Halemanu, with hospitable alacrity, soon made breakfast ready, after which Mr. S., having arranged for my further journey, left me here, and for the first time I found myself alone among natives ignorant of English. For the Waimanu trip it is essential to have a horse bred in the Waimanu Valley and used to its dizzy palis, and such a horse was procured, and a handsome native, called Hananui, as guide. We were away by ten, and galloped across the valley till we came to the nearly perpendicular pali on the other side. The sight of this air-hung trail from Halemanu’s house has turned back several travellers who were bent on the trip, but I had been told that it was quite safe on a Waimanu horse; and keeping under my fears as best I could, I let Hananui precede me, and began the ascent, which is visible from here for an hour. The pali is as nearly perpendicular as can be. Not a bush or fern, hardly a tuft of any green thing, clothes its bare, scathed sides. It terminates precipitously on the sea at a height of 2000 feet. Up this shelving wall, something like a sheep track, from thirty to forty-six inches broad, goes in great swinging zigzags, sometimes as broken steps of rock breast high, at others as a smooth ledge with hardly foothold, in three places carried away by heavy rains--altogether the most frightful track that imagination can conceive. [{235}] It was most unpleasant to see the guide’s horse straining and scrambling, looking every now and then as if about to fall over backwards. My horse went up wisely and nobly, but slipping, jumping, scrambling, and sending stones over the ledge, now and then hanging for a second by his fore feet. The higher we went the narrower and worse it grew. The girth was loose, so as not to impede the horse’s respiration, the broad cinch which usually passes under the body having been fastened round his chest, and yet it was once or twice necessary to run the risk of losing my balance by taking my left foot out of the stirrup to press it against the horse’s neck to prevent it from being crushed, while my right hung over the precipice. We came to a place where the path had been carried away, leaving a declivity of loose sand and gravel. You can hardly realize how difficult it was to dismount, when there was no margin outside the horse. I somehow slid under him, being careful not to turn the saddle, and getting hold of his hind leg, screwed myself round carefully behind him. It was alarming to see these sure-footed creatures struggle and slide in the deep gravel as though they must go over, and not less so to find myself sliding, though I was grasping my horse’s tail.
Between the summit and Waimanu, a distance of ten miles, there are nine gulches, two of them about 900 feet deep, all very beautiful, owing to the broken ground, the luxuriant vegetation, and the bright streams, but the kona, or south wind, was blowing, bringing up the hot breath of the equatorial belt, and the sun was perfectly unclouded, so that the heat of the gorges was intense. They succeed each other occasionally with very great rapidity. Between two of the deepest and steepest there is a ridge not more than fifty yards wide.
Soon after noon we simultaneously stopped our horses. The Waimanu Valley lay 2500 feet (it is said) below us, and the trail struck off into space. It was a scene of loneliness to which Waipio seems the world. In a second the eye took in the twenty grass lodges of its inhabitants, the five cascades which dive into the dense forests of its upper end, its river like a silver ribbon, and its meadows of living green. In ten seconds a bird could have spanned the ravine and feasted on its loveliness, but we could only tip over the dizzy ridge that overhangs the valley, and laboriously descend into its heat and silence. The track is as steep and broken as that which goes up from hence, but not nearly so narrow, and without its elements of terror, for kukuis, lauhalas, ohias, and ti trees, with a lavish growth of ferns and trailers, grow luxuriantly in every damp rift of rock, and screen from view the precipices of the pali. The valley looks as if it could only be reached in a long day’s travel, so very far it is below, but the steepness of the track makes it accessible in an hour from the summit. As we descended, houses and a church which had looked like toys at first, dilated on our sight, the silver ribbon became a stream, the specks on the meadows turned into horses, the white wavy line on the Pacific beach turned into a curling wave, and lower still, I saw people, who had seen us coming down, hastily shuffling into clothes.
There were four houses huddled between the pali and the river, and six or eight, with a church and schoolhouse on the other side; and between these and the ocean a steep narrow beach, composed of large stones worn as round and smooth as cannon balls, on which the surf roars the whole year round. The pali which walls in the valley on the other side is inaccessible. The school children and a great part of the population had assembled in front of the house which I described before. There was a sort of dyke of rough lava stones round it, difficult to climb, but the natives, though they are very kind, did not, on this or any similar occasion, offer me any help, which neglect, I suppose, arises from the fact that the native women never need help, as they are as strong, fearless, and active as the men, and rival them in swimming and other athletic sports. An old man, clothed only with his dark skin, was pounding baked kalo for poi, in front of the house; a woman with flowers in her hair, but apparently not otherwise clothed, was wading up to her waist in the river, pushing before her a light trumpet-shaped basket used for catching shrimps, and the other women wore the usual bright-coloured chemises.
I wanted to make the most of the six hours of daylight left, and we remounted our horses and rode for some distance up the river, which is the highway of the valley, all the children swimming on our right and left, each holding up a bundle of clothes with one hand, and two canoes paddled behind us. The river is still and clear, with a smooth bottom, but comes halfway up a horse’s body, and riders take their feet out of the stirrups, bring them to a level with the saddle, lean slightly back, and hold them against the horse’s neck. Equestrians following this fashion, canoes gliding, children and dogs swimming, were a most amusing picture. Several of the children swim to and from school every day. I was anxious to get rid of this voluntary escort, and we took a gallop over the soft springy grass till we reached some very pretty grass houses, under the shade of the most magnificent bread-fruit trees on Hawaii, loaded with fruit. There were orange trees in blossom, and coffee trees with masses of sweet white flowers lying among their flaky branches like snow, and the unfailing cocoa-nut rising out of banana groves, and clusters of gardenia smothering the red hibiscus. Here Hananui adopted a showman’s air; he made me feel as if I were one of Barnum’s placarded monsters. I had nothing to do but sit on my horse and be stared at. I felt that my bleached face was unpleasing, that my eyes and hair were faded, and that I had a great deal to answer for in the way of colour and attire. From the way in which he asked me unintelligible questions, I gathered that the people were catechizing him about me, and that he was romancing largely at my expense. They brought me some bananas and cocoa-nut milk, which were most refreshing.
Beyond the houses the valley became a jungle of Indian shot (Canna indica), eight or nine feet high, guavas and ohias, with an entangled undergrowth of ferns rather difficult to penetrate, and soon Hananui, whose soul was hankering after the delights of society, stopped, saying, “Lios (horses) no go.” “We’ll try,” I replied, and rode on first. He sat on his horse laughing immoderately, and then followed me. I see that in travelling with natives it is essential to have a definite plan of action in one’s own mind, and to verge on self-assertion in carrying it out. We fought our way a little further, and then he went out of sight altogether in the jungle, his horse having floundered up to his girths in soft ground, on which we dismounted and tethered the horses. H. had never been any further, and as I failed to make him understand that I desired to visit the home of the five cascades, I had to reverse our positions and act as guide. We crept along the side of a torrent among exquisite trees, moss, and ferns, till we came to a place where it divided. There were three horses tethered there, some wearing apparel lying on the rocks, and some human footprints along one of the streams, which decided me in favour of the other. H. remonstrated by signs, as doubtless he espied an opportunity for much gossip in the other direction, but on my appearing persistent, he again laughed and followed me.
From this point it was one perfect, rapturous, intoxicating, supreme vision of beauty, and I felt, as I now believe, that at last I had reached a scene on which foreign eyes had never looked. The glories of the tropical forest closed us in with their depth, colour, and redundancy. Here the operations of nature are rapid and decisive. A rainfall of eleven feet in a year and a hothouse temperature force every plant into ceaseless activity, and make short work of decay. Leafage, blossom, fruitage, are simultaneous and perennial. The river, about as broad as the Cam at Cambridge, leaped along, clear like amber, pausing to rest awhile in deep bright pools, where fish were sporting above the golden sand, a laughing, sparkling, rushing, terrorless stream, “without mysteries or agonies,” broken by rocks, green with mosses and fragile ferns, and in whose unchilled waters, not more than three feet deep, wading was both safe and pleasant. It was not possible to creep along its margin, the forest was so dense and tangled, so we waded the whole way, and wherever the water ran fiercely my unshod guide helped me. One varied, glorious maze of vegetation came down to it, and every green thing leant lovingly towards it, or stooped to touch it, and over its whole magic length was arched and interlaced the magnificent large-leaved ohia, whose millions of spikes of rose-crimson blossoms lit up the whole arcade, and the light of the afternoon sun slanted and trickled through them, dancing in the mirthful water, turning its far-down sands to gold, and brightening the many-shaded greens of candlenut and breadfruit. It shone on majestic fern-trees, on the fragile Polypodium tamariscinum, which clung tremblingly to the branches of the ohia, on the beautiful lygodium, which adorned the uncouth trunk of the breadfruit; on shining banana leaves and glossy trailing yams; on gigantic lianas, which, climbing to the tops of the largest trees, descended in vast festoons, passing from tree to tree, and interlacing the forest with a living network; and on lycopodiums of every kind, from those which wrapped the rocks in feathery green to others hardly distinguishable from ferns. But there were twilight depths too, where no sunlight penetrated the leafy gloom, damp and cool: dreamy shades, in which the music of the water was all too sweet, and the loveliness too entrancing, creating that sadness, hardly “akin to pain,” which is latent in all intense enjoyment. Here and there a tree had fallen across the river, from which grew upwards and trailed downwards, fairy-like, semi-transparent mosses and ferns, all glittering with moisture and sunshine, and now and then a scarlet tropic bird heightened the effect by the flash of his plumage.
After an hour of wading we emerged into broad sunny daylight at the home of the five cascades, which fall from a semicircular precipice into three basins. It is not, however, possible to pass from one to the other. This great gulf is a grand sight, with its dark deep basin from which it seemed so far to look up to the heavenly blue, and the water falling calmly and unhurriedly, amidst innumerable rainbows, from a height of 3000 feet. The sides were draped with ferns flourishing under the spray, and at the base the rock was very deeply caverned. I enjoyed a delicious bath, relying on sun and wind to dry my clothes, and then reluctantly waded down the river. At its confluence with another stream, still arched by ohias, a man and two women appeared rising out of the water, like a vision of the elder world in the days of Fauns, and Naiads, and Hamadryads. The water was up to their waists, and leis of ohia blossoms and ferns, and masses of unbound hair fantastically wreathed with moss, fell over their faultless forms, and their rich brown skin gleamed in the slant sunshine. They were catching shrimps with trumpet-shaped baskets, perhaps rather a prosaic occupation. They joined us, and we waded down together to the place where they had left their horses. The women slipped into their holukus, and the man insisted on my riding his barebacked horse to the place where we had left our own, and then we all galloped over the soft grass.
Waimanu had turned out to meet us about thirty people on horseback, all of whom shook hands with me, and some of them threw over me garlands of ohia, pandanus, and hibiscus. Where our cavalcade entered the river, a number of children and dogs and three canoes awaited us, and thus escorted I returned triumphantly to the house. The procession on the river of paddling canoes, swimming children, and dogs, and more than thirty riders, with their feet tucked up round their horses’ necks, all escorting a “pale face,” was grotesque and enchanting, and I revelled in this lapse into savagery, and enjoyed heartily the kindliness and goodwill of this unsophisticated people.
When darkness spread over the valley, clear voices ascended in a weird recitative, the room filled up with people, pipes circulated freely, poi was again produced, and calabashes of cocoa-nut milk. The mêlés were long, and I crept within my curtain and lay down, but the drowsiness which legitimately came over me after riding thirty miles and wading two, was broken in upon by two monstrous cockroaches really as large as mice, with fierce-looking antennæ and prominent eyes, both of which mounted guard on my pillow. On rising to drive them away, I found to my dismay that they were but the leaders of a host, which only made a temporary retreat, rustling over the mat and dried grass with the crisp tread of mice, and scaring away sleep for some hours. Worse than these were the mosquitoes, also an imported nuisance, which stabbed and stung without any preliminary droning; and the heat was worse still, for thirteen human beings were lying on the floor and the door was shut. Had I known that two of these were lepers, I should have felt far from comfortable. As it was, I got up soon after midnight, and cautiously stepping among the sleeping forms, went out of doors. Everything favoured reflection, but I think the topics to which my mind most frequently reverted were my own absolute security--a lone white woman among “savages,” and the civilizing influence which Christianity has exercised, so that even in this isolated valley, gouged out of a mountainous coast, there was nothing disagreeable or improper to be seen. The night was very still, but the sea was moaning; the river rippled very gently as it brushed past the reeds; there was a hardly perceptible vibration in the atmosphere, which suggested falling water and quivering leaves; and the air was full of a heavy, drowsy fragrance, the breath of orange flowers, perhaps, and of the night-blowing Cereus, which had opened its ivory urn to the moon. I should have liked to stay out all night in the vague, delicious moonlight, but the dew was heavy, and moreover I had not any boots on, so I reluctantly returned to the grass house, which was stifling with heat and smells of cocoa-nut oil, tobacco, and the rancid smoke from beef fat.