In the forenoon we visited the Volcano House on the yawning lip of the big crater, and sat before a roomy stone fireplace in the older section, where Isabella Bird and many another wayfarer, including Mark Twain, once toasted their toes of a nipping night.
From the hotel lanai we looked a couple of miles or so across the sunken lava pan to Halemaumau, from which a column of slow, silent, white vapor rose like a genie out of underworld Arabian Nights, and floated off in the light air currents. No fire, no glow—only the ghostly, thin smoke. And this inexorable if evanescent breath of the sleeping mountain has abundant company in myriad lesser banners from hot fissures over all the surrounding red-brown basin, while the higher country, variously green or arid, shows many a pale spiral of steam.
Rheumatic invalids should thrive at the Volcano House, for this natural steam is diverted through pipes to a bath-house where they may luxuriate as in a Turkish establishment; and there is nothing to prevent them from lying all hours near some chosen hot crack in the brilliant red earth that sulphurous exudation has incrusted with sparkling yellow and white crystals.
Having arranged with Mr. Demosthenes, Greek proprietor of this house as well as the pretty Hilo Hotel, for a guide to the pit later on, Mrs. Shipman directed her coachman farther up Mauna Loa—the “up” being hardly noticeable—to see thriving as well as dead koa forest, and also the famous “tree molds.” A prehistoric lava-flow annihilated the big growth, root and branch, cooling rapidly as it piled around the trees, leaving these hollow shafts that are faithful molds of the consumed trunks.
The fading slopes of Mauna Loa, whose far from moribund crater is second in size only to Kilauea’s, beckoned alluringly to us lovers of saddle and wilderness. One cannot urge too insistently the delusive eye-snare of Hawaii’s heights, because an elastic fancy, continuously on the stretch, is needful to realize the true proportions. Today, only by measuring the countless distant and more distant forest belts and other notable features on the incredible mountain side could we gain any conception of its soaring vastitude.
For a time the road winds through rolling plains of pasture studded with gray shapes of large, dead trees, and then comes to the sawmills of the Hawaii Mahogany Company. Here we went on foot among noble living specimens of the giant koa, which range from sixty to eighty feet, their diameters a tenth of their height, with wide-spreading limbs—beautiful trees of laurel-green foliage with moon-shaped, leaf-like bracts. It was in royal canoes of this acacia, often seventy feet in length, hollowed whole out of the mighty boles, that Kamehameha made his conquest of the group, and by means of which his empire-dreaming mind planned to subdue Tahiti and the rest of the Society Group. As a by-product, the koa furnishes bark excellent for tanning purposes.
(1) Alika Lava Flow, 1919. (2) Pit of Halemanman.
Great logs, hugely pathetic in the relentless clutch of machinery, were being dragged out by steel cable and donkey-engine, and piled in enormous and increasing heaps. Jack, who is inordinately fond of fine woods if they are cut unshammingly thick, left an order for certain generous table-top slabs to be seasoned from logs which we chose for their magnificent grain and texture.
In addition to their flourishing koa business, these mills are turning out five hundred ohia lehua railroad ties per day, and filling orders from the States. But one can easily predict a barren future for the forests of Hawaii if no restraint, as now, is enforced in the selection of trees.