No positive cure of leprosy has yet been discovered. But occasionally some patient is found upon bacteriological examination to have no leprosy in him—never having had leprosy. Such are discharged from the Settlement. Nine times out of ten, they do not want to go, and will practice any innocent fraud to retain residence in the place that has become a congenial home.
In some ways the inhabitants of this peninsula are the happiest in the world. Food and shelter are automatic; pocket-money may be earned. Several private individuals conduct stores. The helpers, kokuas, are in the main lepers, and earn salaries. The Board ofHealth carries on agriculture, dairying, stock-raising, and the members of the colony are paid for their labor, and themselves own many heads of cattle and horses which run pasture-free over some 5,000 acres. The men possess their fishing boats and launches, and sell fish to the Board of Health for Settlement consumption. Sometimes a catch of 4,000 pounds is made in a night. It is not an unhappy community—quite the reverse. And their religions are not interfered with, which is amply shown by the six different churches that flourish here. Also there is a Young Men’s Christian Association.
Long we rested on the Goodhue lanai to-night, and long the shadowy leper orchestra serenaded beyond the hibiscus hedges, while some one recalled a story of Charles Warren Stoddard’s “Joe of Lahaina,” in which a Hawaiian boy, bright companion of other days, crept to the gateway in the dusk, and there from the dust called to his old friend. Forever separated, they talked of old times when they had walked arm in arm, and arms about shoulders, in Sweet Lahaina.
July 4.
This morning we were shocked from dreams by noises so outlandish as to make us wonder if we were not struggling in nightmare—unearthly cackling mirth and guttural shoutings and half-animal cries that hurried us into kimonos and sandals to join our household at the gate where they were watching a scene as weird as the ghastly din. Only a little after five o’clock, the atmosphere was vague, and overhead we heard the rasping cry of a bosun bird,koae. In the eery whispering dawn there gamboled a score or so “horribles,” men and women already horrible enough, God wot, and but thinly disguised in all manner of extravagant costumings. They wore masks ofhome manufacture, in which the makers had unwittingly imitated the lamentable grotesquerie of the features of their companions—the lopping mouth, knobby or almost effaced nose, flapping ear; while, equally correct in similitude, the hue of these false-true visages was invariably an unpleasant, pestilent yellow. Great heaven!—do our normal countenances appear abnormal to them?
Some of the actors in this serio-comic performance were astride cavorting horses, some on foot; and one, an agile clown in dots and frills, seemed neither afoot nor horseback, in a way of speaking, for he traveled in company with a trained donkey that lay down peaceably whenever it was mounted. One motley harlequin, whose ghostly white mask did not conceal a huge bulbous ear, exhibited with dramatic gesture and native elocution a dancing bear personified by a man in a brown shag to represent fur.
And all the while the crowd kept up a running fire of jokes and mimicry that showed no mean originality and talent.
In the silvering light across the dewy hemisphere a cavalcade of pa’u riders took shape, coming on larger and larger with a soft thunder of hoofs, wild draperies straight out behind in the speeding rush, and drawing up with a flourish, horses on haunches, before the Superintendent’s house. The vivid hues of the long skirts intensified in the increasing daylight—some of them scarlet, some blue, or orange, while one proud equestrienne sued for favor with a flaunting panoply of Fourth of July red, white, and blue.
Many of the girls were mercifully still comely, even pretty, and rode superbly, handling their curvetting steeds with reckless grace and ease.
All forenoon these gala-colored horsewomen trooped singing and calling over the rises and hollows of the countryside, to incessant blaring of the bands of both villages combined. The whole was a picture of old Hawaii not to be composed elsewhere in the Territory, and certainly nowhere else in the world. For no set reproduction of the bygone customs could equal this whole-souled exhibition, costumed from simple materials by older women who remembered days of the past, carried out in the natural order of life in one of the most beautiful spots in the Islands, if not on the globe. No description can depict the sight that was ours the forenoon long.
To our distress, we were appointed to award prizes at the race track. We feared hurting the contestants by injudicious choices. But Jack McVeigh pooh-poohed our diffidence, and insisted that we serve on the committee. Horseback we went to the races, and found the track like any other, with its grand stand, its judges, its betting and bickering—the betting running as high as $150—its well-bred horses, and wild excitement when the jockeys came under the wire.
Jack tied his fractious pony, and I saw him on foot over by the judges’ stand, waving arms and cowboy hat and yelling himself hoarse, just as crazy as the crowd of lepers he jostled, who were as crazy as he. Later, he was conversing soberly with a Norwegian and his wife, both patients, who told us we had no idea what it meant to them all for us to come here and mingle among them as friends, and that people were very happy about it. This was good tidings, for the lepers are so little forward in manners that invariably we must accost them first, whereupon they break into the smiling Aloha of their land.
Between heats, there were footraces, and screaming sack races, and races to the slowest, in which McVeighfigured on the rump of a balking donkey, and won; then followed a wahine contest of speed, and a wahine horse race.
But the most imposing event of the afternoon, as of the morning, was enacted by the pa’u riders, who paced leisurely in stately procession once around the course, then circled once in a swinging canter, and, finally, with mad whoopings, broke into a headlong stampede that swept twice and a half around before the Amazons could win control of their excited animals. A truly gorgeous spectacle it was, the flying horses with their streaming beribboned tails, the glowing riders, long curling hair outblown, and floating draperies painting the track with brilliant color—all mortal decay a thing forgot of actors and onlookers alike, in one grand frolic of bounding vitality and youth.
The three prizes were for $5, $3, and $2, and it would not be guessing widely to say that they came out of the private pocket of the Superintendent, along with numerous other gifts during the day. He is not the man to go about with his heart’s good intentions pinned on his sleeve—indeed, a supersensitive character would be out of place as manager of such an institution; but hand in hand with iron will and executive ability, he carries a heart as big as the charge he keeps, and a keen gray eye quick to the needs of his children, as he calls them.
The three beaming winners galloped abreast once around the track, and then rode out; but suddenly the buxom wahine, bright and bold of eye and irresistible of smile, who had taken second, wheeled about and came to attention before the judges’ stand with the request, to our surprise, that I ride once around with her. “Oh, do, do!” Jack under his breath instantly prompted, fearing I might hesitate. Of course Imounted forthwith, and together we pranced the circuit, to deafening cheers.
But I was not riding with a leper, for it turned out that this inviting girl is a kokua, an assistant at the surgery, from whom the bid to ride with her was in the best Kalaupapa social usage.
The Superintendent’s big dinner was a signal triumph, and he handled the mixed company with rare tact, several factions being represented. But even the grave Bishop Liebert and the Fathers warmed to his kindly and ready humor, and soon all were under the spell of Kalama’s perfumed garlands and the really sumptuous feast.
Following several merry toasts, Mr. McVeigh rose and raised his glass to “The Londons—Jack and Charmian, God bless them!” And went on to confess to a warm regard that affected us deeply. For he has given us of his confidence during the past day or two in a way that has mightily pleased us. At the end of the little speech, breaking into his engaging smile, he announced that he knew all present would wish us well upon our departure, which was approaching all too soon etc., etc., and which would be via the pali trail; and that Mrs. London should ride the best horse on Molokai—his mule Makaha!
By the time we arrived at Beretania Hall for the evening entertainment, it was crammed to suffocation with a joyful crowd of lepers, orchestra in place, resting on their violins, banjos, guitars and ukuleles. After they had opened with Star-Spangled Banner and several Hawaiian selections, a willowy young woman, graceful as a nymph but with face as awful as her body was lovely, rendered a popular lightsome song in tones that had lost all semblance to music. Half-caste she is, traveled and cultured, once a beauty in Honolulu, whose native mother’s bank account is in seven figures.And this girl, in the blossom-time of life, with death overtaking in long strides, bereft of comeliness, shocking to behold, and having known the best that life has to bestow, rises superior to life and dissolution, and, foremost in courage, surpasses the gayest of her sisters in misfortune. What material for a Victor Hugo!
At the end of an hour, we left the fantastic company dancing as lustily as it had sung and laughed and ridden the gladsome day through. No one, listening outside to the unrestrained merrymaking, could have guessed the band of abbreviated human wrecks, their distorted shadows monstrous in the flickering lamplight, performing, unconcernedly for once, their Dance of Death.
July 5.
Let none say that great men, capable of noble sacrifice, have ceased from the earth in this day and age. And Dr. William J. G. Goodhue, with his exceeding modesty, would be the first to protest any association of his pleasant name with such holy company. But no outsider, entering upon the scene of his wonderful and precarious operations in tissue and bone diseased with the mysterious curse of the ages, could doubt that he had come face to face with one who spares himself not from peril of worse than sudden death. Although the world at large recks as little of him as it does of leprosy, great surgeons know and acclaim his work, performed bi-weekly at his clinics, where remedial and plastic operations of incalcuable importance take place. His tracheotomies in lepral stenosis have saved many, and have cured or improved conditions of the nose and throat which no other treatment, so far, has been known to relieve.
(1) The Forbidden Pali Trail, 1907. (2) Landing at Kalaupapa, 1907. (3) Coast of Molokai—Federal Leprosarium on shore. (4) American-Hawaiian. (5) Father Damien’s Grave, 1907.
(1) The Forbidden Pali Trail, 1907. (2) Landing at Kalaupapa, 1907. (3) Coast of Molokai—Federal Leprosarium on shore. (4) American-Hawaiian. (5) Father Damien’s Grave, 1907.
Ungloved, his sole protection vested in caution against abrading his skin, and an antiseptic washingbefore and after his work, the man of empirical science waded elbow-deep into the unclean menace upon the operating table. He was assisted by two women nurses, one Hawaiian, one Portuguese, and both with a slight touch of anæsthic leprosy.
The first subject to-day was a middle-aged wahine, jolly and rolling fat, who was borne in laughing and borne out laughing again. In between were but a few self-pitying moans when she raised her head to watch the doctor. We had every proof that she knew no pain, nor even discomfort; but the sight of copiously flowing blood caused her to weep and wail “Auwe!” until one of the nurses said something that made her laugh in spite of herself. The sole of her foot had thickened two inches, and she had not stepped upon it for a couple of years. Into this dulled pad, lengthwise, the cool surgeon cut clean to the diseased bone, which he painstakingly scraped, explaining that the blood itself remains pure, only the tissues and bone being attacked by thebacillus lepræ.
But the second patient, a good-looking lad who came on theNoeauwith us, was victim of the most loathsome and agonizing sort, which made it necessary to anæsthetize him—Dr. Hollman using the slow and safe “A. C. E.” (Alcohol, one part; Chloroform, two parts; Ether, three parts). The only visible spot was a running sore forward of and below the left shoulder; but what appeared on the surface was nothing to that which the knife divulged.
Although the details are not pretty, and I shall not harrow with more of them, I wish I could picture the calm, pale surgeon, with his intensely dark-blue eyes and the profile of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose kinsman he is, working with master strokes that cleansed the deep cavity of corruption; for it was an illustration of the finest art of which the human is capable.
And now this boy may possibly be quite healthy for the rest of a natural life, and die of some other cause or of old age. Again, the bacillus at any time may resume its destructive inroads elsewhere in his system. There are myriad unknown quantities about leprosy. All that Dr. Goodhue, with his pensive smile, can say about it with finality, is:
“The more I study and learn about leprosy, the less assurance I have in saying that I know anything about it!”
By this evening all troubadour spirit was quenched, and no minstrelsy greeted our postprandial lolling on the lanai. No voice above a night-bird’s disturbed the quiet of tired Kalaupapa. And we also were weary, for seeing the operations, though not our first, claimed a certain measure of nervous energy; besides, we had ridden hard to another rugged valley in the late afternoon, goat-hunting on the crags, and were ready for early bed. In passing, I must not forget to relate that we were shown some black-and-white-striped mosquitoes up-valley, the proper carriers of yellow fever—though Heaven forbid that these ever have a chance to carry it!
Mr. and Mrs. Myers to-day ascended the baking pali on foot, to prepare for our coming on the morrow, when we shall have accomplished the hair-raising exit from Kalaupapa. Now that permission has been graciously accorded, our witty host enlarges continually upon the difficulties and dangers of the route.
Waikiki, Sunday, July 7.
At eleven o’clock yesterday, on our diminutive beasts, we bade farewell under the cluster of kukuis where our friends had accompanied us on the beginning of the ascent, and proceeded to wage the sky-questing, arid pathway, for this section of the pali is almost bareof vegetation. Short stretches as scary we have ridden; it is the length of this climb that tries—angling upon the stark face of a 2300-foot barrier.
They told me, when I bestrode the short strong back of the mule Makaha, to “stay by her until the summit is reached. She never fails.” Implicitly I obeyed, for the very good reason that I would have been loath to trust my own feet, let alone my head. Never a stumble did her tiny twinkling hoofs make, even where loose stony soil crumbled and fell a thousand feet and more into the sea that wrinkled oilily far below; and the hardy muscle and lungs of her seemed to put forth no unusual effort. But Jack and the Hawaiian mail carrier, who led the way, were obliged several times to dismount where the insecure vantage was too much for the quivering, dripping ponies, though they are accustomed to the work. Once, from the repairing above, some rubble came down, fortunately curving clear. Makaha, who has a few rudimentary nerves, shied, but instantly recovered, only to shy again at a bag of tools by the trailside.
Sometimes an angle was so acute that she and the ponies were forced to swing on hind legs to reach the upper zigzag, where poised front hoofs must grip into sliding stones or feel for hold among large, fixed rocks, and the rider lie forward on the horse’s neck. A miss meant something less than a half mile of catapultic descent through blue space into the blue ocean. Once Jack glimpsed destruction from the guide’s horse that slipped and scrambled and almost parted from the zigzag immediately overhead. There were places where it seemed incredible that anything less agile than a goat could stick.
“I don’t wonder McVeigh won’t let malihinis go out this way,” Jack called down, craning his neck to seethe base of the sea-washed rampart, and failing. “It is worse than its reputation!”
The Settlement lay stretched in the noonday sun, like the green map of a peninsula in a turquoise sea. And we amused ourselves, while resting the animals, picking out familiar landmarks.
A short distance from the summit we joined the rebuilt portion of the trail, and passed the time of day with the stolid Japanese laborers. Six feet wide, some parts railed, to our pinched vision it appeared a spacious boulevard. Our sensations, now speedily at the top and looking over, may have been something like those of Jack of Beanstalk fame when he found a verdant level plain at the end of his clambering. Here was a rolling green prairie browsed by fat cattle, and threaded by a red road. A family carriage waited, driven by a stalwart son of the Myers’.
The restful two-mile drive through rich pasture land dotted with guava shrub brought us to his home in the midst of a 60,000-acre ranch. There are no hotel facilities on Molokai, which is forty miles long by ten in breadth, and the visitor without friends and friends of friends on the island will see little unless equipped for camping. The climate at this elevation is mild and cool, the hills and ruggeder mountains interspersed with meadows, where spotted Japanese deer have become so numerous that shooting them is a favor to the ranchers.
High Molokai—and the top of it, Mt. Kamakou, is nearly 5000 feet—should be a paradise for sportsmen, and it is surprising the Territory does not get together with the owners and try to develop facilities at Kaunakakai for housing, and transportation into the back country which is surpassingly beautiful and interesting. Somewhere on the coast there is an old battlefield where countless human bones still whiten;and on the rocky coast to the south can be seen in shallow water the ruins of miles of ancient fish ponds equaled nowhere in the group. To the northwest Oahu disturbs the horizon, cloud-capped and shimmering in the blue; while Haleakala bulks ten thousand feet in air on Maui to the east.
This ranch home is buried in flowers, and my unbelief in begonias a dozen feet high underwent rude check. A fairy forest of these surrounds the guest cottage, casting a rosy shadow on window and lanai. I should have been content to remain here indefinitely.
On the ten-mile gradual descent mid-island to the port, Kaunakakai, there was ample chance to observe this aspect of the supposedly melancholy isle, and noticing dry creeks and the general thirsty appearance of the lower foothills, we descanted upon its rich future when irrigation schemes are worked out and applied. As it is now, only in the rainy season do the streams flow, while the amphitheatre-shaped valleys on the other side of the island, set as they are almost directly across the path of the northeast tradewinds, are drenched with tropical rains. Some day these waters will be controlled to make fertile these rich but parched lands.
Dashing native cowboys, bound for a wedding luau, passed us on the road, teeth and eyes flashing, gay neckerchiefs about their singing brown throats, and hatbrims blown back from vivid faces, out-Westing the West.
Kaunakakai itself is not especially attractive, and during two hours’ waiting for theIwalani, we occupied ourselves keeping as comfortable as possible, for July is hot on the leeward sides of the “Sandwich Islands.”
Once aboard, and our luggage, taken on at Kalaupapa, safely located, we watched the loading of freight and live-stock on the little steamer. Between the deeprolling of the ship and the din and odor of seasick swine for’ard, there was little rest the night. And the Steamship Company has a very unceremonious way of dumping its passengers ashore in Honolulu at heathenish hours. The car lines had not yet started when we stood yawning and chill beside our bags and saddles on the wharf, and we were obliged to wake a hackman to drive us to Waikiki. The city might have been dead but for an occasional milk-wagon; but after all we did not grudge ourselves the dawning loveliness of the morning—an unearthly gray-silver luminance wherein a large lemon-tinted moon melted in a lilac sky. It was like a miracle, this swift awakening of the growing earth. Birds stretched into song, the water-taro rustled in a fitful wind, young ducks stirred and fluffed their night-damp feathers on the margins of the ponds, where lilies opened to the brightening waves of light, while the broken slate-blue mountains in the background shifted their graying curtains of shimmering rain. Diamond Head developed slowly into the scene, like a photographed mountain in a dark-room, and took opalescent shades of dove and rose. Creation might have been like this! I recalled Mascagni’s “Iris,” for all living things burgeoned visibly on the warm awakening earth.
All through the busy morning hours, and the surf-boarding and swimming and romping of the afternoon, of all the remarkable impressions of that astounding week on Molokai, the pali endured. Again and again I seem to cling to the incredible face of it, creeping foot by foot, alert, tense, unafraid except for each other...[5]
Waikiki, July 11.
In a fine frenzy to give a just presentation of the Leper Settlement, Jack has lost no time finishing the promised article, “The Lepers of Molokai.”
In it he pictures himself having a “disgracefully good time,” yelling at the track-side with the lepers when the horses came under the wire, and presently branches off into a serious consideration of the situation, interspersed with bright items of life in the Settlement. The article is highly approved by Mr. Pinkham, and Mr. Lorrin A. Thurston avers it is the best and fairest that has ever been written.
Although the President of the Board of Health is entirely satisfied with himself and with the article, as well as with Jack’s press interviews regarding the trip, several prominent citizens have expressed themselves to the official as highly indignant that we should have been allowed in the Settlement. But the imperturable Pinkham has told them with asperity that it does not profit them or Hawaii to imitate ostriches and simulate obliviousness of the fact that the world knows of leprosy in Hawaii. And why should Hawaii be supersensitive? Leprosy is not unknown in the large cities even of America; and Hawaii should be proud to advertise her magnificent system of segregation, unequaled anywhere in the world, and be glad to have it exploited by men of conscience and intelligence.
Wailuku, Maui, Sunday, July 14.
Two evenings gone, in company with Mr. and Mrs. Thurston, we boarded theClaudine, which though much larger than theNoeau, pitched violently in the head-sea of Kaiwi Channel, and took more than spray over the upper deck for’ard where were our staterooms.
A swarm of Japanese sailed steerage and outside on the lower deck, each bearing a matted bundleexactly like his neighbor’s. The women carried their possessions wrapped in gorgeously printed challies in which a stunning orange was most conspicuous among vivid blues and greens and intermediate purples. Early in the trip all were laid low in everything but clamor and from our deck we could see the poor things in every stage of disheartened deshabille, pretty matron and maiden alike careless of elaborate chignon falling awry, the men quite chivalrously trying to ease their women’s misery in the pauses of their own.
Kahului, our destination, on Maui, the “Valley Isle,” is on the northern shore of the isthmus connecting West Maui with the greater Haleakala section of this practically double island; but Mr. Thurston’s sea-going emotions had increased to such intensity that around midnight he crept to our latticed door and suggested we disembark at Lahaina, the first port, finish the night at the hotel, and in the morning drive around the Peninsula of West Maui to Wailuku.
Nothing loath to escape the roughest part of the passage, doubling the headland, we dressed and gathered our hand-luggage; and at half past one in the morning dropped over theClaudine’sswaying side. As we clung in the chubby, chopping boat, manned by natives with long oars, we could make out towering heights against the star-bright sky, and on either side heard the near breakers swish and hiss warningly upon the coral. And all about, near and far, burned the slanting flares of fishermen, the flames touching the inky tide water with elongated dancing sparkles. Voices floated after from the anchored steamer, and ghostly hoof-beats clattered faint but distinct from the invisible streets of the old, old town. As at Molokai, shadowy hands helped us upon the wharf—and the tender witchery of the night fled before the babble of hackmen, stamping of mosquito-bitten horses, alost and yelping dachshund pup that insisted on being trod upon, and the huge red-headed hotel proprietor of an unornamental wooden hostelry, its uninviting entrance lighted with smoking kerosene lamps.
“Beautiful Lahaina,” warbles Isabella Bird Bishop, in her charming book “Hawaii”; “Sleepy Lahaina,” she ecstatically trills—and she is not the only writer who has sung the praises of this town of royal preference, once the prosperous capital of the kingdom, and the oldest white settlement, where touched the whaling ships that sometimes anchored fifty strong off shore. But this prosperity entailed disease and death, since the sailors were given free run by their unscrupulous captains. The village dwindled to less than a wraith of its former opulence, much of the original site now being planted to cane.
A short distance above the town, at an altitude of 700 feet, the old Lahainaluna (“upper Lahaina”) Seminary, founded in 1831 by the missionaries, still flourishes, maintaining its reputation as an excellent industrial school. The land on which it stands was a gift from Hoopili Wahine, wife of Hoopili, governor of Maui. The original school opened in a temporary lanai shed of kukui poles with grass roof. Tuition was free; but the scholars did what work was required, and raised their own food. Among the pupils of The Reverend Lorrin Andrews were some of the finest young men from the islands, many of whom were married. During the next year a stone building with thatched roof was raised by the scholars. In 1833 a very much worn printing outfit was obtained and placed in charge of Mr. Ruggles, with the aid of which school books were printed; and the very first Hawaiian newspaper was published, theLama Hawaii(“Hawaiian Luminary”), preceding theKumu Hawaii, at Honolulu. Mr.Andrews prepared the first Hawaiian Grammar, and later the Hawaiian Dictionary.
The reader of Isabella Bird longs for Lahaina above all bournes; Lahaina, Seat of Kings! He cannot wait to test for himself its spell of loveliness and repose. But this repose is of the broad day, or else the gallant lady’s mosquito net was longer than ours, which did cruelly refuse to make connection with the coverlet. Jack’s priceless perorations will ever be lost to posterity, for I shall repeat them not.
In the morning, Mrs. Thurston peeped laughingly in and asked if I knew my husband’s whereabouts; and I, waking solitary, confessed that I did not, though I seemed to recall his desertion in a blue cloud of vituperation against all red-headed hotel hosts and stinging pests. Mrs. Thurston, viewing the blushing morn from the second-story veranda, had come upon the weary boy fast asleep on the hard boards, blanket over head and feet exposed, as is the wont of sailors and tramps, and led me to where he lay. But none more vigorously famished than he, when we sat in an open-air breakfast room, table spread with land fruit and sea fruit; for Mr. Thurston had been abroad early to make sure the repast should be an ideal one after our hard night—fish from the torchlight anglers, alligator pears dead-ripe out of the garden, mangoes of Lahaina, the best in the Islands, and coffee from the Kona Coast.
Mrs. Bishop, in the seventies, spoke of Lahaina as “an oasis in a dazzling desert.” The dazzling desert has been made to produce the cane for two great sugar mills whose plantations spread their green over everything in sight to the feet of sudden mountains, rent by terrific chasms that rise 6000 feet behind the village. Once this was a missionary center as well as the regular port of call for the devastating whale ships. The deserted missionary house, fallen into decay these longyears, is still landmark of a Lahaina that but few live to remember. But the blood of the missionaries has neglected not to make hay, or, more properly, sugar, under the ardent sun.
The streets of the drowsy town are thickly shaded by coconuts, breadfruit with its glossy truncated leaves and green globes, monkey-pod, kukui, bananas, and avocados; and before we bade farewell to Lahaina, Mr. Thurston drew up beside an enormous mango tree, benefactor of his boyhood, where an obliging Hawaiian policeman, in whose garden it grows, with his pretty wife threw rocks to bring down a lapful of the ripe fruit—deep yellow, with crimson cheeks, a variety known as the “chutney” mango.
It is some twenty-three scenic miles from Lahaina to Wailuku, and the road runs for a distance through tall sugar cane, then begins an easy ascent to where it is cut into the sides of steep and barren volcanic hills above the sea. There was a glorious surf running, and for miles we could gaze almost straight down to the water, in places catching glimpses of shoals of black fish in the blue brine where there was no beach and deep ocean washed the feet of the cliffs.
Jack has blue-penciled my description of the capital luncheon arranged in advance by Mr. Thurston, holding that though I write best on the subject of food, my readers may become bored. So I pass on to Iao Valley (E-ah-o—quickly E-ow) where we drove in the afternoon, following the Wailuku River several miles to the valley mouth. On the shelving banks of this river, near the town, many Hawaiians have their homes and live in native style for the most part.
Iao has been pronounced by travelers quite as wonderful in its way as Yosemite. I should not think of comparing the two, because of their wide dissimilarity. The walls of Iao are as high, but appear higher, sincethe floor, if floor it can be called, is much narrower. Most gulches in Hawaii draw together from a wide entrance, but in Iao this is reversed, for, once the narrow ascending ingress is passed, the straight walls open like the covers of a book which Dore might have illustrated, the valley widening into an amphitheater of surpassing grandeur. On the ferned and mossed walls of the entrance hang festoons of deep-trumpeted, blue convolvulæ between slender dracena palms and far-reaching branches of silvery kukuis, quivering or softly swaying in passing airs.
It is foolish to try to extend any impression of the prodigious palisades with their springing bastions; the needled peaks; shimmering tropical growth of tree and vine; bursting, sounding falls of watercourses rushing headlong over mighty bowlders; the rolling glory of clouds, casting showers of gold upon joyous green pinnacles or with deep violet shadow turning these into awful fingers pointing to the zenith. Nor can one fitly characterize the climate—the zephyrs warm and the wind-puffs cool that poured over us where we lay on a table-land, reached by trail through a sylvan jungle of ferns, in matted grass so deep and dense that we never felt the solid earth.
Long we rested, speaking little, surrounded by impregnable fastnesses, marveling at this superlatively grand and beautiful cleft, at its head, lord of all lesser peaks and spires and domes, Puu Kukui piercing nearly 6000 feet into the torn sky. There are other valleys back of Puu Kukui, as beautiful as Iao, but more difficult of access. It is said by the few who have ascended that the view from the top of Puu Kukui is away and beyond anything they have ever seen.
There is but one way out of Iao, as with most of these monster gulches of Hawaii, and that is the way in. Old warriors learned this to their rue, caught byKamehameha in the sanguinary battle that completed his conquest of Maui, when their blood stained the waters of the stream as it flowed seaward, which henceforth bore the name of Wailuku, “Water of Destruction.”
From our high post, looking seaward, down past the interlacing bases of beryl-green steeps eroded by falling waters of æons, the vision included the plains country beneath, rose and yellow and green with cultivated abundance, bordered at the sea-rim by white lines of surf inside bays and out around jutting points and promontories, the sapphire deep beyond; and upon the utmost indigo horizon pillowy trade clouds lowlying—all the splendor softened into tremulous, mystic fairyland. “Hawaii herself, in all the buxom beauty, roving industry ... with all the bravery and grace of her natural scenery.”
One pursues one’s being in Hawaii within an incessant atmosphere of wonder and expectation—ah, I have seen Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, the Alps, the Swiss lakes; but Hawaii is different, partaking of those and still different, and more elusively wonderful. Even now, as I write of what my eyes have gloried in, they behold mighty roofless Haleakala, ancient House of the Sun, its ragged battlements ranging two miles into the ether, above the cloud-banners of sunset.
Haleakala Ranch, Maui, Monday, July 15.
Except one be deaf, dumb, and blind, there is no boredom in these Islands. Indeed, one must avoid bewilderment among the attractions that fill the days. Little opportunity was ours to become acquainted with the old town of Wailuku, with its picturesque population of natives and immigrants, for yesterday’s program included a private-car trip over the Hawaiian Commercial and Kihei Sugar Companies’ vast plantations. We were the guests of the superintendent ofthe Kahului Railroad Company, who entertained us at Kahului, where we went aboard the car. There was a bustling air of activity and newness about the port—track-laying, boat-loading, house-building; and in the harbor swung at anchor a big freighter of the American-Hawaiian Line, unloading on lighters and receiving sugar by the same means.
Waving fields of cane occupy practically all the broad neck between the two sections of Maui, spreading into the slopes of Haleakala’s foothills and extending well around to the “windward” side of the island. Our trip included one of the mills and a descent three hundred feet into the shaft of Kihei’s pumping station, where we were conducted by a young football giant from Chicago.
At the village of Paia, with its alluring Japanese shops, we transferred to carriages for an eight-mile drive to this stock ranch 2000 feet up Haleakala. From afar, the mountain appears simple in conformation, smooth and gradual in rise. The rise is gradual, to be sure, but varied by ravines that are valleys, and level pastures, and broken by ancient blowholes and hillocks that are miniature mountains as symmetrical as Fujiyama. It is almost disappointing—one has a right to expect more spectacular perpendicularity of a 10,000-foot mountain. Even now, from where we sit on a shelf of lawn, under a tree with a playhouse in its boughs, it is impossible to realize that the amethyst summit, free for once of cloud, is still 8000 feet above, so lazily does it lean back. And looking downward, never have I taken in so much of the world from any single point.
Louis von Tempsky, English-Polish, son of the last British officer killed in the Maori War, handsome, wiry, military of bearing and discipline, is manager of this ranch of sixty thousand-odd acres, owned by Lorrin A.Thurston, James B. Castle, and H. P. Baldwin. He came to Hawaii years ago on a vacation from his New Zealand bank cashiership, and he never went back—“Shanghaied,” says Jack. One cannot blame the man. Here he is able to live to the full the life he loves, with those he loves—the big free life of saddle and boundless miles, with his own fireside (and one needs a fireside up here of an evening) at the end of the day. His wife, Amy, was born in Queen Emma’s house in Honolulu, of English parentage. Her father, Major J. H. Wodehouse, was appointed English Minister to Hawaii about three years before annexation to the United States took place, and now, home in England, is retired upon a pension.
The climate is much like California’s in the mountains, and refreshing after the sea-level midsummer heat. This bracing air makes one feel younger by years. Life here is ideal—a rambling old house, with a drawing-room that is half lanai, furnished with a good library and piano, and fine-matted couches deep in cushions; a cozy dining-room where one comes dressed for dinner, and a commodious guest-wing where Jack and I have two rooms and bath, and he can work in comfort.
The lawn is in a two-sided, sheltered court, intersected with red-brick walks, and lilies grow everywhere. From our books on the lawn beside a little fountain under tall trees where birds sing and twitter, we rise and step past the lilies to the edge of the garden where the rich red earth, grass mantled, slopes to the ocean. Standing as if in a green pavilion, we seem detached from the universe while viewing it. Terrace upon terrace of hills we trace, champaigns of green speckled with little rosy craters like buds turned up to sun and shower; and off in the blue vault of sea and sky, otherislands mirror-blue and palpitating like mirages. One hears that Maui, the second largest island, contains 728 square miles and that it is 10,000 feet high; but what are calculated confines when apparently the whole world of land and sea is spread before one’s eyes on every hand! Hand in hand, we look, and look, and strive to grasp the far-flung vision, feeling very small in its midst. “Beautiful’s no name for it,” breathes Jack; and through my mind runs a verse of Mrs. Browning’s, a favorite of my childhood:
“We walk hand in hand in the pure golden ether,And the lilies look large as the trees;And as loud as the birds sing the bloom-loving bees—And the birds sing like angels, so mystical-fine,While the cedars are brushing the Archangel’s feet.And Life is eternity, Love is divine,And the world is complete.”
“We walk hand in hand in the pure golden ether,And the lilies look large as the trees;And as loud as the birds sing the bloom-loving bees—And the birds sing like angels, so mystical-fine,While the cedars are brushing the Archangel’s feet.And Life is eternity, Love is divine,And the world is complete.”
“We walk hand in hand in the pure golden ether,And the lilies look large as the trees;And as loud as the birds sing the bloom-loving bees—And the birds sing like angels, so mystical-fine,While the cedars are brushing the Archangel’s feet.And Life is eternity, Love is divine,And the world is complete.”
“We walk hand in hand in the pure golden ether,
And the lilies look large as the trees;
And as loud as the birds sing the bloom-loving bees—
And the birds sing like angels, so mystical-fine,
While the cedars are brushing the Archangel’s feet.
And Life is eternity, Love is divine,
And the world is complete.”
This morning early we were out looking over our mounts and seeing that our saddles were in good shape. “I love the old gear!” Jack said, caressing the leather, well worn on many a journey. A cattle-drive and branding, with colt-breaking to follow, were the business of the day. At ten we cantered away from the corrals, and Jack and I went right into the work with Mr. Von Tempsky and his girls, Armine and Gwendolen, and the native cowboys, to round up the steers. Oddly enough, although born and raised in the West, we two have sailed over two thousand miles to take part in our firstrodeo.
To my secret chagrin, I was doomed to be tried out upon an ambitionless mare, albeit Louisa is well-gaited and goodly to the eye. But I dislike to spur another person’s animal, so took occasion to look very rueful when my host, coming alongside, inquired: “Are you having a good time?” He could see that I was not, and sensed why; so he advised me not to spare the spur,adding: “There isn’t a better cattle pony, when she knows you mean business!”
And oh, these “kanaka” horses, with their sure feet! And oh, the wild rushes across grassland that has no pit-falls—gophers and ground-squirrels are unknown—thudding over the dustless, cushioned turf, hurdling the taller growth, whirling “on a cowskin” to cut off stray or willful stock, and making headlong runs after the racing herd. All the while taking commands from General Daddy, and sitting tight our eager horses, streaking the landscape in ordered flight to head off the runaways, the young girls with hair flying, sombreros down backs, cheeks glowing, eyes sparkling, utterly devoted to the work in hand.
Miles we covered, doubling back and forth, searching out the bellowing kine; up and down steep canyons we harried them, along narrow soft-sliding trails on stiff inclines, turning to pathless footing to keep them going in the right direction. And the farther afield we rode, the farther beckoned the reaches of that deceptive mountain.
At last the droves were converged toward a large gate not far from the outlying corrals, and after a lively tussle we rounded up all but one recalcitrant—a quarter-grown, black-and-white calf that outran a dozen of us for half an hour before we got him.
Promptly followed the segregation of those to be marked; the throwing of calves in the dusty corral, and their wild blatting when the cowboys trapped them neck and thigh, with the lasso; the restless circling of the penned victims waiting their turns; the trained horses standing braced against lariats thrown from their backs into the seething mass; the rising, pungent smoke of burning hair and hide as the branding irons bit; then frantic scrambling of the released ones to lose themselves in the herd.
We sat fence-high on a little platform overlooking the strenuous scene, and when the branding was finished, the colt-breaking began, in which the Von Tempsky children took intense interest, as did we. Their father superintended his efficient force of native trainers in the work of handling three-year-old colts that had never known human restraint, which made a Buffalo Bill show seem tame indeed. For breathless hours we watched the making of docile saddlers, all being finally subdued but one, which threatened to prove an “outlaw.” After the “buck” has been taken out of the young things, they are tied up all night to the corral fence, and in the morning are expected to be tractable, with all tendency to pull back knocked out of them forever.
“And some are sulky, while some will plunge,(So ho! Steady! Stand still, you!)Some you must gentle, and some you must lunge,(There! There! Who wants to kill you!)Some—there are losses in every trade—Will break their hearts ere bitted and made;Will fight like fiends as the rope cuts hard,And die dumb-mad in the breaking-yard.”
“And some are sulky, while some will plunge,(So ho! Steady! Stand still, you!)Some you must gentle, and some you must lunge,(There! There! Who wants to kill you!)Some—there are losses in every trade—Will break their hearts ere bitted and made;Will fight like fiends as the rope cuts hard,And die dumb-mad in the breaking-yard.”
“And some are sulky, while some will plunge,(So ho! Steady! Stand still, you!)Some you must gentle, and some you must lunge,(There! There! Who wants to kill you!)Some—there are losses in every trade—Will break their hearts ere bitted and made;Will fight like fiends as the rope cuts hard,And die dumb-mad in the breaking-yard.”
“And some are sulky, while some will plunge,
(So ho! Steady! Stand still, you!)
Some you must gentle, and some you must lunge,
(There! There! Who wants to kill you!)
Some—there are losses in every trade—
Will break their hearts ere bitted and made;
Will fight like fiends as the rope cuts hard,
And die dumb-mad in the breaking-yard.”
Ukulele, on Haleakala, July 16.
Thirteen strong, we rode out from the ranch house this morning, beginning a week’s trip in the crater and on around through the Nahiku “Ditch” country. Besides the cowboys, gladsome brown fellows, overjoyed to go along, there were seven in the party, with a goodly string of pack animals trailing out behind. And bless my soul! if there wasn’t Louisa, meekly plodding under a burden of tent-poles and other gear. For Mr. Von Tempsky had now allotted me his own Welshman, “the best horse on the mountain.”
Fifty-four hundred feet above sea level, we stopped here at Ukulele, the dairy headquarters of the ranch.Why Ukulele, we are at loss to know, for nothing about the place suggests that minute medium of harmony. However, there is a less romantic connotation, for the definition of ukulele is literally “jumping louse,” which name was given by the natives to the first fleas imported. Let us hope the place was called after the instrument!
The ascent was steeper than below the ranch house, but it worked no hardship on horse or rider. We were in good season to “rustle” supper, and went berrying for dessert. Of course, there had to be a berry-fight between Jack and the two husky girls, who soon became weird and sanguinary objects, plastered from crown to heel with the large juicyakalas, which resemble our loganberries. Jack asserts that they are larger than hens’ eggs; but lacking convenient eggs, there is no proving him in error. Nothing does him more good than a whole-hearted romp with young people, and these were a match that commanded his wary respect.
After supper, we reclined upon a breezy point during a lingering sunset over the wide, receding earth, lifted high above the little affairs of men, and, still high above, the equally receding summit. We felt light, inconsequential, as if we had no place, no ponderability, no reality—motes poised on a sliver of rock between two tremendous realities.
Louis Von Tempsky recounted old legends concerning the House of the Sun, and the naming thereof, and the fierce warfare that is ever going on about its walls, between the legions of Ukiukiu and Naulu, the Northeast Trade and the Leeward Wind; and until we were driven indoors by the chill, we lay observing the breezy struggle beneath among opposing masses of driven clouds.
There is a continual temptation to digress and dwell upon the rich folk-lore. I am glad to note that ThomasG. Thrum, of Honolulu, has compiled a book entitled Hawaiian Folk Tales.
It will fascinate many an older person than a child in years to learn, whatever we know or do not know about fairies, that in truth there is a foundation, in the lore of Hawaii, for the belief in Brownies. Tradition says that they were the original people of these Islands—an adventurous and nomadic tribe known as Menehunes, sprightly, cunning, and so industrious that it was their rule that any work undertaken must be entirely accomplished in one night. If it were not, it would never be finished, since they would not put their hand twice on one task. An ancient uncompleted wall of a fish-pond, on Kauai, is by credulous natives laid to the fact that the Menehunes neglected to begin work until midnight, and dawn found them but half done. To those who may smile at this legend, I can only point out the Little Peoples whom Martin Johnson has but lately discovered in both the Solomons and New Hebrides, moving-pictures of which I have seen: veritable Brownies, if better-proportioned than our fairy-tale books would have us believe of Menehunes.
We are going to rest upon ourhikie(hik-e-a), the same being a contrivance of hard boards, seven feet square, laid deep, native fashion, with lauhala mats, and haole quilts made to measure, with warmer covering at hand for the crisp small hours.
Paliku, Crater of Haleakala, July 17.
And it’s ho! for the crater’s rim, to look over into the mysterious Other Side from the tantalizing skyline that promises what no other horizon in all the world can give. Hail, Haleakala! It’s boots andsaddles for the unroofed House of the Sun, the largest extinct crater in existence! What will it be like? (“Nothing you’ve ever seen or dreamed,” assures one.) Shall we be disappointed? (“Not if you’re alive!” laughs another.) Jack gives me a heaving hand into the saddle, and my Welshman strikes a swinging jog-trot that plays havoc with theopu-full—opu being stomach—with which my terrible mountain appetite has been assuaged.
Rolling grasslands give place to steep and rugged mountain, with sparse vegetation. Here and there gleams a sheaf of blades, the “silver-sword,” with a red brand of blossoms thrusting from the center; or patches of “silver verbena,” a velvet flower that presses well and serves asedelweissfor Haleakala. Stopping to breathe the horses, we nibbleoheloberries, like cranberries, but with a mealy-apple flavor, like the manzanita-berries of California. There is wild country up here, where sometimes cattle and ranging horses are pulled down by wild dogs; and back in the fastnesses, even mounted cowboys, rounding up the stock, have been attacked.
Somebody is singing all the time. If it is not Mr. Von’s tenor, one hears Mr. Thurston’s pleasant voice on the breeze, attempting a certain climacteric note that eludes his range at the end of “Sweet Lei Lehua.”
Over the sharp, brittle lavas of antiquity our horses, many barefooted, their hoofs like onyx, scramble with never a fall on the panting steeps; on and on, up and up, we forge, with a blithe, lifting feel in the thin and thinner air, while the great arc of the horizon seems ever above eye level. Rings a thrilling call from ahead that the next rise will land us on the jagged edge of the hollow mountain. I am about to join the charge of that last lap when a runaway packhorse—none other than Louisa—diverts my attention to the rear. WhenI turn again, the rest are at the top—all but Jack, who faces me upon his Pontius Pilate, until I come up. “I wanted to see it with you,” he explains, and together we follow to Magnetic Peak—so-called what of its lodestone properties. And then...
More than twenty miles around its age-sculptured brim, the titanic rosy bowl lay beneath; seven miles across the incredible hollow our eyes traveled to the glowing mountain-line that bounds the other side, and, still above, across a silver sea, high in the sky ... we could not believe our vision that was unprepared for such ravishment of beauty. Surely we beheld very Heaven, the Isles of the Blest, floating above clouds of earth—azure, snow-crowned peaks so ineffably high, so ungraspably lovely, that we forgot we had come to see a place of ancient fire, and gazed spellbound, from our puny altitude of ten thousand feet, upon peaks of snow all unrelated to the burned-out world on which we stood.
It was only Mauna Kea—Mauna Kea and its twin, Mauna Loa, on the Big Island of living fire, half again as high as our wind-swept position; but so remote and illusive were they, that our earthborn senses were incapable of realizing that their sublimity was anything more than a day-dream, and that we looked upon the same island, the loftiest on the globe, that had greeted our eyes from theSnark.
“It never palls,” Armine whispered solemnly, the dew in her forget-me-not-blue eyes. And her father, who had stood here uncounted times, soberly acquiesced. I knew, with certitude birthed of the magic moment, that my memory, did I never return, would remain undimmed for all my days.