But every foot of the way was of a beauty and interest never to be forgotten. The start, for instance: did I say dawn? It was barely more than the beginning of the end of morning twilight. The sky was deep blue in contrast to a crescent moon bright as any star. The day grew, and beetling cloud-masses, slate-blue, stood up, solid, the lightning streaking athwart, like fantastic mountains against the heavenly hyacinth dome. I almost listened for grand music to usher in this creation of a new day. Music there was not wanting, however, of birds on earth and in the scintillating air. Then a Gargantuan cloud-zeppelin sailed on its tremendous way above the horizon, raining reflected fire over a burning cloud-city of sunrise upon a cobalt sea.
How different the vision upon our left—shadowy Mauna Kea’s snows flushing rosier, shade by shade, to the sun’s ardency; but in some towering fields it was that the color of the snow is occasioned by the red volcanic soil.
Dipping in and out of gulches, the clawing, sliding hoofs uncovered earth as yellow as rusty iron. In a light rain, the warm breath of the dust rose fog-like in the frosty air. While the sun dispersed the mists and sent them drifting, drifting, in opal veils, we noted the semblance of a Japanese print in the dead and dying koa trees, stark and gray against a pearl-white curtain.
When the sharp, hot sunlight became obscured by clouds through which we plodded, our coats had to be unrolled. The changes of temperature were startling. But as the morning wore, the heat settled down, and jerseys were added to the saddle bundles. In and out of forest and descending plain jogged we; and many were the views of the mountain—red, upturned profiles of burned-out craters against the enamel-blue sky, and the sharp-edged summit blotched with snow. The drouth was very apparent where we had come again into the Parker Ranch, which reaches over the shoulders and about both sides of Mauna Kea, into and around other tracts. Reforesting has been done by setting out eucalyptus. I saw some well-grown groves, of a kind bearing blossoms which drenched the breeze with fragrance.
The last few miles, by highway along the ocean bluffs, were painful, I will admit; but I was not the only “seasoned rider” who dismounted stiffly. A short walk, and the restful trip to Hilo in an open railway coach, put us into condition for a dance. But I was bothered much by the sudden wrenching from transcendent heights of which I had been a thankful and very humble part for the past days. It was hard again to tread city pavement, to gaze upon buildings of wood and stone instead of fronded tree and the extravagant bulks of God’s mountains. Even when contemplating the Shipmans’ string of automobiles, I harked back regretfully to my friends up yonder on Mauna Kea’s shoulder—the funny, fuzzy, excellent philosophers, the square, true little horses of PuuOO.
Yet for all the stupendousness of my late surroundings, and the wholesome excitements of the chase, the memory of it remained a quiet thing, something serenely happy.
At one o’clock of another morning, I arrived at Lahaina, on Maui, to spend Christmas holidays upon Haleakala Ranch. Not long after leaving Hilo, the Mauna Kea had run into a succession of violent squalls, through which she threshed steadily for hours. But when the ship’s boat landed, it was under a sky of low-hanging stars, and I could see the loom of West Maui’s valleyed heights.
Louis von Tempsky, debonair as of old, and the sonsy Armine, stood peering down in the uncertain light. Without trace of yawn from interrupted sleep, they reached to me the hands of perfect welcome one fails not to clasp in these sweet isles. Never, should I embark and depart a thousand times, can Hawaii’s landings become commonplace. Day or night, they remain the most unspoiled of travel blessings.
If there is one thing lovelier than sea-level on Maui, it is her temperate zone. I slept and woke for a month in the wing of a new house on the ranch, set in thick, wild lawns where before breakfast one romps barefoot with an adorable sprawl of puppies. By day, it was the old story of bird-song, of sunshine and shadow, of illimitable mountain rim above blue-shadowed clouds. And rainbows. Such rainbows! Conflagrations of rainbows; the air afire with drifting rainbows; rainbows against cloudrack of West Maui; through a veil of rainbowed mist, all the centuried lapse of green-clothed lava below. Each morning, my own pet rainbow frayed itself out in a dewy meadow just beyond my window. And once, on a day’s ride of fifty miles, I saw at sunset, across a vast bowl of pale-green cane, an old burial ground turned into a glittering city of the dead, with a huge slanting shaft of rainbow piercing a low, leaden pall of cloud.
During that same ride on the mountain, above the cactus plains, we could make out the island of Kahoolawe. And Armine told me how once she had found, in a rocky interstice, an old tambourine—so old it fell to dust in her fingers. Lanai was visible to the northwest, and I planned some day to go there from Lehaina. One reads that the ages have exposed on Lanai a strata of soil of every conceivable shape and color, as remarkable as the Garden of the Gods.