That night, when the first vivid crack broke the oily dark surface, Jack, with a gasp of delight, seized my hand, lighted a match above it, and peered closely at a big black opal, precious loot of Australia’s Lightning Ridge, that I had named “Kilauea” before ever we had seen Pélé’s colors. Tipping the stone from slanting plane to plane, its blue-gray dull face cracked into flaming lines for all the world like the phenomenon before us in the wounded side of Mauna Loa—a truer replica of Halemaumau than any painting.
Upon our return, Mr. Demosthenes had the old guest book lying open in the same long glass room, and again we read the page written years before.
“Be sure, now, Lakana,” had been another final behest of Kakina’s, “to call up Col. Sam Johnson in Pahoa, when you get to Hilo. I’m writing him to expect to take you from the Volcano down to Puna. Never saw such a man for punch.”
Next morning the Colonel arrived at the Volcano House, and drove us by way of Hilo to Pahoa, where he is in charge of the lumber mill.
Nine miles from Hilo, at the mill of the enormous Olaa Sugar Plantation, we branched off southwest on the picturesque Puna Road. Once clear of certain beautiful miles of jungle, it crosses an interesting if monotonous desert of aged lava, supporting a sparse growth of lehua and ohia, and pasturage for cattle of the Shipmans and others. Mauna Kea and her sister mountain were good to us that day, for both going and returning we had fair view of their snowy springtime summits.
The mill at Pahoa demonstrated to us how the forests of lehua, koa, the ohia, and all the valuable hard timber of the rich woods is converted into merchantable lumber. And we came away with a handsome souvenir, a precious calabash of kou wood (now almost extinct, owing to an insect that deprives the tree of its leaves, heavy and polished like mottled brown marble), a product of the mill.
After luncheon there were summoned three part-Hawaiian sisters, cultured and modest-mannered, to sing. And there, my initial time in the District of Puna—scene of Tully’s “Bird of Paradise,”—quite unexpectedly I learned something of what these isles of the Snark’s first landfall meant to me. While the contralto and treble of their limpidezzo voices sang the beloved old “Sweet Lei Lehua,” “Mauna Kea,” the “Dargie Hula,” and the heart-compelling “Aloha oe,” suddenly I fell a-weeping, quite overwhelmed with all the unrealized pent emotion of what I had seen and felt the preceding days, and the gracious memories that flooded back from the older past. And auwé, murmured the dusky sisters, hovering about me in solicitude.
Once more at Hilo Harbor, the Matsonia, out in the stream, her siren sounding the warning hour, was reached by launch from the pretty oriental waterside at the mouth of the Waiakea. Our eyes were more than a little wistful as in memory we sailed out with the Snark. But we did it! “With our own hands we did it,” thus Jack; and the glamorous voyage was now an accomplished verity, from which we had come back very much alive and unjaded.
Back in Honolulu at daybreak, Jack declined to be ousted by any officious steward until the final period was dotted to his morning’s ten pages. Eventually he issued upon deck almost into the arms of Alexander Hume Ford, whom we were no end glad to see, buoyant and incessant as ever, brimful of deeds for the advantage of Hawaii as ever he had been of their visioning.