Too burned and tired to fancy goat-hunting in the rain, Mrs. Thurston and I spent yesterday resting, reading, sleeping, and playing cards in the dripping tent, while our men went with Mr. Von and the girls. The drenching clouds drifted and lifted on the pali, where the sun darted golden javelins through showers until the raindrops broke into a glory of rainbows. Then the brief splendor waned, leaving us almost in darkness at midday, in an increasing downpour.
The hunters returned in late afternoon, wet and weary, but jubilant and successful, eager for supper and a damp game of whist on the blankets. After we had tucked under those same blankets, with shrewdly placed cups to catch the leaks in our soaked tent-roof, we listened to the mellow voices of the Hawaiians singing little hulas and love-songs and laughing as musically.
This morning it was down-tent, and boot and saddle once more; but ere we made our six o’clock get-away, I found a half hour to go prowling to the feet of the pali, to an alluring spot that had been in my eyes since the moment of arrival—a green lap in the gray rock where a waterfall had been. Winning through a thicket, I peeped into a ferny, flowery corner of Elfland at the base of a vertical fall, down which the water had furrowed a shining streak on the polished rock amid fanning ferns and grasses and velvet mosses—a grotto fit for childhood’s imaginings to people with pink and white fairy-folk and brown and green gnomes.
They were slippery trails that led out of the crater and down through Kaupo Gap, chill with Naulu’s drafty onslaught, where Pélé, Goddess of Fire, once broke through the ramparts of the crater and fled forever from Maui to take up her abode on Mauna Loa’s wounded side. But soon out of the clouds we rode and went steaming in the horizontal rays of a glorious sunrise. Again there were glimpses of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, supernal in the morning sky, though a trifle more plausible seen from this level.
Down our sure-footed animals dropped into lush meadows, where fat cattle raised their heads to stare; up and down, across crackling lava beds, like wrecked giant stairways balustraded by the cool gray-and-gold palisades of the Gap, from between which we could make out the surfy coast line. Once we had struck the final descent, there were no ups, only downs, for 6000 feet; and several times our saddles, sliding over the withers of the horses, obliged us to dismount and set them back.
On a rocky cliff above the sea we found an early lunch ready and waiting, at the house of a Portuguese-Hawaiian family; and by eleven were cantering easily along green cliffs, past old grass-houses still occupied by natives—a sight fast becoming rare. From one weirdly tattered hut, there rushed a nut-brown, wrinkled woman, old, but with fluffy black hair blown out from wild black eyes, flinging her arms about and crying “Aloha! Aloha!” with peal upon peal of mad sweet laughter.
For several miles the coast was much like that of Northern California, with long points, rimmed by surf, running out into the ocean; but soon we were scrambling up and down gulch-trails. In olden times these clefts were impassable on account of the tremendous rainfall on this eastern shore; and around on the north, or Nahuku side, it averages two hundred inches yearly. (Three years ago it registered as high as four hundred and twenty inches.) So the wise chiefs, somewhere around the sixteenth century, with numerous commoners at their command, had the curt zigzags paved with a sort of cobblestone, without regard to suavity of grade. So the rises and falls of this slippery highway are nothing short of formidable, especially when one’s horse, accustomed to leading, resents being curbed midway of the procession and repeatedly tries to rush past the file where there is no passing-room.
But the animals quickly proved that they could take care of themselves, and we advantaged by this assurance to look our fill upon the beautiful coast and forested mountain. Tiny white beaches dreamed in the sunlight at the feet of the deep indentations, where rivers flowed past banana and cocoanut palms that leaned and swayed in the strong sea breeze, and brown babies tumbled among tawny grass huts; while gay calicoes, hung out to dry, gave just the right note of brilliant color.
Some of the idyllic strands were uninhabited and inviting; and I thought of the tired dwellers of the cities of all the world, who never heard of Windward Maui, where is space, and solitude, and beauty, warm winds and cool, soothing rainfalls, fruit and flowers for the plucking, swimming by seashore and hunting on mountain side, and Mauna Kea over there a little way to gladden eye and spirit. Then, “Mate, are you glad you’re alive?” broke upon my reverie as Jack leaned from his horse on a zigzag above my head.
It would not have seemed like Hawaii if we had not traversed a cane plantation, and halt was made at the Kipahulu Sugar Mill, where one of the horses must have a shoe reset. It would appear that the onyx feet of the unshod horses, that have never worn iron in their lives, stand the wear and tear of the hard travel over ripping lava better than the more pampered ones.