Up wet and steaming paths we strove through hot-house plants that shook perfumed raindrops upon us, into the short, mounting vale; and I, while the men went landshell-hunting with and for the eager Kakina, idled in deep grass like that remembered of Iao and Tantalus. I tried hard to realize the earthly actuality of this amphitheater of greenest green swishing with water-courses and long falls, and the intense inshore peacock-green of the precipitously walled bay, turning to intenser peacock-blue outside, clear to the low white wool-packs on the intensest indigo horizon.
“We’ll return here some day, when we needn’t hurry; and then we’ll go into Wailau, too,” Jack, who had been especially happy on this little side-voyage, endeavored to compensate my regret in passing the next lovely rent in the shore Wailau, “four hundred water-falls”—lovely as Pelekunu, with an almost impregnable partition between the two. What we saw from the resumed sampan trip, young Kenneth Emory, in Ford’s Mid-Pacific Magazine, later on described too happily to omit:
“With each revolution of the propeller, scenes were laid open whose magnificence and beauty surpassed all that we thought impossible to surpass the day before. A plateau three thousand feet high and a mile long ended in one vast pali—cut down as if by a knife. Waterfalls, peaceful vales, lagoons hidden under dark caverns, tropical birds floating above, vines swaying in the wind, every form and color of beauty lay revealed upon the grand precipice above us.”
Some of the finest scenery in this island, Molokai nui a Hina, “The Lonely Isle,” is to be found in the valley of Halawa. “The traveler,” wrote “A Haole,” in 1854, “stumbled upon its brink unawares.” At a depth of nearly twenty-five hundred feet below, there spreads out a panorama of exquisite beauty. Several large cascades spring hundreds of feet into the valley. These, and scores of taro beds, with a scattering of native dwellings, can all be seen in a sweeping glance. “It seems,” the old writer said, “as if one leap would lodge the visitor at the foot of the enormous walls which bound this earthly Eden.”
He tells how the scenes in Pilgrim’s Progress had stayed in his consciousness since childhood, and how that “matchless allegory” welled up in memory as here on Molokai he came upon the Delectable Mountains, and the Land of Beulah, and explored their wonders.
Halawa is little changed in this day, they say, and is quite accessible. Hawaii is awakening to the possibilities of this island so little known by travelers; and hotels are planned at strategic points to enable the visitor to reach novel sights in the “Paradise of the Pacific” which have so far been unheard-of. I, for one, shall make my pilgrimage to that Molokai, I have not seen; and I shall tarry at leisure until I have known it all.
A correspondent writes me from Pukoo, on the southeast rim of Molokai: “I live here in my house by the sea, as isolated as if I were in Tonga.”
But the years are few ere “the horn of the hunter,” to say nothing of the honk of the gas-car and the strident explosion of aeroplane enginery will daily contest the supremacy of the birds in the utmost fastnesses. Regretfully enough, one must remember that the swarming of the white sojourners means the gradual disappearance of the last indigenes, until now practically undisturbed in their lovely retreats on the edge of the world, by the gruelling march of events outside in that world.
Next we voyaged to Maui. How strange to ascend Haleakala in an automobile!—oh, not to the summit, but even to the Von Tempsky’s and some miles above.
Kahului had fulfilled its promise and become a lively young town. Wailuku remained as if unchangeably serene; and fabulous Iao transcended all recollection of it. Then we heard the voices of the Vons over the telephone from Wreath of Surf, Kaleinalu by the sea, and next from their smart motor car—the same debonair Von, and the two elder girls grown to splendid womanhood. Lorna, thirteen, brought up as a girl in Hawaii may gloriously be, to the free life of saddle and range, could rope cattle with the best. At the races in Kahului, we saw Jubilee’s colt, Wallaby, carry off honors for Gwendolen.