We slept on a broad platform in the Japanese goat-herd’s hut. It did not look tempting. But noting that the Shipman girls were nothing loth, I made myself at home in the small, earth-floored room hung with quaint rags. Coming to examine these and the rest of the windowless apartment, I found it all immaculate, everything “sweet as a nut,” as if fresh laundered. The crisp night-wind flowed through the open doorways, and at intervals a pink glow suffused us from far Kilauea. We slept like children to the organ music of the surf; and there was a poignancy in the pleasure of awakening to the sunrise, an enormous orb, clear-cut as a harvest moon, red as wine, lifting out of a slate-blue, heaving plane. Then the snows of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa blushed from rose to fervid crimson above the fathomless mist-blues of their towering bulks.
Naturally, I had been eager to see the great eruption of Mauna Loa’s crater, Mokuoweoweo, down the Kau side of Hawaii; but it had ceased before my arrival. Kilauea, too, had joined in the general outburst, Halemaumau overflowing into the main crater, clear to the foot of the bluff below the Volcano House. The day before I landed, the lava had suddenly lapsed several hundreds of feet, carrying with it large sections of the pit walls. Before I had left Hilo, however, mine was the good fortune to see it risen to within twenty feet of the rim.
It was away and beyond all imagining from former views. Night after night I stood upon the crusted margin of the boiling shaft, prickly with Pélé’s strands of spun-glass hair, and ever the wonder accumulated. The circle of lava wall that had fallen in was raised by the powerful tide into the wreath-form of a south sea atoll, supporting tiny hills as does the surrounding reef of Bora-Bora in the Societies. Upon one arc the island bore a rugged miniature mountain with the silhouette of a castle on the Rhine. Inside this black lava circlet there moved and fountained a lake of fiery liquid, while between the ring and the crater walls there flowed and exploded a molten torrent. This would gradually sink a few feet, disclosing awful caverns at white heat along the lower edges of the island. The fountains, first bubbling up in domes of exquisite rose and lambent yellow, would swell to bursting point, and fling high into the burning night tons of molten fire-gold, which fell in great drops heavily back into the restless, roaring, hissing flood.
When one first leaves his car in the parking place, there is heard the peculiar soft-grinding, avalanching sound of the milling chaos. The sky is painted red above the pit, and clouds of pink steam rise and bend back and forth in the wind, or float away. But this illumination is no preparation, even to the very brink, for what impinges upon the eye when it looks over into the House of Fire. The brilliance is of an intensity so terrific that all the white-hot furnaces of the world could give little intimation of this glare that seems, like the eye of God, to pierce and light the innermost convolutions of one’s brain, rob the very spirit of its vain secrets.
By day the brilliance is more one of color, as if the solar spectrum dyed the earth-substance and vapor with fervid rose, red, and orange, and sulphurous greens and yellows.
Pélé has played fast and loose the past several years; and no man can count upon his pilgrimage being rewarded by her most spectacular performances. Although I continue to maintain that her serenest vaporings are worth the voyage.
In March of 1921, the big steamer Hawkeye State made her first Baltimore to Hawaii trip, bringing a large list of eastern passengers to visit the volcanic marvel. The campaign of publicity which landed them at Hilo had been based more than all else upon the prayer that the fire goddess might be in wrathful mood. As the Hawkeye State neared port, there was a disheartening lack of glow upon the side of Mauna Loa. The hopes of the promoters were faint when the hotels at Kilauea were reached, and grumbling arose at the insufficient accommodation and lethargic aspect of Halemaumau in the distance. This continued until the procession of motors was well on its way through the forest, bound for the pit.
And then it happened.
Abruptly, as if ordered for their benefit, Pélé broke loose upon the starry night; and by the time the excited scores had reached the verge of her dwelling, the ponderous surge, urged from beneath, was lashing tremendously against the battlements. These capitulated to the onslaught, and crashed into the molten mass, driving the tourists hastily to their cars and the safety and sight-seeing vantage of the bluffs around the main crater. I quote from an eye-witness: