As we mounted the glacis of the island, the horses clattering on the lava, we saw far above us the curtain of the rain exclude the view. The sky was clear, the sun strong overhead; around us, a thin growth of bushes and creepers glittered green in their black setting, like plants upon a ruinous pavement; all else was lava—wastes of lava, some of them enclosed (it seemed in wantonness) with dry-stone walls. But the bushes, when the rain descends often enough from its residential altitudes, flourish extremely; and cattle and asses, walking on these resonant slabs, collect a livelihood. Here and there, a prickly-pear came to the bigness of a standard tree and made a space of shade; under one I saw a donkey—under another no less than three cows huddled from the sun. Thus we had before our eyes the rationale of two of the native distinctions; traversed the zone of flowering shrubs; and saw above us the mist hang perennial in Mau.
As we continued to draw nearer to the rain, trees began to be mingled with the shrubs; and we came at last to where a house stood in an orchard of papaias, with their palm-like growth and collar of green gourds. In an out-house stood the water-barrel, that necessity of Kona life. For all the water comes from heaven, and must be caught and stored; and the name of Hookena itself may very well imply a cistern and a cup of water for the traveller along the coast. The house belonged to Nahinu, but was in occupation by an American, seeking to make butter there (if I understood) without success. The butterman was gone, to muse perhaps on fresh expedients; his house was closed; and I was able to observe his three chambers only through the windows. In the first were milk pans and remains of breakfast, in the second a bed; in the third a scanty wardrobe hung from pegs, and two pirated novels lay on the floor. One was reversed and could not be identified; the name of the other I made out. It was Little Loo. Happy Mr. Clark Russell, making life pleasant for the exile in his garden of papaias, high over sea, upon the forest edge, and where the breeze comes freely.
A little way beyond, we plunged into the forest. It grew at first very sparse and park-like, the trees of a pale verdure, but healthy, the parasites, per contra, often dead. Underfoot, the ground was still a rockery of fractured lava; but now the interstices were filled with soil. A sedge-like grass (buffalo grass?) grew everywhere, and the horses munched it by the way with relish. Candle-nut trees with their white foliage stood in groves. Bread-fruits were here and there, but never well-to-do; Hawaii is no true mother for the bread-fruit or the cocoa-palm. Mangoes, on the other hand, attained a splendid bigness, many of them discoloured on one side with a purplish hue which struck the note of autumn. The same note was repeated by a certain aerial creeper, which drops (you might suppose) from heaven like the wreck of an old kite, and roosts on tree-tops with a pendent raffle of air-roots, the whole of a colour like a wintry beech’s. These are clannish plants; five or six may be quartered on a single tree, thirty or forty on a grove; the wood dies under them to skeletons; and they swing there, like things hung out from washing, over the death they have provoked.
We had now turned southward towards Kaa, following a shapeless bridle-track which is the high road of Hawaii. The sea was on one hand. Our way was across—the woods we threaded did but cling upon—the vast declivity of the island front. For long, as we still skirted the margin of the forest, we kept an open view of the whole falling seaboard, the white edge of surf now soundless to our ears, and the high blue sea marbled by tide rips, and showing under the clouds of an opalescent milky white. The height, the breeze, the giddy gradient of the isle, delighted me. I observed a spider plant its abhorred St. Andrew’s cross against the sea and sky, certainly fifty yards from where I rode, and five feet at least from either tree: so wide was its death-gossamer spread, so huge the ugly vermin.
Presently the sea was lost, the forest swallowed us. Ferns joined their fronds above a horseman’s head. High over these, the dead and the living rose and were hung with tattered parasites. The breeze no longer reached us; it was steaming hot; and the way went up and down so abruptly, that in one place my saddle-girth was burst and we must halt for repairs. In the midst of this rough wilderness, I was reminded of the aim of our excursion. The schoolmaster and certain others of Hookena had recently bought a tract of land for some four thousand dollars; set out coffee; and hired a Chinaman to mind it. The thing was notable in itself; natives selling land is a thing of daily custom; of natives buying, I have heard no other instance; and it was civil to show interest. “But when,” I asked, “shall we come to your coffee plantation?” “This is it,” said he, and pointed down. Their bushes grew on the path-side; our horses breasted them as they went by; and the gray wood on every hand enclosed and over-arched that thread of cultivation.
A little farther, we strung in single file through the hot crypt, our horses munching grass, their riders chewing unpalatable gum collected from a tree. Next the wood opened, and we issued forth again into the day on the precipitous broadside of the isle. A village was before us: a Catholic church and perhaps a dozen scattered houses, some of grass in the old island fashion, others spick-and-span with outside stair and balcony and trellis, and white paint and green, in the more modern taste. One arrested my attention; it stood on the immediate verge of a deep precipice: two stories high, with double balconies, painted white, and showing by my count fifteen windows. “There is a fine house,” said I. “Outside,” returned the schoolmaster drily. “That is the way with natives; they spend money on the outside. Let us go there: you will find they live in the verandah and have no furniture.” We were made welcome, sure enough, on the verandah; and in the lower room, which I entered, there was not a chair or table; only mats on the floor, and photographs and lithographs upon the wall. The house was an eidolon, designed to gladden the eye and enlarge the heart of the proprietor returning from Hookena; and its fifteen windows were only to be numbered from without. Doubtless that owner had attained his end; for I observed, when we were home again at Hookena, and Nahinu was describing our itinerary to his wife, he mentioned we had baited at Ka-hale-nui—“the great house.”
The photographs were of the royal family; that goes without saying in Hawaii; of the two lithographs, made in San Francisco, one I knew at the first sight for General Garfield: the second tempted and tantalised me; it could not be, I thought—and yet it must; it was this dubiety which carried me across the threshold; and behold! It was indeed the Duke of Thunder, his name printed under his effigies in the Hawaiianised form of Nelesona. I thought it a fine instance of fame that his features and his empty sleeve should have been drawn on stone in San Fransisco, which was a lone Mexican mission while he lived; and lettered for a market in those islands, which were not yet united under Kamehameha when he died. And then I had a cold fit, and wondered after all if these good folk knew anything of the man’s world-shaking deeds and gunpowder weaknesses, or if he was to them a “bare appellation” and a face on stone; and turning to the schoolmaster, I asked of him the question. Yes, the Hawaiians knew of Nelesona; there had been a story in the papers where he figured, and the portrait had been given for a supplement. So he was known as a character of Romance! Brave men since Agamemnon, like the brave before, must patiently expect the “inspired author.” And nowhere has fiction deeper roots than in the world of Polynesia. They are all tellers and hearers of tales; and the first requisite of any native paper is a story from the English or the French. These are of all sorts, and range from the works of good Miss Porter to The Lightning Detective. Miss Porter, I was told, was “drawing” in Hawaii; and Dumas and the Arabian Nights were named as having pleased extremely.
Our homeward way was down the hill and by the sea in the black open. We traversed a waste of shattered lava; spires, ravines, well-holes showing the entrance to vast subterranean vaults in whose profundities our horse-hooves doubtless echoed. The whole was clothed with stone fiorituri fantastically fashioned, like débris from the workshop of some brutal sculptor: dog’s heads, devils, stone trees, and gargoyles broken in the making. From a distance, so intricate was the detail, the side of a hummock wore the appearance of some coarse and dingy sort of coral, or a scorched growth of heather. Amid this jumbled wreck, naked itself, and the evidence of old disaster, frequent plants found root: rose-apples bore their rosy flowers; and a bush between a cypress and a juniper attained at times a height of twenty feet.
The breakneck path had descended almost to the sea, and we were already within sound of its reverberations, when a cliff hove up suddenly on the landward hand, very rugged and broken, streaked with white lichen, laddered with green lianas, and pierced with the apertures of half a hundred caves. Two of these were piously sealed with doors, the wood scarce weathered. For the Hawaiian remembers the repository of the bones of old, and is still jealous of the safety of ancestral relics. Nor without cause. For the white man comes and goes upon the hunt for curiosities; and one (it is rumoured) consults soothsayers and explores the caves of Kona after the fabled treasures of Kamehameha.