Honolulu had of course altered, and grown. New streets, like this our Beach Walk, had been laid on filled marshlands at Waikiki, and bordered with bungalows set in unfenced lawns, while the lilied area of duck-ponds along Kalakaua Avenue had shrunken to the same populous end. Beyond the Moana, Heinie’s, an open-air café chantant—and dansant—beguiled the up-to-date residents and tourists, and a roof-garden, with like facilities, was bruited for the Alexander Young. The Country Club, out Nuuanu, boasted what we heard many a mainlander term “the finest golf-links anywhere.” Diamond Head’s rosy cradle had become unapproachable as a heavily fortified military position. Residential districts of beautiful homes had extended well into the valleys; some of the vernal ridges of Honolulu’s background had blossomed into alluring building-sites, such as Pacific Heights; and Tantalus was developing its possibilities. Kaimuki, on the rolling midlands beyond Kapiolani Park, formed quite a little city by itself. Kaimuki’s red lands, on the side of the gentle, seaward-tipped bowl that holds Honolulu, seemed always to be brushed by the raveled ends of rainbow-opal scarves. Never in the minds of living men, due to the continuous storms that year, were there such rainbows over Oahu. We lay, Jack and I, floating on the green hills of water beyond the inshore surges, and bathed our very souls in heavenly color. To mauka, out of deep blue skies pearled with magnificent clouds, out of the warm palpitant chaos of reflected sunset over against the eastern mountains, came the miracle, the rainbows, formless, generous, streaming banners of immaterial, loosely-banded colors, frayed with melting jewels that softly drenched the ruby and emerald vale and foothills. If I should have to live in a house for the rest of my days, I should call upon my memory of Oahu’s rainbow-tapestried skies, and dwell within that memory.
Automobile traffic had drawn the island closer together, and a drive around Oahu, by the route we had formerly traveled, was more often accomplished in one day. Once we spent a night on Kahuku Plantation, and visited the huge Marconi Wireless Station near by. Our return to Honolulu was made by way of the railroad around the extreme western end of the island. This trip should not be missed, for it shows a remarkable coast line, and splendid valleys of the mountain ranges, on the slopes of which one may still see the ruins of stone walls and habitations of long-dead generations. Automobile picnics from Diamond Head to Koko Head, and others over the Nuuanu Pali to points on the eastern shore, like Kailua and Waimanalo bays, together with a visit to Kaneohe Bay and its wondrous coral gardens, with swimming and sailing in pea-green water over jet-black volcanic sands, nearly completes the circuit one may make of this protean isle.
That summer of 1915, during a warm spell in town, bag and baggage we moved for a week to the little hotel at Kaneohe Bay. Each time we emerged over the Pali into the valley of the Mirrored Mountains, Jack would exclaim at the vast pineapple planting that had flowed over the carmine hillocks below. Instead of bemoaning this encroachment of man upon the natural beauty of the landscape, Jack hailed it with acclaim. To those who deprecated the invasion he would cry:
“I love to see the good rich earth being made to work, to produce more and better food for man. There is always plenty of untouched wild that will not produce food. Every time I open up a new field to the sun on the ranch, there is a hullabaloo about the spoiling of natural beauty. Meantime, I am raising beautiful crops to build up beautiful draft-animals and cattle—improving, improving, trying to help the failures among farmers to succeed. And, don’t you see? don’t you see?—there’s always plenty of wild up back. To me the change is from one beauty to another; and the other, in turn, goes to make further beauty of animal life, and more abundance for man.”
Indeed, from its small beginnings of but a few years before, the pineapple industry had risen to the second in importance in the Islands, giving place only to sugar. The exported product alone, for 1914, had been valued at $6,000,000.00.[[10]]
Mr. Thurston took us horseback on one of the most interesting and least known jaunts on Oahu. From Kaneohe we held east a quarter-mile to the sandy mouth of the Kaneohe River, across a spit of mountain-washed debris, through abandoned fishing villages and little tufts of groves; thence along an arm of the bay, outside the ancient barrier of a fish pond nearly half a mile in diameter, where the tide washed our horses’ flanks.
We attained to a plain partially covered with sand and sand hills drifted up out of the ocean, and rode upon a dead coral bed formerly undersea, which had been elevated several feet by volcanic action. Northwest to the point at the entrance to Kaneohe Bay, from a small fishing village we climbed a low cone to see the ruins of an old heiau, where some seventy years ago a church was erected by the pioneer Catholics. It is now in ruins, for the inhabitants, numbering several hundreds, have passed away. The pathetic remains of their little rocky homes can still be seen scattered about the slopes of the green hills and upon surrounding levels, where plover run, with skylarks soaring overhead. And for the first time in our lives, in this lonely deserted spot we listened to the celestial caroling of those lovely flying organisms, English skylarks, which our old friend, Governor Cleghorn, now dead, first imported from New Zealand. Ainahau, auwe and ever auwe, had been broken up into town lots, and was become the site of a boarding-house! Never, once, did Jack or I, in passing along Kalakaua Avenue, glance that way. Too sorrowful and indignant we were, that the home of Likelike and Kaiulani should not have been held inviolate. A distinguished architect, later passing through Honolulu, complained: “One thing regarding Honolulu I would say is damnable: that is the three-deck tenement on part of the old gardens of the Princess Kaiulani at Ainahau. This three-deck fills me with amazement, disgust and apprehension. This class of construction is not desirable under any consideration and should be stopped in this extraordinarily beautiful city.” He went on to say: “During my drive around the Island I came to the belief, after a matter of conclusion extending over thirty-five years of travel in Europe and Asia, that the Island of Oahu is the most beautiful place on earth. You have here the home of absolute beauty, and you should conserve it.”
On the seashore, inside a glorious surf, in view of Namoku manu, or Bird Islands, where we could see myriad seabirds nesting and flying about in clouds, we lunched under grotesque lava rocks, carved by the seas of ages; and Jack and I studied the green and turquoise rollers that thundered close, driven by the full power of the trans-Pacific swell, figuring how we should comport ourselves in such waters if ever we should be spilled therein. Again in the saddle, we let the horses run wild over a continuous, broad sand-beach, for a mile and a half; to our right a line of glaring sand hills, called Heleloa. Mounting these, Kakina led us to the battle field of a century before, where the Mauis, landing, had fought with the Oahus. The winds had uncovered a scattering of bleached bones, whiter than the white sand, and we found one perfect jawbone, larger than Jack’s, with several undecayed molars firm in their sockets, and, curiously enough, no provision for “wisdom teeth.”
Near the shore at one point we turned aside and dismounted to hunt for land-shells in the bank of a small gulch. For Lorrin A. Thurston was become a land-shell enthusiast, and by now had, by personal searching, amassed a fascinating collection of over 200 varieties, laid out like jewels in shallow, velvet-lined drawers.