A new guide helps us to the most easily reached cave, and with the lad and his smoking torch we climb into the dusky mouth.
There is dust everywhere and cobwebs as thick as cloth, hanging in tatters. An almost interminable series of small cells, just high enough to straighten one's back in, leads us farther and farther into the mountain of bones. This cave has been pillaged too often to be very ghostly now. We find a little parcel of bones here. It might have been a hand and an arm once, cunning and dexterous. It is nothing now but a litter. Here is an infant's skull, but broken, thin and delicate as a sea-shell, and full of dust. Here is a tougher one, whole and solid; the teeth well set and very white; no sign of decay in any one of these molars. Perhaps it is because so little of their food is even warm when they eat it. This rattles as we lift it. The brain and the crumbs of earth are inseparably wedded. Come with us, skull. You look scholarly, and shall lie upon our desk,—a solemn epistle to the living. But the cave is filled with the vile smoke of our torch, and we are choked with the heat and dust. Let us out as soon as possible. The Great Navigator's skeleton cannot be hidden in this tomb. Down we scramble into the sand and shadow by the water, and talk of departing out of this place of relics.
We are to cross the lava southward where it is frescoed with a wilderness of palm-trees: for when the mountain came down to the sea, flowing red-hot, but cooling almost instantly, it mowed down the forests of palms, and the trunks were not consumed, but lay half buried in the cooling lava, and now you can mark every delicate fibre of the bark in the lava, as firm as granite.
Still farther south lies the green slope that was so soon to be shaken to its foundations. I wonder if we could discover any of the peculiar loveliness that bewitched us the evening we crossed it in silence. There was something in the air that said, "Peace, peace"; and we passed over the fatal spot without speaking. But the sea spoke under the cliffs below us, and the mountain has since replied.
This place is named prettily, Kealekakua. You see that mountain? There are paths leading to it. Thither the gods journeyed in the days of old. So the land is called "the path of the gods."
It is a cool, green spot up yonder; the rain descends upon it in continual baptism. The natives love these mountains and the sea. They are the cardinal points of their compass. Every direction given you is either toward the mountain or toward the sea.
There is much truth in the Arabian tale, and it is time to acknowledge it. Mountains are magnetic. The secret of their magnetism may lie in the immobility of their countenances. Praise them to their face, and they are not flattered; forget them for a moment: but turn again, and see their steadfast gaze! You feel their earnestness. It is imposing, and you cannot think lightly of it. Who forgets the mountains he has once seen? It is quite probable the mountain cares little for your individuality: but it has given part of itself to the modelling of your character; it has touched you with the wand of its enchantment; you are under the spell. Somewhere in the recesses of this mountain are locked the bones of the Great Navigator, but these mountains have kept the secret.
