Next Day.
This bright, blue and crystal morning, despite the bustle of packing for the return to Hilo, Mrs. Shipman was found seated amidst cut flowers of her own tender care, weaving crisp leis for our shoulders and hats. That in itself was not surprising; but in view of the fact that she was to accompany us, it seemed the very acme and overflow of hospitality. Jack, gazing upon this mother-of-many, his eyes brimming with appreciation, broke out: “To me, Mother Shipman is the First Lady of Hawaii!”
To the garlands were added necklaces of strung berries, bright blue and hard as enamel, and strands of tiny round rosebuds, exquisite as pale corals from Naples. It was a custom in less strenuous years to present these plant-gems laid in jewel cases of fresh banana bark split lengthwise, the inside of which resembles nothing so well as mother-of-pearl.
And so, wreathed in color and perfume, we rumbled down the fragrant mountain, ourselves a moving part of the prevalent luxuriance of flower and fern and vine. One mile is as another for unspoiled beauty, though turns in the magical pathway open up pictures that surpass beauty if this may be. Great trees, living or dead, their weird roots half above ground, form hanging gardens of strange blooms and tendrilly creepers imagined of other planets or the pale dead moon. Giant ferns, their artificial-looking pedestals set inches-deep in moss on fallen trunks, crowd the impenetrable, dank undergrowth. Climbing-palms net the forest high and low with fantastic festoons, and star the glistening wildwood with point-petaled waxen blossoms of burnt-orange luster, while the decorative ie-ie sets its rust-colored candelabra on twisted trunk and limb. If you never beheld else in all Hawaii Nei, the Volcano Road would impress a memory of one of the most marvelous journeys of a lifetime. Of the thirty miles, the twenty nearest to Hilo wind through this virgin forest garden, into the picturesque outskirting lanes of the old town. If I mistake not, Kakina, when Minister of the Interior, was the pioneer road-builder of this region. Before that, men and women made their way on foot or horseback; and Mrs. Shipman relates how she carried her babies on the saddle before her.
When the carriage left the bridge that crosses Wailuku’s roaring gorge into the Shipmans’ driveway to their castle-white house overlooking Hilo, a pair of white-gowned daughters, brunette Clara, and Caroline tawny-blonde, ran to meet mother and father and younger ones as if from long absence, and lo, also Mary, now Mrs. English, who proved to be an old classmate of Jack’s in the Oakland High School. Behind them, Uncle Alec, another hale example of Hawaii’s beneficence to the old, stood apple-cheeked and smiling under his thatch of vital, frosty hair, and joined in a welcome that seemed to seal us forever their very own.
Wainaku, September 15.
As often happens, one of our giddiest experiences came through a remembered suggestion of Mr. Ford, who has long wished to coast the cane-flumes of the Big Island. Jack made a tentative bid to the Baldings for this rather startling entertainment, and the pair entered into the spirit of the idea, which, however, was not altogether new to them.
One of the flimsy aqueducts runs just beyond their rear fence, on the seaward slope; and any week-day we can follow with our eyes the loose green faggots slipping noiselessly toward the toothed maw of the sugar mill, the whistle of which measures the working hours of its employees.
To the right is a gulch, crossed, perhaps two hundred feet in air, by the flume’s airy trestle; and over this, in swimming-suits, a merry party of us essayed the narrow footboard that accompanies the flume elbow high at one’s side.
Each had his or her own method of preserving balance, mental and bodily, above the unsettling depths. Jack sustained his confidence by letting one hand slide lightly along the edge of the flume, with the result that his palm, still calloused from the Snark’s ropes, picked up an unnoticed harvest of finest splinters that gave us an hour’s work to extract. My system was first deliberately to train my eyes on the receding downward lines to the tumbling gulch-stream, and at intervals, as I walked, to touch hand momentarily to the flume. Martin, of the Snark, debonair stranger to system of any sort under any circumstances, paced undaunted halfway across, and suddenly fell exceeding sick, grasping the waterway with both hands until the color flowed back into his ashen face.