In the bright afternoon, horseback, with a Hawaiian guide, we made descent into Kilauea.
The morning’s cursory view had been no preparation for the beautiful trail, on which we were obliged to brush aside tree-branches and ferns and berry bushes in order to see the cracking desolation of the basin. Abruptly enough, however, we debouched upon its floor, under the stiff wall we had descended, now hundreds of feet overhead. Before us lay a crusted field of copperish dull-gold, where whiffs and plumes of white rose near and far from awesome fissures—a comfortless waste without promise of security, a treacherous valley of fear, of lurking hurt, of extermination should a foot slip.
On a well-worn pathway, blazed in the least dangerous places, we traversed the strange, hot earth-substance. The horses, warily sniffing, seemed to know every yard of the way as accurately as the tiny Hawaiian guide. But I recalled Christian in the Valley of the Shadow, for at every hand yawned pitfalls large and small and most fantastic—devilish cracks issuing ceaseless scalding menace, broken crusts of cooled lava-bubble of metallic dark opalescence; jagged rents over which we hurried to avoid the hot, gaseous breath of hissing subterranean furnaces.
Now and then the guide requested us to dismount, and then led, crawling, into caverns of unearthly writhen forms of pahoehoe lava, weirdly beautiful interiors—bubbles that had burst redly in the latest overflow of Halemaumau into the main crater. On through the uncanny, distorted lavascape cautiously we fared under a cloud-rifted sky, and finally left the horses in a corral of quarried lava, thence proceeding afoot to the House of Fire.
Perched on the ultimate, toothed edge, we peered into a baleful gulf of pestilent vapors rising, forever rising, light and fine, impalpable as nightmare mists from out a pit of destruction. Only seldom, when the slight breeze stirred and parted the everlasting, unbottled vapors, were we granted a fleeting glimpse, many hundreds of feet below on the bottom of the well, of the plummetless hole that spills upward its poisonous breath. If the frail-seeming ledge on which we hung had caved, not one of us could have reached bottom alive—the deadly fumes would have done for us far short of that.
A long silent space we watched the phenomenon, thought robbed of definiteness by our abrupt and absolute removal from the blooming, springing, established world above the encircling palisade of dead and dying planetary matter. Jack’s comment, if inelegant, was fit, and without intentional levity:
“A hell of a hole,” he pronounced.
Pélé, Goddess of Volcanoes, with her family, constituted a separate class of deities, believed to have emigrated from Samoa in ancient days, and taken up their abode in Moanalua, Oahu. Their next reputed move was to Kalaupapa, Molokai, thence to Haleakala, finally coming to rest on the Big Island. In Halemaumau they made their home, although stirring up the furies in Mauna Loa and Hualalai on occasion, as in 1801, when unconsidered largess of hogs and sacrifices was vainly thrown into the fiery flood to appease the huhu (angry) goddess. Only the sacrifice of a part of Kamehameha’s sacred hair could stay her wrath, which cooled within a day or two.
Many, doubtless, have there been of great men and women in the Polynesian race; but the fairest complement to the greatest, Kamehameha, seems to have been that flower of spiritual bravery, Kapiolani. A high princess of Hawaii, she performed what is accounted one of the greatest acts of moral courage ever known—equal to and even surpassing that of Martin Luther. Woman of lawless temperament, her imperious mind became interested in the tenets of Christianity, and swiftly she blossomed into a paragon of virtue and refinement, excelling all the sisterhood in her intelligent adoption of European habits of thought and living.
Brooding over the unshakable spell of Pélé upon her people, in defiance of their dangerous opposition, as well as that of her husband, Naihe, the national orator, she determined to court the wrath of the Fire Goddess in one sweeping denunciation and renunciation. We have it, however, that Naihe later cultivated an aloha for the missionaries, and was buried where are now only the ruined foundations of the first mission station, established by Ely and Ruggles in 1824 and 1828, mauka of Cook Monument.