582 W. T. BRIGHAM ON THE RECENT 



Land-slide. "Between Kapapala and Keiiiwa in Ka-u, 1 examined what has incorrectly 

 been called the ' Mud Flow.' I went entirely around it, and crossed it at its head and centre, 

 measuring its length and breadth, which I found were severally three miles long and half a 

 mile wide. The breadth at the head is about a mile, and the ground on the side hill, where 

 the cleavage took place, is now a bold precipice sixty feet high. Below this line of fracture 

 the superstrata of the earth, consisting of soil, rocks, lavas, boulders, trees, roots, ferns, and 

 all tropical jungle, and water, slid and rolled down an incline of some 20°, until the immense 

 masses came to the brow of a precipice near a thousand feet high, and here all plunged 

 down an incline of 40° to 70° to the cultivated and inhabited plains below. The momentum 

 acquired by this terrific slide was so great that the mass was forced over the plain, and even 

 up an angle of 1° 30', at the rate of more than a mile a minute. In its course it swept 

 along enormous trees, and rocks from the size of a pebble to those weighing many tons. 

 Immense blocks of lava, some fresh as of yesterday, and others in all stages of decomposi- 

 tion, were uncovered by the slide. The depth of the deposit on the grass plains may 

 average six feet ; in depressions at the foot of the precipice it may be thirty or even forty 

 feet. 



" I had heard that this was a ' mud eruption,' and had supposed that the explosive force 

 of steam or gases had riven the precipice and projected this immense mass over the plains ; 

 but on personal examination I am sure that it is nothing more than a land-slide or avalanche 

 of earth and rocks shaken off from the steep hill-side and propelled by its own gravity. 

 This is evident from the fact that there was no heat, steam, nor smoke connected with the 

 slide, except the dust which would naturally arise by the motion of so vast a body of 

 earth. 



Eruption in Kahuku. " From the land-slide I went on to the igneous eruption in western 

 Ka-u. Rents, tiltings, and other disturbances of the strata were seen along the shore, while 

 the wooded and grassy hills on the right were scalped, scarred, cracked, and striated ; some 

 of the once green hills looked as if a gigantic cultivator had been driven down their sides, 

 tearing off the sward and exposing the soil in wide parallel grooves, and leaving broad belts 

 of vegetation resembling rows of sugar-cane. In passing from Waiohinu to Kahuku, we 

 started a little after sunrise, and rode westward. About three miles from Waiohinu we 

 crossed a lateral arm of the eruption, about one sixteenth of a mile wide and some two 

 miles long, from where it left the parent stream. It was a high ridge of aa, say twenty-five 

 feet deep, and running in a southeasterly direction. Crossing this, and riding half a mile 

 over verdant and beautiful fields, we came to another lateral outgush of similar character 

 and dimensions. Then came a third, which flowed some four miles, and threatened to fill 

 the harbor of Kaadu&lu. This was longer and broader than the other two, but of the same 

 general character. After another half mile we crossed a fourth rugged stream of aa, and 

 then moving southwest we rode rapidly over a fine surface of soil down a slope of about 

 3° to the ends of the two large parallel streams that entered the sea at Kailikii. Over all 

 this wide field of pasturage, cinder and pumice had been scattered, and the grass had been 

 consumed as by a prairie fire. 



This portion of the eruption went into the sea about one mile northwest of Kalae, the 

 south cape of the island. On the left flank of the streams is a high and very steep ridge 

 (four hundred to five hundred feet high) extending from the cape up the southern slope 



