(1) Hana. (2) The Ruin of Haleakala. (3) Von and Kakina.
And then we devoted ourselves to hanging upon the glassy-brittle brink and peering into the crater’s unbelievable depths, which are not sheer but slope with an immensity of sweep that cannot be measured by the eye, so deceptive are the red and jet inclined planes of volcanic sand.
Pointing to an inconsiderable ruddy cone in the floor of the crater, Mr. Thurston said: “You would hardly think that that blowhole is taller than Diamond Head, but it is!” And before there was time to readjust our dazzled minds, he was indicating an apparent few hundred feet of incurving cinder-slope that looked ideal for tobogganing, with the information that it was over a mile in length. A dotted line of hoof prints of some wayward goat strung across its red-velvet surface, and we tossed clinkers of lava over-edge upon unbroken stretches immediately below, to watch the little interrupted trails they traced until the wind should erase them. Only when the men loosened bowlders into the chasm, and we saw them leaving diminishing puffs of yellow ocher dust as they bounded upon the cindrous declivity, could we begin to line up the proportions of the immediate crater-side. Whole minutes were consumed, and minutes upon minutes for those swift projectiles to pass beyond sight.
“And why,” queried Jack, “are we the only ones enjoying this incomparable grandeur? Why aren’t there thousands of people climbing over one another to hang all around the rim of ‘the greatest extinct crater in the world’? Such a reputation ought to be irresistible. Why, there’s nothing on earth so wonderful as this! I should think there wouldn’t be ships enough to carry the tourists, if only for Iao and Haleakala. Perhaps Hawaii doesn’t want them, or need them..... Personally,” he laughed, “I’m glad my wife and I are the only tourists here to-day. And we’re not tourists, thank God!”
Two broad portals there are into the House Built by the Sun, and through them march the warring winds, Ukiukiu and Naulu. In at the northern portal, Ukiukiu drives the trade clouds, mile-wide, like a long line of silent, ghostly breakers, only to have them torn to shreds, as to-day, and dissipated in the warm embrace of the rarefied airs of Naulu. Sometimes Ukiukiu meets with better fortune, and fills the castle with cloud-legions; but ours was the fortune this day, for the crater was swept of all but remnants of floating cloud-dust, and the view was superb.
At last, tearing from the absorbing spectacle, we descended a short way to a stone-walled corral, where the bright-eyed, quiet-mannered cowboys had lunch waiting—a real roughing-it picnic of jerked beef and salt pork, products of the ranch; and hard-poi, called pai’ai, thick and sticky, royal pink-lavender, in a roomy sack. Into this we dug our fists, bringing them out daubed with the hearty substance. It came to me, blissfully licking the pai’ai from my fingers, that this promiscuous delving for poi into one receptacle which obtains among the natives, and which the real kamaaina hesitates not to emulate, is far from the unfastidious custom it is sure to appear upon first sight. “Why, yes—” Jack caught the idea, “you stick your finger into a thick paste, and the finger is withdrawn coated with it. Ergo, your finger has touched nothing of what remains in the pot—or sack.”
Having lunched, we mounted a disgorged litter of bowlders and sharp lava, to the meager crumbling ruins of what are thought to be fortifications built into the side of the mountain by Kamehameha the Great; then, overtopping the verge, slowly we sank into the ruddy depths, by way of the cinder declivities we had speculated upon from our soaring perch. They proved entirely too rough with loose rubble for tobogganing. The horses left sulphur-yellow tracks as they pulled their pasterns from out the bottomless burnt sands, and a golden streamer flew backward from each hoof-fall. So swift was our drop that riders strung out ahead speedily grew very, very small, though distinct, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. In the crystal-pure atmosphere each object stood out clean-cut, while an insidious sunburn began to spread over lips and cheeks and noses. Apart from slightly shortened breathing at the summit, we had felt no inconvenience from the elevation.
Thus our caravan straggled into the depths of Haleakala, sometimes a horseman galloping springily across a dark cinderslope in a halo of tawny sun-shot dust, then dropping steeply, his mount nearly sitting; while overhead and behind, on the evanescent path of our making, came the picturesque pack horses and cowboys, and one small patient mule laden with camp comforts. From farthest below rose quaint reiterative chants of hulas, as Louis von Tempsky rode and sang, loose in the saddle, reins on his cow-pony’s neck, debonair and tireless, with a bonny daughter to either side.
Strange is the furnishing of this stronghold of the Sun God. And few are the nooks in it that would invite the tired and parched wayfarer to tarry. For all the beauty of its rose and velvet of distance, there reigns intense desolation, With something sinister in the dearth of plant or animal life. Passing an over-toppling crimson Niagara of dead lava frozen in its fall, we reinvested the silent bleakness with fire and flow and upheaval, until, suddenly whooping into a mad race up the flanks of a big blowhole that had earlier presented its dry throat to our downward scrutiny, we hesitated to look over into the soundless pit, half expecting we knew not what. Nothing happened, of course, though dead volcanoes have been known to resurrect; and we slanted back into the floor of the House, and went on our burning, arid course.