He will wave his hands to me,
Then he’ll float and float and float;
So he said last time he wrote—
He is such a man of note!”
For three miles today we rode south along the fine road skirting the mighty sweep of mountain. On our saddles were tied raincoats, for smart rains are frequent of an afternoon, filling one’s nostrils with the smell of the good red earth.
“Oh, look—look at your yacht!” Jack suddenly cried; and there was she, the “white-speck boat,” in a whisper of wind crawling out across the level blue carpet of the open roadstead, growing dimmer and still dimmer in the Blue Flush, bound for Hilo, our port of departure for the Marquesas.
We turned downhill on a trail through guava and lantana shrubbery sparkling from the latest shower. Owing to the success of an imported enemy, large tracts of that beautiful pest, the lantana, have the appearance of having been burned.
One of our party bestrode a ridiculous dun ass, a pet that for the most part wreaked its own will upon its young rider, especially when its large braying, “a sound as of a dry pump being ‘fetched’ by water and suction,” elicited like responses from the “bush” where these Kona Nightingales, as they are known throughout the region, breed unchecked and are had for the catching. If not a favorite, they are an inexpensive and popular means of travel among the poorer natives and the long-legged pakés (Chinese) on the roads of the district.
Winning through the expanse of shrubbery, we traversed a desert of decomposed lava, our path edged pastorally with wild flowers, among them the tiny dark-blue ones of the indigo plant. Across this arid prospect undulates the ruin of the prehistoric holualoa—a causeway built fifty feet wide of irregular lava blocks, flanked either side by massive, squat walls of masonry several feet thick. This amazing slide extends from water’s edge two or three miles up-mountain, and its origin, like that of the ambitious fish ponds, is lost in the fogs of antiquity. Its supposed use was as an athletic track for the ancient game of holua—coasting on a few-inches-wide sledge—papa holua—with runners a dozen feet long and several inches deep, fashioned of polished wood, hard as iron, curving upward in front, and fastened together by ten or more crosspieces. The rider, with one hand grasping the sledge near the center, ran a few yards for headway, then leaped upon it and launched headforemost on the descent. Ordinarily, a smooth track of dry pili grass was prepared on some long declivity that ended in a plain; but this holualoa (loa connotes long) is believed to have been sacred to high chiefdom, whose papa holuas were constructed with canoe-bottoms. Picture a mighty chief of chiefs, and his court of magnificent warriors, springing upon their carved and painted canoe-sleds, flashing with ever increasing flight down this regal course until, at the crusty edge of the solid world, shouting they breasted the surf of ocean!
We have heard that there is another holua, a short one, with a level approach of but seventy-five feet, eight feet wide, with a two-hundred-foot incline widening to twenty feet at the sea-edge. This may be visited by canoe, with a chance to see beautiful colored fish by water-telescopes.