"When we reached Hilo, I went ashore in a boat through the dangerous
surf, and before arranging to go up the mountain with my host and his
niece, I called first on an English merchant in the little palm-girt
town, to whom we had letters of introduction from friends in Liverpool.
"Going to stop with Kalaua, eh?" the merchant said, as soon as we had
named our particular business. "A very good house, too! You couldn't do
better. Quite close to the very mouth of the crater, and right in the
track of the great red-hot lava streams. You'll see Pélé kicking up a
shindy there simply to perfection. Her majesty's been getting precious
uneasy of late--rumbling and growling I shouldn't be surprised if
you're just in the nick of time for a first-rate eruption."
"And what sort of person is my host?" I asked curiously. "He seems a
very stern, old-fashioned cannibal."
Our new acquaintance laughed. "You may well say that," he answered
smiling. "In the good old days--or the bad old days, whichever of the
two you prefer to call them--you pays your money and you takes your
choice--Kalaua, they say, was the hereditary priest of that grim
goddess, Pélé. His house was built on the highest habitable point of the
mountain where Pélé dwells, that he might be close at hand to appease
the angry spirit of the great crater whenever she began to pour down
lava over the banana-grounds and cocoanut plantations at the foot of the
volcano. Many a fat pig, and many a basketful of prime taro that
hard-looking old man has offered up in his time to Pélé--ay, and I dare
say many a human victim, too, if we only knew it. But all that's over
long ago, thank goodness. He's a Christian now, of course, like all the
rest of them; a very respectable old fellow in his way, with a keen eye
of his own to business, and a thorough comprehension of the state of the
sugar market. He keeps a good house. You've fallen on your feet, I can
tell you, for Hawaii, if you've got an invitation to stop for an
indefinite time as a guest at Kalaua's."
I was glad to hear we had happened by chance upon such comfortable
quarters.
We slept that night at a little Hawaiian inn at Hilo, where we dined
most sumptuously off roast pig and baked plantains; and at six next
morning, Kalaua himself wakened us up to start on our long ride up the
great lone mountain.
When we sallied forth, four sure-footed ponies stood saddled at the
door, and Kalaua, Kea, Frank, and myself, mounting our careering steeds
(only they didn't career), began our ascent to the cloud-capped summit.
Mauna Loa, that bald cone, is almost as high as any peak in the Alps,
rising some 14,000 feet above sea level; but the ascent over the lava
plains is gentle and gradual, and the top, in this warm and delicious
climate, still remains far below the level of perpetual snow.
Nevertheless it is a long and tedious ride, some thirty miles, from Hilo
to the top; and our sure-footed little ponies clambered slowly on,
planting their hoofs with the utmost deliberation on the treacherous
surface of the rugged and honey-combed masses of lava. Frank and I were
both quite tired out with their camel-like pace when we reached the
summit. Kea and Kalaua, more accustomed to the ascent, were as fresh as
daisies, and Kea, in particular, laughed and talked incessantly, though
I fancied, she was ill at ease somehow, in spite of all her apparent
merriment.
At last, after crossing a wide expanse of broken blocks of black basalt,
as big as the largest squares of freestone used in architecture, and
then sliding and gliding over a hideous expanse of slippery, smooth
lava, like ice for glassiness, we pulled up, wearied, at a house built
close on the very summit, European or rather American, in its style and
arrangements, but comfortable and even wealthy-looking in all its
appointments. It was composed of solid volcanic stone, cut into large
square masses, and round it ran a pleasant wooden verandah, with
rocking-chairs temptingly displayed in a row under its broad canopy. An
oleander blossomed profusely by the side, and tropical creepers of
wonderful beauty festooned the posts and balconies with their hanging
verdure and their trumpet-shaped flower-bells.
"Come in," Kea cried, leaping down with ease from her mountain pony,
which a native boy seized at once and took away to the stables. "Come
in, and make yourselves at home in our house. Dinner will be ready in
twenty minutes."
"I should hope so," Frank answered, with his free-and-easy manner; "for
I'm free to confess I want my grub awfully after such a long ride. And
then I shall go out and inspect this precious volcano we hear so much
about."
Kalaua's brow darkened somewhat, as if he didn't like to hear Mauna Loa
so cavalierly described, and he murmured a few words in Hawaiian to Kea,
in which I could only catch the name of Pélé, repeated very earnestly
several times over.
The house was large, roomy, and well furnished, with bamboo chairs and
neat native bedsteads; and the dinner, to which Frank at least did full
justice, seemed to promise well for our future treatment under the old
chief's hospitable roof. Kalaua himself grew somewhat less grim, too, as
the meal progressed. Nothing thaws the soul like dinner. He warmed by
degrees, and told us several amusing stories of the old heathen days,
delighting Frank's heart by narrating, in glowing language, how, in his
youth, he had charged, a naked warrior at the head of his naked troops,
when Kamehameha the Second attacked the island. Frank was charmed to
find himself so nearly face to face with aboriginal savagery. "And what
did you do with the prisoners?" he asked inauspiciously.
The old man smiled a grimly terrible smile. "The less said about the
prisoners the better," he answered at last, with some faint show of
conventional reluctance. "Remember, we were heathens then, and knew no
better. The English have come since and taught us our duty. We no longer
fight; we are civilized now; we buy horses, and cultivate yam and
bread-fruit and sugar-cane." And he helped himself as he spoke to
another piece of fresh ginger.
I don't think Frank quite saw what he meant; but I confess a shudder
passed through my own frame as I realized exactly what the old chief was
driving at. It was strange to stand so very close to the lowest
barbarism known to humanity. They had eaten the prisoners.
After dinner we strolled out, in the beautiful, clear, tropical evening,
to the edge of the crater. Accustomed as I was to volcanoes everywhere,
I never beheld a more grand or beautiful sight than that first glimpse
of Mauna Loa in all its glory. We looked over the edge of the great ring
of basalt, and saw below us, down three successive ledges of rock,
seething and tossing, a vast and liquid sea of fire. Here and there the
lava boiled and bubbled into huge, inflated, balloon-like crests; here
and there it rose into monstrous black stacks and irregular chimneys,
from whose fiery mouths belched forth great columns of red flame,
interspersed with dark wreaths of smoke and sulphur. It was the wildest,
noblest, and most awful volcano I had ever yet visited--and my
acquaintance with the family was by no means superficial. Frank stood
aghast with awe and wonder for a moment by my side. "Why, Vesuvius is
nothing to it!" he cried, astonished, "and Etna's just nowhere in the
matter of craters! I say, Tom, how I should love to see it in a good
tip-top blazing eruption!"
As he spoke Kea, who had come out with us, clad from head to foot in her
simple, long Hawaiian robe, gazed steadily over the brink, and looked
down with a familiar glance into the gigantic crater. For a minute or
two she kept her eyes fixed on a certain jagged peak or furnace of lava,
round whose base the sea of liquid fire was surging and falling, like
water in a saucepan on a kitchen stove. At last she broke out into
sudden surprise, "Why, it's rising!" she cried breathlessly. "It's
rising! It's rising!"
"How jolly!" Frank called out from a few yards down, where he had
clambered to get a better view of the inner crater. "I hope that fellow
in the town was right after all, and that we're going to come in at the
very right point for a regular good eruptive outburst!"
Kea's face grew pale with terror. "You are," she answered, "I can see it
rise. The bubbles are bursting; the steam's crackling. It always does so
before it begins to flow out upon the slopes of the mountain."
She was quite right. It was clearly rising. I was overjoyed. Nothing
could have happened more neatly or opportunely for the interests of
science. Our arrival at Mauna Loa seemed to prove, as it were, the
signal for the mountain to burst out at once into full activity. We were
in luck's way. We had come on the very eve of an eruption.
Kea ran down to fetch her uncle. The old man came up, and peered over
cautiously into the depths of the crater. Then he called aloud in
Hawaiian to his trembling niece. I couldn't catch all the words he said,
but I caught one sentence twice repeated, "Pélé ké loa," and a single
word that recurred over and over again in his frantic outbursts,
"Areoi," "Areoi."
I had brought my Hawaiian-English pocket dictionary with me from Hilo,
and I turned up the words in their places one by one, to see if I could
understand them. To my great surprise I found I had heard them quite
aright; it's so hard to catch any part of an unknown language when
rapidly spoken between natives. "Pélé ké loa," I discovered, meant in
English, "Pélé is angry," and "areoi" was defined by my book as "a
stranger, a foreigner, especially a white man, a European or American."
We stood long on the brink of the crater and watched it rising slowly
before our very eyes. Kea pointed out to us with demonstrative finger
the various floors or ledges on the inner wall. "That first," she said
with an awestruck face, "is the Floor of the Strangers; as far as that
everybody may go; it is as it were the mere threshold, or outer
vestibule, of the volcano. The second, that you see further down below,
in the dark glare, is the Floor of the Hawaiians; as far as that, by the
rule of our fathers, only natives may dare to penetrate. If a white
man's foot ever treads that floor, our people used to say, Pélé will
surely claim him for her victim. The third, that you can just
distinguish down there in the bright light, where the fiery lava is
this moment rising--that's the Floor of Pélé: none but the priests of
Pélé might venture in the old days to tread its precincts. If any other
man or woman were to dream of descending upon it, in the twinkling of an
eye, like a feather in the flame, our fathers said, Pélé would surely
shrivel him to ashes."
"And you believe all that nonsense?" I cried incredulously.
Kea turned towards me with a very grave face. "It isn't nonsense," she
answered, in her most serious manner. "It's perfectly true. As true as
anything. Of course I don't believe the superstition, but whoever falls
into that third abyss is burnt to a cinder before aid can arrive, by the
wrath of the volcano."
"I dare say," I answered carelessly. "It looks quite hot enough to
frizzle up anything. Whoever falls into an ordinary blast furnace (if it
comes to that) is burnt to a cinder before aid can arrive, by the
unconscious wrath of the molten metal."
"Don't talk so!" Kea cried, with a terrified face. "You distress me. You
frighten me."
The volcano meanwhile rose faster and faster. The gray evening began to
close in. A deep red glow spread over the open mouth of the crater. The
clouds above reflected and repeated the lurid light. Every moment the
glare grew deeper and yet deeper. As night came on, it seemed to rain
fire. I saw at once that we were in for a good thing. We had hit on the
exact moment of a first-class eruption.
A more awful or grander night than that I never remember. I'm a
scientific man, and my business is to watch and report upon volcanoes;
but that night, I confess, was every bit as hot as I care to have it.
Anything hotter than that, indeed, would fry one like a herring. By nine
o'clock, the mountain was in full glare; by ten, it was pouring out red
fragments of stone and showers of ashes; by eleven, a stream of white
glowing lava was pushing its way in one desolating flood down the
ravines on the southern slope of the mountain. Before the final
outburst, light curling wreaths of vapour ascended from fissures in the
wall of the crater, and hung like a huge umbrella over the mountain top.
The red glare, reflected from this strange cloud-like canopy, gave the
whole scene for many miles around the appearance of being lighted up by
giants at play with some vast and colossal Bengal fires. We looked on
awestruck. Suddenly, and without the slightest warning, a sound reached
our ears, a terrific sound, as of ten thousand engines blowing off
steam; and all at once a great body of gas was ejected into the air, in
a blaze of light, while huge fragments of rock were hurled violently
upward, only to fall again in fiery heat upon the naked slopes of the
cone and shoulders. All night long we were positively bombarded with
these aërial shells; they fell in thousands round us on every side,
though fortunately none of them happened to touch either the house
itself or any one of its inhabitants.
Not a living soul remained upon the spot save Frank and myself, and Kea
and her uncle. All the rest of the natives fled headlong down in wild
panic and terror to the sea at Hilo.
A man of science, however, like a soldier on the battle-field, must know
how to take his life in his hand. I got out my pencil, my sketch-book
and my colours, and, true to the orders of the Association in whose
interest I was travelling, I endeavoured to reproduce, as well as I
could, in a spirited sketch, the whole awful scene as it unfolded itself
in vivid hues before us. Frank, who is certainly the most intrepid boy
of my acquaintance, ably seconded me in my difficult task. Kea looked on
at us in speechless amazement. "Aren't you afraid?" she asked at last,
in a hushed voice.
[Illustration: "ALL AT ONCE A GREAT BODY OF GAS WAS EJECTED INTO THE
AIR, IN A BLAZE OF LIGHT."]
"Yes," I answered boldly, telling the plain truth, "if you will allow me
to say so, I'm very much afraid indeed. But I'm a man of science; I've
got to do it; and I shall do it still till the lava comes down and
drives us away bodily. And you? Aren't you afraid, too, of the stones
and ashes?"
"No," she replied, though her tone belied her. "The eruptions never hurt
my uncle nor me. You see, he's been accustomed to them from his
childhood upward. In the old days, he was taught to think he was under
Pélé's protection."
Frank looked up, imperturbable as ever. "For my part," he said, tossing
the curls from his forehead, "I'm not a man of science, like Tom, you
know; and I'm not under the protection of a heathen goddess, like you
and your uncle, Kea; but I call it the grandest set of fireworks I ever
saw in all my life--beats the Crystal Palace hollow--and I wouldn't have
missed it for fifty pounds, I can tell you."
As for Kalaua, he stood sombre, alone, with folded arms and
tight-pressed lips, looking down unmoved into the depths of the crater.