All of the eager train knew from experience that at Hana waited their fodder; and we, in like frame of mind, restrained them not. We had done thirty-five miles when we pulled up before the small hotel—and such miles! Mr. Cooper, manager of Hana Plantation store, called upon us with extra delicacies to eke out the plain hotel fare—avocados, luscious papaias, and little sugary bananas. “Gee!” murmured Jack from the buttery depths of a big alligator pear, “I wish we could grow these things in the Valley of the Moon!”
This village of Hana lies high on the horseshoe of a little blue bay embraced by two headlands, and is fraught with warlike legend and history. In the eighteenth century, King Kalaniopuu, of the old dynasty, whose life was one long bloody battle with other chiefs of Maui for the possession of these eastern districts, held the southern headland of the bay, Kauiki, for over twenty years; then the great Kahekili deprived the garrison of its water supply, and retook the fort, which is an ancient crater. In the time of Kamehameha, it withstood his attacks for two years, after the remainder of Maui had been brought to his charmed heel.
To-night, I know, I shall fall unconscious with, in my ears, the ringing of iron hoofs on stony pathways and the gurgle and plash of waterfalls.
Hana, to Keanae Valley, Maui, July 20.
The Ditch Country—this is the unpoetical, imageless name given to a wonderland that eludes the power of language. An island world in itself, it is compounded of vision upon vision of heights and depths, hung with waterfalls. It is of a gentle grandeur withal, clothed softly with greenest green of tree and shrub and grass, ferns of endless variety, fruiting guavas, bananas, mountain-apples—all in a warm, generous, tropical tangle. It is a Land of Promise for generations to come. All who can sit a Haleakala horse—the best mountain horse on earth—must come some day to feast eyes upon this possession of the United States of America, whose beauty, we are assured of the surprising fact, is unknown save to a few hundred white men exclusive of the engineers of the trail and ditch and those financially interested in the plantations of Windward Maui. And undoubtedly no white foot previously trod here.
The Ditch Country—untrammeled paradise wherein an intrepid engineer yclept O’Shaughnessy, overcame almost unsurmountable odds and put through an irrigation scheme that harnessed the abundant water and tremendously increased the output of the sugar plantations. And to most intents it remains an untrammeled paradise, for what little the transient pilgrim marks of the fine achievement of the Nahiku Ditch is in the form of a wide concrete waterway running for short, infrequent distances in company with a grassy trail before losing itself in Mr. O’Shaughnessy’s difficult tunnels, through which most of its course is quarried.
All manner of Hawaiian timber goes to make up the splendid foresting of this great mountainside, whose top is lost in the clouds; huge koa trees, standing or fallen, the dead swathed in vines, the quick embraced by the ie-ie, a climbing palm that clings only to living pillars, its blossoming tendrils depending in curves like cathedral candelabra; the ohia ai, lighting the prevailing green with its soft, thistle-formed, crimson-brushed blossom, and cherry-red fruit; the ohia lehua, prized for its dark-brown hardwood, but bearing no edible fruit; and the kukui, silver-green as young chestnuts in springtime, trooping up hill and down dale. More than half a hundred varieties of bananas grow from beach to summit of this exotic region. Especially ornamental are the luxuriant tree ferns on their chocolate-hued, hairy pedestals. Many of the ground ferns were familiar—even the gold- and silver-back flourish in Hawaii. Indeed, a collector of Filicales would be in his element in these islands, which own to a large number known nowhere else. Maui alone has a hundred and thirty-odd different kinds.
We nooned on a rubber plantation, where we were entertained at a hospitable luncheon, served by two kimino’d Japanese maids—little bits of pictures off a fan, Jack observed. He, by the way, well-nigh disgraced himself when, replying to a query from the hostess whether or not he liked foreign dishes, he assured her he enjoyed all good food of all countries, with one exception, “nervous” pudding, which he declared made him tremble internally. The words and accompanying gestures were still in the air when a maid entered bearing the dessert, a quivering watermelon-hued dome of gelatine! A horrified silence was broken by a shout of laughter, in which every one joined with relief. But Jack consistently declined any part of the “nervous” confection, saying that he always preferred coffee alone for his dessert.
Armine, to the surprise of father and sister, and my speechless delight, offered to let me ride her superb Bedouin, a young equine prince with movement so springy that he seemed treading in desert sand. We had traveled nearly all day in heavy showers, and were convinced of the accuracy of the figures of Windward Maui’s annual rainfall; for no saddle-slicker was able to turn the searching sky-shot water. But the discomfort of wet garments was lost in rapt attention to the splendor round about. Rightly had our guides assured us that yesterday’s scenery was as nothing compared to this, where the waterfalls ever increased in height and volume, thundering above and sometimes clear over the trail quarried into a wall of rock that towered thousands of feet overhead and a thousand sheer below the narrow foothold. Our brains swam with the whirling, shouting wonder of waters, the yawning depths that opened beneath our feet, filled with froth of wild rivers born of the fresh rains. Jack’s warning was right: I have saved no words for this stunning spectacle.
We reached Keanae Valley tired in body, in eye, in mind—aye, even surfeited with beauty. Once in dry clothing, however, weariness fell from us, and we reclined in rattan chairs on a high lanai, leisurely counting the cataracts that fringed the valley amphitheatre, upon whose turrets the sunset sky, heavy with purple and rose and gold, seemed to rest. We made out thirty-five, some of them dropping hundreds of feet, making hum the machinery in great sugar mills elsewhere. Commercialism in grand Keanae! And yet, it is not out of the way of romance to associate the idea of these natural forces with the mighty enginery that man’s thinking machinery has evolved for them to propel in the performance of his work.[[6]]