HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 



the night pass into day, and the elemental grandeur 

 on every hand reborn before us. There was not a 

 wisp of cloud or fog below us or about us to blur the 

 great picture. The sun came up from behind the 

 vast, long, high wall of the Pacific that filled the 

 eastern horizon, and the shadows fled from the huge 

 pile of mountain in the west. We hung about the 

 rim of the great crater or sat upon the jagged rocks, 

 wrapped in our blankets, till the sun was an hour 

 high. 



We got another glimpse of the band of goats pick 

 ing their way from ledge to ledge far below us on the 

 side of the crater. I saw and heard two or three 

 mina birds fly past, apparently seeking new territory 

 to occupy. These birds are more enterprising than 

 the English sparrows, which also swarm in the 

 island towns but do not brave the mountain- 

 heights. The bird from India seems at home every 

 where. 



After breakfast we still haunted for an hour or 

 more the brink of the great abyss, where one seemed 

 to feel the pulse of primal time, loath to tear our 

 selves away, loath also to take a last view of the 

 panorama of land and sea, lit by the morning sun, 

 which spread out far below us. To the southeast 

 we could dimly see the outlines of the island of 

 Hawaii, with a faint gleam of snow on its great 

 mountain Mauna Loa, nearly fourteen thousand 

 feet high. In the northwest a dim, dark mass low 

 143 



