“I don’t wonder McVeigh won’t let malihinis go out this way,” Jack called down, craning his neck to see the base of the sea-washed rampart, and failing. “It is worse than its reputation!”
The Settlement lay stretched in the noonday sun, like the green map of a peninsula in a turquoise sea. And we amused ourselves, while resting the animals, picking out familiar landmarks.
A short distance from the summit we joined the rebuilt portion of the trail, and passed the time of day with the stolid Japanese laborers. Six feet wide, some parts railed, to our pinched vision it appeared a spacious boulevard. Our sensations, now speedily at the top and looking over, may have been something like those of Jack of Beanstalk fame when he found a verdant level plain at the end of his clambering. Here was a rolling green prairie browsed by fat cattle, and threaded by a red road. A family carriage waited, driven by a stalwart son of the Myers’.
The restful two-mile drive through rich pasture land dotted with guava shrub brought us to his home in the midst of a 60,000-acre ranch. There are no hotel facilities on Molokai, which is forty miles long by ten in breadth, and the visitor without friends and friends of friends on the island will see little unless equipped for camping. The climate at this elevation is mild and cool, the hills and ruggeder mountains interspersed with meadows, where spotted Japanese deer have become so numerous that shooting them is a favor to the ranchers.
High Molokai—and the top of it, Mt. Kamakou, is nearly 5000 feet—should be a paradise for sportsmen, and it is surprising the Territory does not get together with the owners and try to develop facilities at Kaunakakai for housing, and transportation into the back country which is surpassingly beautiful and interesting. Somewhere on the coast there is an old battlefield where countless human bones still whiten; and on the rocky coast to the south can be seen in shallow water the ruins of miles of ancient fish ponds equaled nowhere in the group. To the northwest Oahu disturbs the horizon, cloud-capped and shimmering in the blue; while Haleakala bulks ten thousand feet in air on Maui to the east.
This ranch home is buried in flowers, and my unbelief in begonias a dozen feet high underwent rude check. A fairy forest of these surrounds the guest cottage, casting a rosy shadow on window and lanai. I should have been content to remain here indefinitely.
On the ten-mile gradual descent mid-island to the port, Kaunakakai, there was ample chance to observe this aspect of the supposedly melancholy isle, and noticing dry creeks and the general thirsty appearance of the lower foothills, we descanted upon its rich future when irrigation schemes are worked out and applied. As it is now, only in the rainy season do the streams flow, while the amphitheatre-shaped valleys on the other side of the island, set as they are almost directly across the path of the northeast tradewinds, are drenched with tropical rains. Some day these waters will be controlled to make fertile these rich but parched lands.
Dashing native cowboys, bound for a wedding luau, passed us on the road, teeth and eyes flashing, gay neckerchiefs about their singing brown throats, and hatbrims blown back from vivid faces, out-Westing the West.
Kaunakakai itself is not especially attractive, and during two hours’ waiting for the Iwalani, we occupied ourselves keeping as comfortable as possible, for July is hot on the leeward sides of the “Sandwich Islands.”
Once aboard, and our luggage, taken on at Kalaupapa, safely located, we watched the loading of freight and live-stock on the little steamer. Between the deep rolling of the ship and the din and odor of seasick swine for’ard, there was little rest the night. And the Steamship Company has a very unceremonious way of dumping its passengers ashore in Honolulu at heathenish hours. The car lines had not yet started when we stood yawning and chill beside our bags and saddles on the wharf, and we were obliged to wake a hackman to drive us to Waikiki. The city might have been dead but for an occasional milk-wagon; but after all we did not grudge ourselves the dawning loveliness of the morning—an unearthly gray-silver luminance wherein a large lemon-tinted moon melted in a lilac sky. It was like a miracle, this swift awakening of the growing earth. Birds stretched into song, the water-taro rustled in a fitful wind, young ducks stirred and fluffed their night-damp feathers on the margins of the ponds, where lilies opened to the brightening waves of light, while the broken slate-blue mountains in the background shifted their graying curtains of shimmering rain. Diamond Head developed slowly into the scene, like a photographed mountain in a dark-room, and took opalescent shades of dove and rose. Creation might have been like this! I recalled Mascagni’s “Iris,” for all living things burgeoned visibly on the warm awakening earth.