All night long we remained outside on the platform of the summit,
watching and sketching that terrific convulsion. The mountain poured
forth endless floods of lava. Heaven and earth were lighted up with its
awful glow. Kalaua stood by us still, erect and grim, like one conscious
that the fiery hail and the red-hot boulders had no terrors for him, and
could not harm him. Kea, pale and tremulous, yet too brave at heart to
flinch ever so, crouched by his side, too awestruck to speak in mute
expectation. Frank alone seemed undisturbed by the appalling commotion
going on around him. Boy enough to feel nothing of the terror of the
moment, he was simply excited by the grandeur and magnificence of that
wonderful pyrotechnic display. "It's the jolliest sight I ever saw,
Tom," he exclaimed with delight more than once during the evening. "Why,
to live here would be almost as good as to have a season-ticket all the
year round for all the _fêtes_ and gala-days in England!"
By morning however the eruption slackened; the internal fires had worn
themselves out. "Pélé has grown tired of kicking up such a rumpus,"
Frank remarked cheerfully; and as he himself was tired of watching her,
too, he proposed we should go in and rest ourselves a little after our
arduous labours. Indeed, the lava was now almost ceasing to flow, and
the bombardment of pumice-stone and fiery cinders had intermitted a
little. We returned to the house, and flung ourselves down on our beds
in the clothes we wore, too fatigued after our long and sleepless watch
to trouble ourselves with the needless bother of undressing. When you've
sat up all night observing an eruption, you don't much care about such
luxuries of an advanced civilization as nightshirts. Before we retired
however Kea brought us in a big bowl of fresh taro-paste, and on this
simple food we made a most excellent and substantial breakfast. In ten
minutes we were snoring so hard on our bamboo beds that I don't believe
even another eruption would have roused us up, if it had thundered at
our doors with one of its monstrous subterranean boulders.
It was five in the evening before we woke again. Frank stretched himself
with a yawn. "I don't know how _you_ feel, Tom," he cried as he jumped
out of bed, "but _I_ feel as if that extinct instrument, the rack, had
been invented over again for my special benefit. There's not a bone in
my body that isn't aching."
"What does that matter," I answered, "if science is satisfied? I've got
the very finest sketch of a first-class eruption that ever was taken
since seismology became a separate study."
"Bother seismology!" Frank exclaimed with a snort. "What a jolly long
word for such a simple thing! As if one couldn't say straight out,
earthquakes. For my part, what I want satisfied isn't science at all,
but an internal yearning for some breakfast or some supper, whichever
you choose to call it."
The supper was soon upon the board (for by this time the native servants
had returned), and as soon as it was finished, we sallied forth, all
four together, to inspect the changes wrought in the mountain by last
night's events. The effects of the eruption were indeed prodigious.
Great streams of fresh lava still lay dull and half-hot along the
fertile valleys of the mountain side; and the ground about the house was
strewn thick and deep with a white coat of powdery ashes. "This is
splendid!" I said. "I shall have my work cut out for me now for several
weeks. Nobody had ever a better chance afforded him of observing in
detail the effects of a great volcanic effort."
Kalaua glanced grimly across at me as I spoke. "I wonder," he murmured,
with a sort of sphinx-like sardonic smile, "you have escaped so safe to
observe and report upon them."
"Ah, you see, chief," Frank answered carelessly, "he was under your
protection. Pélé wouldn't hurt us, you know, as we were guests of a
friend of hers. That was awfully nice of her. She's a perfect lady, as
volcanoes go. I call her a most polite and obliging goddess."
Kalaua turned away with a half angry look. It was clear that, converted
or unconverted, he considered the terrible deity of his fathers no
proper subject for light chaff or jesting.
We spent the next six weeks pleasantly enough in the old man's house,
observing and making notes upon the curious facts connected with the
crater and its recent outbreak. I will not narrate my results here at
full for fear of boring you--the more so, as I have already devoted two
large volumes to the subject in the British Association _Reports_,
Manchester Meeting. It will be enough for the present to mention that
Frank and I thoroughly explored the whole top of the crater, as far as
the first floor, which Kea had described to us as the Floor of the
Strangers. We measured and mapped it out in every direction with
theodolite and chain, and we made numerous interesting, and, I venture
to add, important observations upon the most disputed points in the
phenomena of eruptions. We knew our way about the Floor of the
Strangers, in fact, as well as we knew our way down from our own home at
Hampstead Heath to Charing Cross Station. Kalaua and Kea were surprised
to find how accurately we had learnt the whole geography of the
district; and Kalaua in particular seemed far from pleased at our
perfect familiarity with the mountain and its ways, though he was much
too polite ever to say so openly, holding his peace on the matter, at
least to our faces, with true antique Hawaiian courtesy. For bland
courtesy of demeanour, commend me to a cannibal.
One morning however about six weeks after our first arrival, I had
occasion to send Frank by himself down to Hilo, on one of the
sure-footed little mountain ponies, to fetch up some ropes and other
articles we needed for our exploration from the stores in the town; and
I said good-bye to him just outside the house, where Kalaua was seated,
smoking a cigarette, and wrapped up as usual in his own stern and sombre
reveries.
"Good-bye, old fellow,"' Frank cried in farewell, as he mounted his
horse and cantered gaily off. "Mind you take care of yourself while I'm
away. Give the crater a wide berth. Don't try to go exploring any
further without me!"
"All right," I shouted back. "I won't get into mischief. Trust me for
saving my own skin. I shall just potter about a bit to amuse myself
alone on the outer edge of the Floor of the Strangers."
"What do you want the rope for?" Kalaua asked moodily, looking up from
his cigarette as Frank rode away. "Better not go trusting yourself with
any rope too far in the crater of Mauna Loa."
"I'm not afraid," I answered, with a short little laugh. "I want the
rope to let myself down to the lower levels."
"What, the Floor of the Hawaiians?" the old chief cried with flashing
eyes.
"Well, yes," I answered; "that first, of course, and then, after that,
the Floor of Pélé."
If I had dropped a bomb-shell right in front of his house, the stern old
chief could not have looked that moment more appalled and horrified.
"Young man," he cried, rising hastily to his feet and standing like a
messenger of fate before me, "I warn you not to trifle with the burning
mountain. Tread the Floor of the Strangers as much as you like, but the
lower ledges of the crater are very dangerous. You're my guest, and I
advise you. For unskilled feet to approach those levels is almost
certain death. In the dark old days when we were all heathen, we used to
say in our folly that the wrath of Pélé would burn you up like a leaf if
you ventured to touch them. We no longer say that: we know better now.
But we still say to all who would tamper with them that the mouth of the
crater is most treacherous and perilous."
"Oh," I answered lightly, turning on my heel, "don't trouble for me. I'm
accustomed to volcanoes. I don't object I think no more of them than a
sailor thinks of chapters of a storm at sea. Let them boil and seethe
as much as they like. They're nothing after all, when a fellow's used to
them."
[Illustration: "'YOUNG MAN,' HE CRIED, '...I WARN YOU NOT TO TRIFLE WITH
THE BURNING MOUNTAIN.'"]
The old man answered me never a word. He rose, and with a gesture of
solemn dissent wrapped his native cloak severely round him; then he
walked in grim and gloomy silence back by himself into his own chamber.
As for me, I strolled off quietly, sketch-book in hand, up to the broken
brink of the great crater. I had nothing in particular to do that
morning, having in fact by this time quite exhausted the first ledge or
Floor of the Strangers: and I could accomplish no work, now I had
finished there, till Frank returned from town with the rope to lower us
down to the Floor of the Hawaiians, the next ledge that I thought of
mapping. So I sat myself down on a jagged peak of hardened cinders,
cemented together by molten volcanic matter, and began in a lazy, idle,
half-sleepy kind of way to sketch a distant point of the interior
crater.
I had sat there listlessly, sketching and musing, for about twenty
minutes, when I saw a sight I can never resist. A beautiful butterfly,
of a species quite new to me, attracted my attention on the side of the
crater-wall over which my legs were carelessly dangling. Now, though I
am by trade (saving your presence) a seismologist and vulcanologist--no
offence meant by those awesome words--I've always had a sneaking
kindness in an underhand way for other departments of natural science,
especially zoology; and a new butterfly, with a red spot on its tail, is
a severe temptation that my utmost philosophy can never induce me to
disregard under any circumstances. There are some scientific men, I
know, who seem to think science ought to be made as dull and as dry and
as fusty as possible: for my own part, I never could take that eminently
correct and respectable view: I like my science as amusing as I can get
it, with a considerable spice of adventure thrown in; and I prefer
specimen-hunting among the Pacific Islands to name-hunting among the
prodigiously learned and stupid memoirs of the British Museum. Between
ourselves, too (but I wouldn't like this to reach the ears of the Royal
Society), I regard a man as much more useful to science when engaged in
catching birds or insects in the Malay Archipelago or the African
mountains than when inventing names for them out of his own head in a
fusty, dusty, musty room in the museum at South Kensington. Have the
kindness to keep this dark however if you ever go to a British
Association Meeting: for if it reached the ears of the Committee, they
might think me an unfit person to entrust with any further volcanic
investigations.
Well, my butterfly was resting, poised like a statue, on a pretty
flowering plant that grew out of a cranny in the sheer wall of rock, a
yard or two below the precise point where I was then sitting. Said I to
myself, with an eager dart forward, "I shall nab that specimen;" and
laying aside my pencil and drawing-pad at once, I proceeded forthwith,
at the top of my speed, incontinently to nab him.
It was with great difficulty however that I clambered down the side of
the crag, for the lava just there was porous and bubbly. It crumbled and
broke like thin ice under my feet; and wherever I thought I had just
secured myself a firm foothold it gave way after a moment, bit by bit,
with the force of my pressure. Nevertheless I managed somehow, to my
great delight, to reach the plant that sprouted from the cranny without
at all disturbing my friend the butterfly, who, engrossed on his dinner,
was hardly expecting an attack from the rear; and clapping my hand upon
him before he could say Jack Robinson, I popped him, triumphant, into my
pocket collecting case. Then, with a light heart, and the proud
consciousness of a duty performed, I turned once more to climb up the
cliff again.
But that, I found, was by no means so easy a matter as descending. I had
got down partly by the mean and illegitimate device of letting my feet
slide; to get back I must somehow secure a firm and certain foothold in
the loose lava. To my surprise and horror there was none to be found.
The soft and creamy pumice-stone seemed nowhere to afford a single solid
point of support. I struggled in vain to recover my balance; at last, to
my dismay, I stumbled and fell--fell, as I feared, towards the Floor of
the Hawaiians, that yawned a full hundred and twenty feet of sheer depth
in the crater below me. With a wild lunge I clutched for support at the
plant in the cranny. It broke short in my hand, and my one chance gone,
I rolled down rapidly to the very bottom. I didn't exactly tumble down
the entire sheer height in a single fall; if I had I shouldn't be here
to tell you. I broke the force of the descent somewhat by digging my
hands and feet with frantic efforts into the loose wall of rotten lava.
But before I could realize precisely what was happening I lost my head.
The world reeled round me; my eyes closed. Next moment I was aware of a
horrid thud, and a fierce blow against some hard surface. I knew then
just where I had landed. I had fallen or rolled by stages the whole way
down the crag, and was lying on my side on the Floor of the Hawaiians!
[Illustration: "I ROLLED DOWN RAPIDLY TO THE VERY BOTTOM."]