HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 



What a spell the mountains do lay upon the 

 clouds everywhere, — the robber mountains, — in 

 these islands exacting the last drop of water of all 

 the ocean-born vapors that pass over them ! On the 

 northeast side of the Lahaina district there are val- 

 leys four or five thousand feet deep ; on the southwest 

 side there are no valleys worth mentioning. The 

 difference in this respect was forcibly brought home 

 to me when, later in the day, we made an automo- 

 bile trip from Wailuku to Lahaina on the south- 

 west side; in going less than twenty miles we quickly 

 passed from the region of verdant valleys and 

 mountain-slopes into a hard, raw, barren, unweath- 

 ered region, where there was no soil, and where the 

 rocks looked as crude and forbidding as they must 

 have looked the day they flowed out from the 

 depths as molten lava. In outline the island of 

 Maui suggests a truncated statue, the west end 

 representing the head, very old and wrinkled and 

 grooved by time and trouble, the peninsula the 

 well-proportioned neck, and broad-breasted Halea- 

 kala forming the trunk. What a torso it is, fire- 

 born and basking there in the tropic seas! 



The oldest island of the Hawaiian group is Kauai, 

 called the garden island, because it has much the 

 deepest and most fertile soil. It shows much more 

 evidence of erosion than any of the other islands. 

 The next in point of erosion, and hence in point 

 of age, is Oahu, upon which Honolulu is situated. 



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