The object of our tramp was to visit a great natural
curiosity at the base of the foothills—a
congealed cascade of lava. Some old forgotten
volcanic eruption sent its broad river of fire down
the mountain side here, and it poured down in a great
torrent from an overhanging bluff some fifty feet
high to the ground below. The flaming torrent
cooled in the winds from the sea, and remains there
to-day, all seamed, and frothed and rippled a petrified
Niagara. It is very picturesque, and withal so
natural that one might almost imagine it still flowed.
A smaller stream trickled over the cliff and built
up an isolated pyramid about thirty feet high, which
has the semblance of a mass of large gnarled and knotted
vines and roots and stems intricately twisted and woven
together.
We passed in behind the cascade and the pyramid, and
found the bluff pierced by several cavernous tunnels,
whose crooked courses we followed a long distance.
Two of these winding tunnels stand as proof of Nature’s
mining abilities. Their floors are level, they
are seven feet wide, and their roofs are gently arched.
Their height is not uniform, however. We passed
through one a hundred feet long, which leads through
a spur of the hill and opens out well up in the sheer
wall of a precipice whose foot rests in the waves
of the sea. It is a commodious tunnel, except
that there are occasional places in it where one must
stoop to pass under. The roof is lava, of course,
and is thickly studded with little lava-pointed icicles
an inch long, which hardened as they dripped.
They project as closely together as the iron teeth
of a corn-sheller, and if one will stand up straight
and walk any distance there, he can get his hair combed
free of charge.
We got back to the schooner in good time, and then
sailed down to Kau, where we disembarked and took
final leave of the vessel. Next day we bought
horses and bent our way over the summer-clad mountain-terraces,
toward the great volcano of Kilauea (Ke-low-way-ah).
We made nearly a two days’ journey of it, but
that was on account of laziness. Toward sunset
on the second day, we reached an elevation of some
four thousand feet above sea level, and as we picked
our careful way through billowy wastes of lava long
generations ago stricken dead and cold in the climax
of its tossing fury, we began to come upon signs of
the near presence of the volcano—signs
in the nature of ragged fissures that discharged jets
of sulphurous vapor into the air, hot from the molten
ocean down in the bowels of the mountain.
Shortly the crater came into view. I have seen
Vesuvius since, but it was a mere toy, a child’s
volcano, a soup-kettle, compared to this. Mount
Vesuvius is a shapely cone thirty-six hundred feet
high; its crater an inverted cone only three hundred
feet deep, and not more than a thousand feet in diameter,
if as much as that; its fires meagre, modest, and
docile.—But here was a vast, perpendicular,
walled cellar, nine hundred feet deep in some places,
thirteen hundred in others, level-floored, and ten
miles in circumference! Here was a yawning pit
upon whose floor the armies of Russia could camp, and
have room to spare.
