Two machines carried ten of us, including the drivers. The party was composed of men whom Mr. Ford wanted Jack to know, representing the best of Hawaii’s white citizenship. There was Mr. Joseph P. Cooke, dominating figure of Alexander & Baldwin, which firm is the leading financial force of the Islands (it was Mr. Cooke’s missionary grandparents, the Amos P. Cookes, who founded and for many years conducted what was known as the “Chiefs’ School,” afterward called the “Royal School,” which was patronized by all of the higher chiefs and their families); Mr. Lorrin A. Thurston, also descended from the first missionaries, and associated conspicuously with the affairs of Hawaii, both monarchical and republican—and incidentally owner of the morning paper; and Senor A. de Souza Canavarro, Portuguese Consul, an able man who has lived here twenty years and whose brain is shelved with Islands lore.
The world was all dewy cool and the air redolent with flowers when, after an early dip in the surf, we glided down Kalakaua Avenue between the awakening duck ponds with their lily pads and grassy partitions. Leaving the center of town by way of Nuuanu Avenue, along which an electric car runs for two miles, we headed for the storied heights of the Pali (precipice), and presently began climbing between converging mountains to the pass through the Koolau Range. This Nuuanu Valley is a wondrous residence section, of old-fashioned white mansions of by-gone styles of architecture, still wearing their stateliness like a page in history. The dwellers therein are cooled by every breeze—not to mention frequent rains. It is a humorous custom for a resident to say, “I live at the first shower,” or the second shower, or even the third, according to his distance from moister elevations in the city limits. The rainfall in upper Nuuanu, and Manoa, the next valley to the southeast, is from 140 inches to 150 inches annually. In lower Nuuanu—only three or four miles distant—it averages around 30-35 inches. Many of these old houses stand amidst expansive lawns, the driveways columned with royal palms—the first brought to the Islands. One white New England house was pointed out as having been the country home of Queen Emma, bought with its adjoining acres by the Government and turned into a public park. The building contains some of the Queen’s furniture, and other antiques of the period. “The Daughters of Hawaii,” an organization of Hawaii-born women of all nationalities, has the care of the premises.
I promised myself an afternoon in the cemetery, where quaint tombs show through beautiful trees and shrubbery, and where, in the Mausoleum, are laid the bones of the Kamehameha and Kalakaua dynasties. King Lunalilo, who was the last of the Kamehamehas and preceded Kalakaua, rests in a mausoleum at Kawaiahao Church in town.
Up we swung on a smooth road graded along the hillsides, the flanks of the valley drawing together, the violet-shadowed walls of the mountains growing more sheer until they seemed almost to overtop with their clouded heads breaking into morning gold—Lanihuli and Konahuanui rising three thousand feet to left and right. From a keen curve, we looked back and down the green miles we had come, to a fairy white city suffused in blue mist beside a fairy blue sea.
Four miles from the end of the car-track, quite unexpectedly to me, suddenly the car emerged from a narrow defile upon a platform hewn out of the rocky earth, and my senses were momentarily stunned, for the high island had broken off, fallen away beneath our feet to the east and north. Alighting, we pressed against a wall of wind that eternally drafts through the gap, and threading among a score of small pack-mules resting on the way to Honolulu, gained the railed brink of the Pali. In the center of a scene that had haunted me for years, since I beheld it in a painting at the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo, I looked a thousand feet into an emerald abyss. Over its awful pitch Kamehameha a century ago forced the warriors of the King of Oahu, Kalanikupule—a “legion of the lost ones” whose shining skulls became souvenirs for strong climbers in succeeding generations. Some one pointed to a ferny, bowery spot far below, where Prince Cupid once kept a hunting cabin; but there was now neither trace of it nor of any trail penetrating the dense jungle.
To the left, lying northwest, stretch the perpendicular, inaccessible ramparts of the Koolau Range, which extends the length of the island, bastioned by erosions, and based in rich green slopes of forest and pasture that fall away to alluvial plains fertile with rice and cane, and rippled with green hillocks. Where we stood, a spur of the range bent in a right-angle to the eastward at our back; and off to the right, the great valley is bounded by desultory low hills, amid which an alluring red road winds to Kailua and Waimanalo by the sapphire sea, where we are told the bathing beaches and surf are unsurpassed.
A reef-embraced bay on the white-fringed shore caused me to inquire why Honolulu had not been builded upon this cool windward coast of Oahu, with its opulent and ready-made soil. “Any navigator could tell you that,” Jack chided. “Honolulu was begun when there was no steam, and the lee side of the island was the only safe anchorage for sailing vessels.”
The sun was now burning up the moving mists below, and through opalescent rents and thinning spaces we could trace the ruddy ribbon of road we were to travel. If I had dreamed of the majestic grandeur of these mountains, of the wondrous painted valley to the east, how feebly I should have anticipated other islands until first exploring this one. Jack keeps repeating that he cannot understand why it is not thronged with tourists, and calls it the garden of the world. We have seen nothing like it in America or Europe. And yet Oahu is not generally spoken of as by any means the most beautiful of the Hawaiian Islands. Instead, both residents and visitors rave over the “Garden Isle,” Kauai, the Kona coast of Hawaii and that Big Island’s gulches, the wonders of Maui with its Iao Valley and Haleakala, “The House of the Sun.” What must they all be, say we, if these persons have not been stirred by Windward Oahu!
After clinging spellbound to our windy vantage for half an hour (meanwhile speculating how many times Kalanikupule’s unfortunate army bumped in its headlong fall), we coasted the serpentine road that is railed and reënforced with masonry, fairly hanging to a stark wall for the best part of two miles. I noticed that Mr. Cooke preferred himself to negotiate his car on this blood-tingling descent, until we rounded into the undulating floor of the plain whence we stared abruptly up at the astonishing way we had come, with its retaining walls of cement, some of them four hundred feet in length.
One stands at the base of an uncompromising two-thousand-foot crag, an outjut of the range, and it appears but a few hundred feet to its head. For there is an elusiveness about the atmosphere that makes unreal the sternest palisades, the ruggedest gorges. Everything is as if seen in a mirror that has been dulled by a silver breath. That is it—it is all a reflection—these are mirrored mountains and shall always remain to me like something envisioned in a glass.