless lava flows, without regard for trails, and never have
I seen horses with such perfect footing as that of the thirteen that
composed our outfit. They climbed or dropped down perpendicular places
with the sureness and coolness of mountain goats, and never a horse
fell or baulked.
There is a familiar and strange illusion experienced by all who climb
isolated mountains. The higher one climbs, the more of the earth’s
surface becomes visible, and the effect of this is that the horizon
seems up-hill from the observer. This illusion is especially notable on
Haleakala, for the old volcano rises directly from the sea without
buttresses or connecting ranges. In consequence, as fast as we climbed
up the grim slope of Haleakala, still faster did Haleakala, ourselves,
and all about us, sink down into the centre of what appeared a profound
abyss. Everywhere, far above us, towered the horizon. The ocean sloped
down from the horizon to us. The higher we climbed, the deeper did we
seem to sink down, the farther above us shone the horizon, and the
steeper pitched the grade up to that horizontal line where sky and
ocean met. It was weird and unreal, and vagrant thoughts of Simm’s Hole
and of the volcano through which Jules Verne journeyed to the centre of
the earth flitted through one’s mind.
And then, when at last we reached the summit of that monster mountain,
which summit was like the bottom of an inverted cone situated in the
centre of an awful cosmic pit, we found that we were at neither top nor
bottom. Far above us was the heaven-towering horizon, and far beneath
us, where the top of the mountain should have been, was a deeper deep,
the great crater, the House of the Sun. Twenty-three miles around
stretched the dizzy walls of the crater. We stood on the edge of the
nearly vertical western wall, and the floor of the crater lay nearly
half a mile beneath. This floor, broken by lava-flows and cinder-cones,
was as red and fresh and uneroded as if it were but yesterday that the
fires went out. The cinder-cones, the smallest over four hundred feet
in height and the largest over nine hundred, seemed no more than puny
little sand-hills, so mighty was the magnitude of the setting. Two
gaps, thousands of feet deep, broke the rim of the crater, and through
these Ukiukiu vainly strove to drive his fleecy herds of trade-wind
clouds. As fast as they advanced through the gaps, the heat of the
crater dissipated them into thin air, and though they advanced always,
they got nowhere.
It was a scene of vast bleakness and desolation, stern, forbidding,
fascinating. We gazed down upon a place of fire and earthquake. The
tie-ribs of earth lay bare before us. It was a workshop of nature still
cluttered with the raw beginnings of world-making. Here and there great
dikes of primordial rock had thrust themselves up from the bowels of
earth, straight through the molten surface-ferment that had evidently
cooled only the other day. It was all unreal and unbelievable. Looking
upward, far above us (in reality beneath us) floated the cloud-battle
of Ukiukiu and Naulu. And higher up the slope of the seeming abyss,
above the cloud-battle, in the air and sky, hung the islands of Lanai
and Molokai. Across the crater, to the south-east, still apparently
looking upward, we saw ascending, first, the turquoise sea, then the
white surf-line of the shore of Hawaii; above that the belt of
trade-clouds, and next, eighty miles away, rearing their stupendous
hulks out of the azure sky, tipped with snow, wreathed with cloud,
trembling like a mirage, the peaks of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa hung
poised on the wall of heaven.
It is told that long ago, one Maui, the son of Hina, lived on what is
now known as West Maui. His mother, Hina, employed her time in the
making of _kapas_. She must have made them at night, for her days were
occupied in trying to dry the _kapas_. Each morning, and all morning,
she toiled at spreading them out in the sun. But no sooner were they
out, than she began taking them in, in order to have them all under
shelter for the night. For know that the days were shorter then than
now. Maui watched his mother’s futile toil and felt sorry for her. He
decided to do something—oh, no, not to help her hang out and take in
the _kapas_. He was too clever for that. His idea was to make the sun
go slower. Perhaps he was the first Hawaiian astronomer. At any rate,
he took a series of observations of the sun from various parts of the
island. His conclusion was that the sun’s path was directly across
Haleakala. Unlike Joshua, he stood in no need of divine assistance. He
gathered a huge quantity of coconuts, from the fibre of which he
braided a stout cord, and in one end of which he made a noose, even as
the cow-boys of Haleakala do to this day. Next he climbed into the
House of the Sun and laid in wait. When the sun came tearing along the
path, bent on completing its journey in the shortest time possible, the
valiant youth threw his lariat around one of the sun’s largest and
strongest beams. He made the sun slow down some; also, he broke the
beam short off. And he kept on roping and breaking off beams till the
sun said it was willing to listen to reason. Maui set forth his terms
of peace, which the sun accepted, agreeing to go more slowly
thereafter. Wherefore Hina had ample time in which to dry her _kapas_,
and the days are longer than they used to be, which last is quite in
accord with the teachings of modern astronomy.
We had a lunch of jerked beef and hard _poi_ in a stone corral, used of
old time for the night-impounding of cattle being driven across the
island. Then we skirted the rim for half a mile and began the descent
into the crater. Twenty-five hundred feet beneath lay the floor, and
down a steep slope of loose volcanic cinders we dropped, the
sure-footed horses slipping and sliding, but always keeping their feet.
The black surface of the cinders, when broken by the horses’ hoofs,
turned to a yellow ochre dust, virulent in appearance and acid of
taste, that arose in clouds. There was a gallop across a level stretch
to the mouth of a convenient blow-hole, and then the descent continued
in clouds of volcanic dust, winding in and out among cinder-cones,
brick-red, old rose, and purplish black of colour. Above us, higher and
higher, towered the crater-walls, while we journeyed on across
innumerable lava-flows, turning and twisting a devious way among the
adamantine billows of a petrified sea. Saw-toothed waves of lava vexed
the surface of this weird ocean, while on either hand arose jagged
crests and spiracles of fantastic shape. Our way led on past a
bottomless pit and along and over the main stream of the latest
lava-flow for seven miles.
At the lower end of the crater was our camping spot, in a small grove
of _olapa_ and _kolea_ trees, tucked away in a corner of the crater at
the base of walls that rose perpendicularly fifteen hundred feet. Here
was pasturage for the horses, but no water, and first we turned aside
and picked our way across a mile of lava to a known water-hole in a
crevice in the crater-wall. The water-hole was empty. But on climbing
fifty feet up the crevice, a pool was found containing half a dozen
barrels of water. A pail was carried up, and soon a steady stream of
the precious liquid was running down the rock and filling the lower
pool, while the cow-boys below were busy fighting the horses back, for
there was room for one only to drink at a time. Then it was on to camp
at the foot of the wall, up which herds of wild goats scrambled and
blatted, while the tent arose to the sound of rifle-firing. Jerked
beef, hard _poi_, and broiled kid were the menu. Over the crest of the
crater, just above our heads, rolled a sea of clouds, driven on by
Ukiukiu. Though this sea rolled over the crest unceasingly, it never
blotted out nor dimmed the moon, for the heat of the crater dissolved
the clouds as fast as they rolled in. Through the moonlight, attracted
by the camp-fire, came the crater cattle to peer and challenge. They
were rolling fat, though they rarely drank water, the morning dew on
the grass taking its place. It was because of this dew that the tent
made a welcome bedchamber, and we fell asleep to the chanting of
_hulas_ by the unwearied Hawaiian cow-boys, in whose veins, no doubt,
ran the blood of Maui, their valiant forebear.
The camera cannot do justice to the House of the Sun. The sublimated
chemistry of photography may not lie, but it certainly does not tell
all the truth. The Koolau Gap may be faithfully reproduced, just as it
impinged on the retina of the camera, yet in the resulting picture the
gigantic scale of things would be missing. Those walls that seem
several hundred feet in height are almost as many thousand; that
entering wedge of cloud is a mile and a half wide in the gap itself,
while beyond the gap it is a veritable ocean; and that foreground of
cinder-cone and volcanic ash, mushy and colourless in appearance, is in
truth gorgeous-hued in brick-red, terra-cotta rose, yellow ochre, and
purplish black. Also, words are a vain thing and drive to despair. To
say that a crater-wall is two thousand feet high is to say just
precisely that it is two thousand feet high; but there is a vast deal
more to that crater-wall than a mere statistic. The sun is ninety-three
millions of miles distant, but to mortal conception the adjoining
county is farther away. This frailty of the human brain is hard on the
sun. It is likewise hard on the House of the Sun. Haleakala has a
message of beauty and wonder for the human soul that cannot be
delivered by proxy. Kolikoli is six hours from Kahului; Kahului is a
night’s run from Honolulu; Honolulu is six days from San Francisco; and
there you are.
We climbed the crater-walls, put the horses over impossible places,
rolled stones, and shot wild goats. I did not get any goats. I was too
busy rolling stones. One spot in particular I remember, where we
started a stone the size of a horse. It began the descent easy enough,
rolling over, wobbling, and threatening to stop; but in a few minutes
it was soaring through the air two hundred feet at a jump. It grew
rapidly smaller until it struck a slight slope of volcanic sand, over
which it darted like a startled jackrabbit, kicking up behind it a tiny
trail of yellow dust. Stone and dust diminished in size, until some of
the party said the stone had stopped. That was because they could not
see it any longer. It had vanished into the distance beyond their ken.
Others saw it rolling farther on—I know I did; and it is my firm
conviction that that stone is still rolling.
Our last day in the crater, Ukiukiu gave us a taste of his strength. He
smashed Naulu back all along the line, filled the House of the Sun to
overflowing with clouds, and drowned us out. Our rain-gauge was a pint
cup under a tiny hole in the tent. That last night of storm and rain
filled the cup, and there was no way of measuring the water that
spilled over into the blankets. With the rain-gauge out of business
there was no longer any reason for remaining; so we broke camp in the
wet-gray of dawn, and plunged eastward across the lava to the Kaupo
Gap. East Maui is nothing more or less than the vast lava stream that
flowed long ago through the Kaupo Gap; and down this stream we picked
our way from an altitude of six thousand five hundred feet to the sea.
This was a day’s work in itself for the horses; but never were there
such horses. Safe in the bad places, never rushing, never losing their
heads, as soon as they found a trail wide and smooth enough to run on,
they ran. There was no stopping them until the trail became bad again,
and then they stopped of themselves. Continuously, for days, they had
performed the hardest kind of work, and fed most of the time on grass
foraged by themselves at night while we slept, and yet that day they
covered twenty-eight leg-breaking miles and galloped into Hana like a
bunch of colts. Also, there were several of them, reared in the dry
region on the leeward side of Haleakala, that had never worn shoes in
all their lives. Day after day, and all day long, unshod, they had
travelled over the sharp lava, with the extra weight of a man on their
backs, and their hoofs were in better condition than those of the shod
horses.
The scenery between Vieiras’s (where the Kaupo Gap empties into the
sea) and Lana, which we covered in half a day, is well worth a week or
month; but, wildly beautiful as it is, it becomes pale and small in
comparison with the wonderland that lies beyond the rubber plantations
between Hana and the Honomanu Gulch. Two days were required to cover
this marvellous stretch, which lies on the windward side of Haleakala.
The people who dwell there call it the “ditch country,” an
unprepossessing name, but it has no other. Nobody else ever comes
there. Nobody else knows anything about it. With the exception of a
handful of men, whom business has brought there, nobody has heard of
the ditch country of Maui. Now a ditch is a ditch, assumably muddy, and
usually traversing uninteresting and monotonous landscapes. But the
Nahiku Ditch is not an ordinary ditch. The windward side of Haleakala
is serried by a thousand precipitous gorges, down which rush as many
torrents, each torrent of which achieves a score of cascades and
waterfalls before it reaches the sea. More rain comes down here than in
any other region in the world. In 1904 the year’s downpour was four
hundred and twenty inches. Water means sugar, and sugar is the backbone
of the territory of Hawaii, wherefore the Nahiku Ditch, which is not a
ditch, but a chain of tunnels. The water travels underground, appearing
only at intervals to leap a gorge, travelling high in the air on a
giddy flume and plunging into and through the opposing mountain. This
magnificent waterway is called a “ditch,” and with equal
appropriateness can Cleopatra’s barge be called a box-car.
There are no carriage roads through the ditch country, and before the
ditch was built, or bored, rather, there was no horse-trail. Hundreds
of inches of rain annually, on fertile soil, under a tropic sun, means
a steaming jungle of vegetation. A man, on foot, cutting his way
through, might advance a mile a day, but at the end of a week he would
be a wreck, and he would have to crawl hastily back if he wanted to get
out before the vegetation overran the passage way he had cut.
O’Shaughnessy was the daring engineer who conquered the jungle and the
gorges, ran the ditch and made the horse-trail. He built enduringly, in
concrete and masonry, and made one of the most remarkable water-farms
in the world. Every little runlet and dribble is harvested and conveyed
by subterranean channels to the main ditch. But so heavily does it rain
at times that countless spillways let the surplus escape to the sea.
The horse-trail is not very wide. Like the engineer who built it, it
dares anything. Where the ditch plunges through the mountain, it climbs
over; and where the ditch leaps a gorge on a flume, the horse-trail
takes advantage of the ditch and crosses on top of the flume. That
careless trail thinks nothing of travelling up or down the faces of
precipices. It gouges its narrow way out of the wall, dodging around
waterfalls or passing under them where they thunder down in white fury;
while straight overhead the wall rises hundreds of feet, and straight
beneath it sinks a thousand. And those marvellous mountain horses are
as unconcerned as the trail. They fox-trot along it as a matter of
course, though the footing is slippery with rain, and they will gallop
with their hind feet slipping over the edge if you let them. I advise
only those with steady nerves and cool heads to tackle the Nahiku Ditch
trail. One of our cow-boys was noted as the strongest and bravest on
the big ranch. He had ridden mountain horses all his life on the rugged
western slopes of Haleakala. He was first in the horse-breaking; and
when the others hung back, as a matter of course, he would go in to
meet a wild bull in the cattle-pen. He had a reputation. But he had
never ridden over the Nahiku Ditch. It was there he lost his
reputation. When he faced the first flume, spanning a hair-raising
gorge, narrow, without railings, with a bellowing waterfall above,
another below, and directly beneath a wild cascade, the air filled with
driving spray and rocking to the clamour and rush of sound and
motion—well, that cow-boy dismounted from his horse, explained briefly
that he had a wife and two children, and crossed over on foot, leading
the horse behind him.
The only relief from the flumes was the precipices; and the only relief
from the precipices was the flumes, except where the ditch was far
under ground, in which case we crossed one horse and rider at a time,
on primitive log-bridges that swayed and teetered and threatened to
carry away. I confess that at first I rode such places with my feet
loose in the stirrups, and that on the sheer walls I saw to it, by a
definite, conscious act of will, that the foot in the outside stirrup,
overhanging the thousand feet of fall, was exceedingly loose. I say “at
first”; for, as in the crater itself we quickly lost our conception of
magnitude, so, on the Nahiku Ditch, we quickly lost our apprehension of
depth. The ceaseless iteration of height and depth produced a state of
consciousness in which height and depth were accepted as the ordinary
conditions of existence; and from the horse’s back to look sheer down
four hundred or five hundred feet became quite commonplace and
non-productive of thrills. And as carelessly as the trail and the
horses, we swung along the dizzy heights and ducked around or through
the waterfalls.
And such a ride! Falling water was everywhere. We rode above the
clouds, under the clouds, and through the clouds! and every now and
then a shaft of sunshine penetrated like a search-light to the depths
yawning beneath us, or flashed upon some pinnacle of the crater-rim
thousands of feet above. At every turn of the trail a waterfall or a
dozen waterfalls, leaping hundreds of feet through the air, burst upon
our vision. At our first night’s camp, in the Keanae Gulch, we counted
thirty-two waterfalls from a single viewpoint. The vegetation ran riot
over that wild land. There were forests of koa and kolea trees, and
candlenut trees; and then there were the trees called ohia-ai, which
bore red mountain apples, mellow and juicy and most excellent to eat.
Wild bananas grew everywhere, clinging to the sides of the gorges, and,
overborne by their great bunches of ripe fruit, falling across the
trail and blocking the way. And over the forest surged a sea of green
life, the climbers of a thousand varieties, some that floated airily,
in lacelike filaments, from the tallest branches others that coiled and
wound about the trees like huge serpents; and one, the ei-ei, that was
for all the world like a climbing palm, swinging on a thick stem from
branch to branch and tree to tree and throttling the supports whereby
it climbed. Through the sea of green, lofty tree-ferns thrust their
great delicate fronds, and the lehua flaunted its scarlet blossoms.
Underneath the climbers, in no less profusion, grew the warm-coloured,
strangely-marked plants that in the United States one is accustomed to
seeing preciously conserved in hot-houses. In fact, the ditch country
of Maui is nothing more nor less than a huge conservatory. Every
familiar variety of fern flourishes, and more varieties that are
unfamiliar, from the tiniest maidenhair to the gross and voracious
staghorn, the latter the terror of the woodsmen, interlacing with
itself in tangled masses five or six feet deep and covering acres.
Never was there such a ride. For two days it lasted, when we emerged
into rolling country, and, along an actual wagon-road, came home to the
ranch at a gallop. I know it was cruel to gallop the horses after such
a long, hard journey; but we blistered our hands in vain effort to hold
them in. That’s the sort of horses they grow on Haleakala. At the ranch
there was great festival of cattle-driving, branding, and
horse-breaking. Overhead Ukiukiu and Naulu battled valiantly, and far
above, in the sunshine, towered the mighty summit of Haleakala.