Yet I find this in Professor Jaggar’s official report: “The lava ‘rafts’ or blocks of bench magma which rolled down the live channel, were seen to bob up [in the sea], make surface steam, and float out some distance from the shore without sinking at first, as though buoyed by the hot gas inflating them. Lightnings were seen in the steam columns. There was much muddying of the water, and fish were killed in considerable numbers.”
For the week previous the professor had kept a pack train in readiness, and by sun-up on September 29 he and Mr. Finch of the observatory, with two native packers, were on their difficult and perilous adventure over the lava deserts of other periods. The redoubtable scientist risked life and limb in the following days to secure his remarkable photographs and take samples of gas in vacuum tubes. The absorbing details of the journey and its observations are in his Bulletin of October, 1919—the high fountains of lava, the great detonations of explosions, the lake of fire on the mountain, and the final plunge of the melt over old lava bluffs into the sea in a river speeding five to ten miles an hour. This red torrent coursed for ten days. The heat of the stilled lava was not yet gone when, four months afterward, I motored upon it where it had crossed, a hundred yards wide, the highway in Alika district—a waste of aa as upstanding as the wavelet of a tide-rip, kupíkipíkio. It had swept everything in its path, causing suffering, fear and death among the herds. A temporary restoration of the highway was begun as soon as the heat had sufficiently cooled; but it made one nervous, in an inflammable vehicle, to see how a light shower caused the lava to steam, and to feel warmth still rising from crevices. Through the courtesy of Professor Jaggar, I am able to present his photograph of the flowing lava-stream.
During the eruption there was a succession of short-period, shallow tidal waves ranging from three to fourteen feet in height. These kept in trepidation the passengers on vessels of all classes that swarmed off shore. An authentic tale is told of the wife of an islander being swept some distance off-shore by a subsiding tidal wave. Fortunately she was a swimmer. I have forgotten whether she was returned by the next landward billow or was rescued by a canoe.
As I write, at this late date, of Hawaii’s volcanoes quick and dead, it comes to me that they have new rivals in extent—Katmai in Alaska, and Svea crater in Iceland just discovered by the Swedish savants Yberg and Waddell. But the character and accessibility of Kilauea and Haleakala make them immune from neglect.
One morning at half past two we left Hilo for the Shipmans’ highest altitude on Mauna Kea. But not by way of their volcano house, which necessitates traversing the lava valley between Mauna Loa and its twin mountain. We motored up the coast, in and out the misty, moonlit gulches, breathing the odors of Eden, and trying to catch glimpses of the sleeping beaches at their mouths. The sky went every opal tint that dawn can paint; and when the sun rose it was a dull, blood-red globe that burned its way through the mist at our backs. By five we were breakfasting in substantial New England manner with friends in Waimea on Parker Ranch.
More than one gorgeous sunrise was ours while we wound southerly up Mauna Kea’s western side on tracks more fit for cow-ponies, and only lately attempted by automobiles. As the “clover-leaf” climbed, one felt less and less inclined to talk. The beauty, the enormousness of every prospect was almost stupefying. The first great valley we encountered lies several thousand feet high between the largest mountain’s broken knees and Hualalai lifting its head more than eight thousand feet to the right, with Mauna Loa visible ahead. It must be kept in mind that this highest island in the world is composed of three mountains, two of which are nearly twice the elevation of Hualalai. This valley had the effect of a desert basin, hemmed in by the three looped mountains. The rolling plain, broken by hills and lesser valleys, was tufted with tree-growths and half-dried, golden-green pili grass, blowing in the high wind. For the island was suffering from what was as near drouth as it ever experiences. But one knew that with abundant moisture the wavy plateau would be an incalculably rich one.
At Kalaieha, on the Humuulu tract, still on Parker Ranch, we watched the throwing and shearing of rams, while waiting for the Japanese cowboys to bring horses on which we rode to the Shipmans’ ranch, PuuOO. The ponies’ feet thudded softly in the meadow turf. The air was light and sweet, and full of bird voices—questioning whistle of plover, bickering and calling of mynah, and skylarks near the ground, with more of earth-earthy mellowness than that small feathered angel’s celestial strains from the thin blue ether. From time to time, on our curving path among hillocks high and low, we would have a glimpse, still six thousand feet overhead, of Mauna Kea’s pure snowy pinnacles, with their azure shadows.
“I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed in the buildings,” Caroline ventured. Disappointed? Never had I seen anything to equal this little ranch house, perched a mile and a quarter above sea level. It is built of hand-hewn koa—walls, roof, floors, lanais. Koa, red as Etruscan gold, is as common here as precious metal in heaven. The furniture, too, is of the same “Hawaiian mahogany,” fashioned long ago in quaintest of shapes. Outside, the house was grayed beautifully with age and weathers of many years. We slept in high koa beds, on fat wool mattresses carded by Jack’s “First lady of Hawaii,” Mother Shipman herself. And what sleep! What appetite! What life! It was snapping-cold at morn and eve, with a moon diamond-bright—never did I see moon so bright. I would wake to hear, as if in a Maine winter, the telephone wire humming and crackling, and the mynahs complaining of the cold; and another bird, with a benevolent warble low in the throat.
Before the moon had risen, we could make out afar, where the sea laved the foot of the valley, the twinkling lights of Hilo town, a little to south of east. Already the glow from Kilauea’s raging furnace was coloring the dark clouds beyond Mauna Loa’s long incline. Any time of the night one could reckon upon that intense, lurid wine-glow to the southeast.
Breakfasts were mainly of plumpest plover, proudly served to the queen’s taste by Ondera, the Japanese cook, a broken-down cowboy. For some reason it had been hard for me to think of the Japanese as cowboys; but men who are fortunate enough to get and keep them say there are none more able nor more faithful. The time came when none of the splendid Hawaiian horsemen were to be found who would stay on the upper reaches. A picturesque Japanese graveyard on a neighboring knoll attests the devotion of the transplanted labor.