"You cannot escape liking the climate," Cudworth said, in reply to my
panegyric on the Kona coast. "I was a young fellow, just out of college,
when I came here eighteen years ago. I never went back, except, of
course, to visit. And I warn you, if you have some spot dear to you on
earth, not to linger here too long, else you will find this dearer."
We had finished dinner, which had been served on the big _lanai_, the one
with a northerly _exposure_, though exposure is indeed a misnomer in so
delectable a climate.
The candles had been put out, and a slim, white-clad Japanese slipped
like a ghost through the silvery moonlight, presented us with cigars, and
faded away into the darkness of the bungalow. I looked through a screen
of banana and lehua trees, and down across the guava scrub to the quiet
sea a thousand feet beneath. For a week, ever since I had landed from
the tiny coasting-steamer, I had been stopping with Cudworth, and during
that time no wind had ruffled that unvexed sea. True, there had been
breezes, but they were the gentlest zephyrs that ever blew through summer
isles. They were not winds; they were sighs--long, balmy sighs of a
world at rest.
"A lotus land," I said.
"Where each day is like every day, and every day is a paradise of days,"
he answered. "Nothing ever happens. It is not too hot. It is not too
cold. It is always just right. Have you noticed how the land and the
sea breathe turn and turn about?"
Indeed, I had noticed that delicious rhythmic, breathing. Each morning I
had watched the sea-breeze begin at the shore and slowly extend seaward
as it blew the mildest, softest whiff of ozone to the land. It played
over the sea, just faintly darkening its surface, with here and there and
everywhere long lanes of calm, shifting, changing, drifting, according to
the capricious kisses of the breeze. And each evening I had watched the
sea breath die away to heavenly calm, and heard the land breath softly
make its way through the coffee trees and monkey-pods.
"It is a land of perpetual calm," I said. "Does it ever blow here?--ever
really blow? You know what I mean."
Cudworth shook his head and pointed eastward.
"How can it blow, with a barrier like that to stop it?"
Far above towered the huge bulks of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, seeming to
blot out half the starry sky. Two miles and a half above our heads they
reared their own heads, white with snow that the tropic sun had failed to
melt.
"Thirty miles away, right now, I'll wager, it is blowing forty miles an
hour."