The lovely ball closed with “Aloha Oe,” Love to You, in waltz measure, while the dancers joined in singing. The last, dying cadence left one with a reposeful sense of fulfillment, and none broke this dreamy repose by clapping for an encore.
Waikiki, June 1.
Yesterday, after a luncheon that included our first yam (little different from a fried potato-patty), we rode to Diamond Head, where at last I gazed into a real crater. The way led through Kapiolani Park, where the little sleeping volcano formed a painted background for the scattered trees and blossoming lotus ponds. Once out of the shady driveways, we sweltered in a windless glare upon the rising white road.
It was a mud volcano, this Leahi, and upon its oblong steep sides remain the gutterings of age-ago eruptions. While less than eight hundred feet high, at a distance it appears much higher. We had had a never-to-be-forgotten view of it on our first ride to Honolulu, when, through a gap, we looked across the tree-embowered city, and the low red crater of Punchbowl—Puowaina; and far Diamond Head rose too ethereal in the shimmering atmosphere to be of solid earth thrown up by ancient convulsions.
Skirting the south side of the Head, we tethered our dripping horses, and on foot climbed the limy wall, seething hot under the midday sun. I arrived at the edge of the crater sans heart and lungs, muscles quivering, and eyes dim. But what I there saw brought me back in short order to my normal state of joy at being alive. Compared with other wonders of Hawaii Nei, probably this small hollow mountain should be sung without trumpets. But I have not seen Haleakala and Kilauea, Mauna Kea or Hualalai, and lacked no thrills over my first volcano, albeit a dead one. The bowl is a symmetrical oval, and may be half a mile long—we could not judge, for the eye measures all awry these incurving walls of tender green, cradling, far beneath, the still, green oval mirror of a lakelet.
We rested our burned eyes on the soft green shell of earth before retracing the scorching way to the horses, and decided that small-boat travel is ill training for mountain scaling anywhere near the Southern Cross. Around Diamond Head we continued, gazing off across blue bays and white beaches to Koko Head, very innocent seen from the land by light of day, but full of omen by night when winds blow hot and small Snarks drift near wicked reefs. To-day the road led close by Diamond Head lighthouse and the signal station that telephoned our approach to Honolulu; and we learned that it was wirelessed from the city to the island of Maui, where the Congressional party hung 10,000 feet, on the lip of Haleakala’s twenty-three-mile crater. How different from times when the only way of messages was by the watery miles separating the islands, in sloops and schooners or outrigger canoes, and telephones had never been dreamed of.
On the way to return the mares, Jack took me aside to the transport wharf that I might see the departure of a vessel from Honolulu, for never, since his own experiences, has he spoken without emotion of this beautiful ceremonial. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world.
The steamer decks were bowers of fragrant color, as was the wharf, for the shoulders of the departing congressmen and their womenfolk were high-piled with wreaths, of ilima, of roses, of heliotrope, carnations, lilies, and scented green things; while the dense throng ashore was hardly less garlanded, and streams of flowers flowed back and forth on the gangways. A great humming of voices blent with the quivering strains of an Hawaiian orchestra on the upper deck, and now and again all tuneful din drowned in a patriotic burst from Berger’s Royal Hawaiian Band ashore. An impressive scene it was, not alone for beauty, but in a human way, for the myriad faces of the concourse shaded from white through all the browns to yellow skins, mingling in good fellowship and oneness of spirit in this hour of farewell to the lawmakers of their common cause. And none of these wishing godspeed were more imposing nor charming than the Hawaiians, from the two Princes and their splendid consorts to the humblest commoners of their people. Humblest is wrong—there is no humility in the breed. Their eyes look only an innocent equality of sweet frankness, and their feet step without fear the soil they can but still regard as their dearest own.
Prince Cupid, the delegate, received round after round of cheers from the passengers when a deep-mouthed siren called the parting moment; and at the last, the native orchestra, descending the gangway, joined with the wind instruments in Queen Liliuokalani’s own song, tenderest of farewells and hopes for a returning, “Aloha Oe.” The human being did not live whose heart was not conscious of a nameless longing for he knew not what. One ached with burden of all the good-bys that ever were and ever will be, of all the sailings of all the ships of all the world.
“O warp her out with garlands from the quays,”