Indeed, I had noticed that delicious rhythmic, breathing. Each morning I had watched the sea-breeze begin at the shore and slowly extend seaward as it blew the mildest, softest whiff of ozone to the land. It played over the sea, just faintly darkening its surface, with here and there and everywhere long lanes of calm, shifting, changing, drifting, according to the capricious kisses of the breeze. And each evening I had watched the sea breath die away to heavenly calm, and heard the land breath softly make its way through the coffee trees and monkey-pods.
“It is a land of perpetual calm,” I said. “Does it ever blow here?—ever really blow? You know what I mean.”
Cudworth shook his head and pointed eastward.
“How can it blow, with a barrier like that to stop it?”
Far above towered the huge bulks of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, seeming to blot out half the starry sky. Two miles and a half above our heads they reared their own heads, white with snow that the tropic sun had failed to melt.
“Thirty miles away, right now, I’ll wager, it is blowing forty miles an hour.”
I smiled incredulously.
Cudworth stepped to the lanai telephone. He called up, in succession, Waimea, Kohala, and Hamakua. Snatches of his conversation told me that the wind was blowing: “Rip-snorting and back-jumping, eh? . . . How long? . . . Only a week? . . . Hello, Abe, is that you? . . . Yes, yes . . . You will plant coffee on the Hamakua coast . . . Hang your wind-breaks! You should see my trees.”
“Blowing a gale,” he said to me, turning from hanging up the receiver. “I always have to joke Abe on his coffee. He has five hundred acres, and he’s done marvels in wind-breaking, but how he keeps the roots in the ground is beyond me. Blow? It always blows on the Hamakua side. Kohala reports a schooner under double reefs beating up the channel between Hawaii and Maui, and making heavy weather of it.”
“It is hard to realize,” I said lamely. “Doesn’t a little whiff of it ever eddy around somehow, and get down here?”