THE HOUSE OF THE SUN.
MY Hawaiian oracle, Kahéle, having posed himself in compact and chubby grace, awaited his golden opportunity, which was not long a coming. I sat on the steps of L——'s veranda, and yawned frightfully, because life was growing tedious, and I did not know exactly what to do next. L——'s house was set in the nicest kind of climate, at the foot of a great mountain, just at that altitude where the hot air stopped dancing, though it was never cool enough to shut a door, or to think of wearing a hat for any other purpose than to keep the sun out of one's eyes. L——'s veranda ran out into vacancy as blank as cloudless sky and shadowless sea could make it; in fact, all that the eye found to rest upon was the low hill jutting off from one corner of the house beyond a jasmine in blossom; and under the hill a flat-sailed schooner rocking in a calm. I think there was nothing else down the slope of the mountain but tangled yellow grass, that grew brown and scant as it crept into the torrid zone, a thousand feet below us, and there it had not the courage to come out of the earth at all; so the picture ended in a blazing beach, with warm waves sliding up and down it, backed by blue-watery and blue-airy space for thousands and thousands of miles.
Why should not a fellow yawn over the situation? especially as L—— was busy and could not talk much, and L——'s books were as old as the hills and a good deal drier.
Having yawned, I turned toward Kahéle, and gnashed my teeth. The little rascal looked knowing; his hour had come. He fired off in broken English, and the effect was something like this:—
"Suppose we sleep in House of the Sun,—we make plenty good sceneries?"
"And where is that?" quoth I.
Kahéle's little lump of a nose was jerked up toward the great mountain at the back of L——'s house. "Haleakala!"[A] cried he, triumphantly, for he saw he had resurrected my interest in life, and he felt that he had a thing or two worth showing, a glimpse of which might content me with this world, dull as I found it just then. "Haleakala—the House of the Sun—up before us," said Kahéle.
[A] Haleakala, an extinct crater in the Sandwich Islands, supposed to be the largest in the world.
"And to get into the Sun's House?"