This perfect day, in high balmy coolness, found us driving twenty miles over the shower-laid highway. Once more we detected the Snark, still holding to westward in order to lay her proper slant for the coastwise course—by now a mere-flick of white or silver or shadow in the shifting light, sometimes entirely eluding sight in the cloud-dimming blue mirror.
The road swings along through forest of lehua and tree-ferns, the larger koa being found in higher regions of the acclivity; and on some of the timbered hillsides Jack and I exclaimed over the likeness to our home woods.
At intervals, up little trails branching from the road, poi-flags fluttered appetizingly in the breeze—a white cloth on a stick being advertisement of this staple for sale. I longed to follow those crooked pathways for the sake of a peep at the native folk and their huts.
“I wish I had miles of these stone walls on my ranch,” quoth Jack, on the broad top of one of which he sat, munching a sandwich in the kukui shade. Every where one sees examples of this well-made rock-fencing, built by the hands of bygone Hawaiian commoners to separate the lands of the alii. But most of the stone-fencing along the highway has been done since 1888, when the first wagon-road was built in Kona.
The return miles were covered in a downpour that the side-curtains could not entirely exclude, and we stopped but once—to make a call upon a neighbor, a hale and masterful man of eighty-odd years, whose fourth wife, in her early twenties, is nursing their two-months-old babe. “Gee!” Jack said in an awed tone as we resumed our way under a sunset-breaking sky, “the possibilities of this high Kona climate are almost appalling! This is certainly the place to spend one’s declining years.” And the Doctor added, “They say in this district that people never die. They simply dry up and float away in the wind!”
Jack’s admiration for the holoku remains unabated; and so, as have many Americans, I have adopted it for housewear as the most logically beautiful toilette in this easy-going latitude. Callers arrive: I am bending over the typewriter, wrapped in a kimono. In a trice, I am completely gowned in a robe of fine muslin and lace, with ruffled train, ready for domestic social emergency.
August 24.
To Keauhou again we came this lovely evening, guests of Mr and Mrs. Thomas White, of Kona, she of alii stock. After a mad dash, neck and neck, on the bunched and flying horses, with heavy warm rain beating in our warmer faces, someone led the riot makai on the muddiest trail through the slapping, dripping lantana. We arrived at the seashore drenched to the buff, feet squashing unctuously in our boots.
Turkey-red calico muumuus had been brought for us malihini haoles, that we might be entirely Hawaiian in the water, and at last I was able to demonstrate to my own skepticism that it is more than possible to keep from drowning in a flowing robe. A bevy of chocolate colored water-babies were already bobbing blissfully in the sunset-rosy flood that was tepid as new milk.
In the water I was seized with a small panic when a distressful stinging sensation began spreading over my body like flame. Simultaneously, others began to make for the beach with little shrieks of pain and laughter. The brown mer-babies tried with wry, half-smiling faces to explain, but it took an older indigene to make plain that in the twilight we had blundered into a squadron of Portuguese men of war, whose poisonous filaments are thrown out somewhat as spiders cast their webs over victims. A man-of-war has been known to lower these filaments many feet, say into a shoal of sardines, whereupon the fish become paralyzed from poison at the instant of contact and the enemy is able to hoist them to the surface. No wonder our tender skins felt the irritation. Never again shall I be able to look upon the fairy fleets of Lilliputian azure ships with the same unalloyed pleasure in their pretty harmlessness.