Saving the Volcano for evening, we spent the day horseback, visiting Kilauea’s environs of sister craters, some still breathing and others dead and cold, shrouded in verdure. Kalauea-iki, one of the nearest to the Volcano House and the new Crater Hotel, is an 800-foot deep sink, with a diameter of half a mile. The neighborhood is pitted with these void caldrons, and one could spend wonderful weeks in the jungle trails. The Thurstons have made a study of the region, and find it one of the most interesting in the Islands. Into a number of the more important craters we peered, and our native guide finally led the way up Puuhuluhulu around whose mellifluous name we had been rolling our tongues from Honolulu, where Kakina’s last adjuration was not to miss a sight of this particular blowhole.
Leaving the animals with the sandwich-munching guide, we carried our own lunch to the summit, where, prone, we lay with faces over the edge of the bewitching inverted cone. For an hour, like foolish children, we played with our fantasy, planning the most curious of all contemplated Hawaii dwellings, this time in the uttermost depths of Puuhuluhulu’s riotous natural fernery, with a possible glass roof over the entire crater!
Already, as we returned, low-pressing clouds above Kilauea were alight with the intense red-rose glow of Halemaumau. And no remembered volcano of Tana or Savaii made me any less excited at prospect of at last beholding Pélé’s boiling well.
(1) Kahilis at Funeral of Prince David Kawananakoa. (2) Kamehameha the Great. (3) and (4) Sport of Kings.
Not by the old trans-basin trail did we pilgrimage to the House of Everlasting Fire, but upon a new road graded through veriest stage-scenery of ohia and tree ferns, a fairyland in the brilliant headlights. One encircles nearly half of the great sink until, on the southeastern section, the road winds down westerly and across the floor to Halemaumau.
It was weird; and weirder still it became when, within a few minutes’ walking distance of the pit, the car, making for a walled parking circle, ran into a waft of steam like a tepid pink fog. Out of this, or into it, the eyes of an oncoming machine took form, burning larger and brighter through the downy smother, and safely passing our own.
A well-defined pathway is worn in the gritty lava to the southeast edge. Soon we were settled there waiting for the warm mists to incline the other way and disclose the disturbance of liquid earth that we could hear hissing softly, heavily, hundreds of feet beneath, like the sliding fall of avalanches muffled by distance and intervening masses of hills.
Then, suddenly, the mist drafted in a slanting flight toward the western crags, sucked clear of the inland sea of incredible molten solids. Open-mouthed we gazed into the earth and saw nothing akin to the colored representations of Halemaumau, but a tortured, crawling surface of grayish black, like a mantle thrown over slow-wrestling Titans in a fitful, dying struggle. Then a crack would show—not red, but an intensely luminous orange flame-color—a glimpse of earth’s hot blood. As our eyes became accustomed to the heaving skin of the monstrous tide, they could follow the rising, slow-flowing, lapsing waves that broke sluggishly against an iron-bound shore. And never a wave of the fiery liquid but left some of itself on the black strand, its ruthless, heavy-flung comb resistlessly imposing coat upon coat of rocky gore that cooled, at least in comparison to its source, in upbuilding process. Once in a while a bubble would rise out in the central mass, and burst info a fountain of intolerably brilliant orange fluid, its scorching drops fading on the dense black surge.
From the seduction of its merest smoke display to this deep-sunk eruption of 1915, the House of Fire is all one in its confounding marvel.