“Gee!” was the awed whisper. “Are they all like that?”
It was Beth Wiley, my cousin from California—who is as much or as little Spanish as I, but shows it more. By several months she had preceded us, and had become well-tanned by unstinted sunning on the beach at Waikiki.
The malihini’s confusion was almost pathetic when Jack introduced “Mrs. London’s cousin—I taught her to swim when she was a gangly kid!” and he continued mischievously, “I’ll leave it to you, Beth, to convince him that part of that color of yours has been acquired since last I saw you!”
Tremulous with memory of those hack-drives in the silver and lilac dawns of eight years gone, we entered an automobile in the crush outside the wharf’s great sheds, and proceeded to the Alexander Young Hotel for one night. Kilauea being in eruption, we were to return aboard the Matsonia next day for the round trip to Hilo.
On this short voyage, for the first time from sea vantage, we saw the Big Island’s green cliffs, stepped in dashing surf and fringed with waterfalls, Mauna Kea’s fair knees and lap of sugar cane extending into the broad belt of clouds—and, glory of glories, Mauna Kea’s wondrous morning face white and still against the intense blue sky.
At Hilo, we were met by Mr. R. W. Filler, manager of Mr. Thurston’s concrete dream of a Hilo Railroad, over which, in an automobile on car wheels, we made the thirty-four miles to Paauilo in the Hamakua District, and knew it to be one of the most scenically beautiful rail journeys we had ever had the good fortune to travel. It was hard to realize the accomplishment of these trestles, one horseshoe of which, we understood, is the most acute broad gauge in existence. And thus, high in a motorcar, upon steel tracks, we looked fascinated into the depths of the same gulches, unbridged and perilous in Isabella Bird’s time, and laboriously journeyed by ourselves nearly a decade ago. Sections of the railroad, instead of imitating the bluff coast line, run through passes that have been sliced deep through the bluffs themselves, the narrow cuts already blossoming like greenhouses.
Beaching the terminal, Paauilo, a pretty spot on the seaward edge of a sugar plantation, we lunched in a rustic hotel, before starting on the return. Part-way back, we left the train, at a station where Mr. Filler had been especially urged by Kakina to have an automobile waiting to take us mauka to the Akaka Fall, seldom visited and rather difficult of access. A muddy tramp in a shower brought us to the fall—a streaming ribbon five hundred feet long, trailing into an exquisitely lovely cleft, earth and rocks completely hidden by maiden-hair and other small ferns. The origin of Akaka is told in a charming legend.
Strange it seemed to speed over the red road to Hilo in a “horseless carriage,” reminiscent as we were of the four-mule progress of yore. Good it was to meet up once more with the Baldings, Mrs. Balding dimpling at Jack’s reminder of her pessimism concerning the Snark; and with Jack’s First Lady of Hawaii, “Mother” Shipman, her Hawaiian curls perhaps more silvery, but her face beaming as ever. And there was Uncle Alec, smiling only more benignly.
Next morning, in an unyieldingly new hired machine, up mountain we fared, noting a lessening of the forestage along the route, due to the encroachment of sugar cane. In some of the cleared areas we recognized the familiar ’ava plant of the South Seas. Still remained untouched stretches, as of a dream within a dream for beauty, and again I could vision the evanescent minarets and airy spans of the Palace of Truth I had once liked to fancy growing before my eyes in the delicate tracery of parasite foliage. Nothing seen in all the Snark’s coming and going among the isles under the Line had surpassed this enchanted wood.