HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 
about the interior of these mountains. I neither saw 
nor heard a bird or other live thing. Guava apples 
lay on the ground all along the trail, and one could 
eat them and not make faces. Some of the sharp, 
knife-blade ridges that cut down toward us from the 
higher peaks were very startling, and so steep and 
high that they could be successfully scaled only by 
the aid of ropes and ladders. A more striking object- 
lesson in erosion by rain would be hard to find. 
There were no naked rocks; short, thick vegetation 
covered even the steepest slopes, and the vegetable 
acids which this generated, and the perpetual rains, 
weathered the mountains down. It soon became so 
wet that we stopped far short of the head of the val- 
ley, and turned back. I wished to look into the 
great, deep, green amphitheatre which seems to lie 
at the head, but had glimpses of it only from a dis- 
tance. How many millenniums will it be, I said to 
myself, before erosion will have completed its work 
here, and these thin, high mountain-walls will be 
in ruins? Surely not many. 
We returned to the hospitable home we had left, 
and passed the midday there. In the afternoon Mr. 
Aiken, guiding our eyes by the forms of trees that 
cut the horizon-line on the huge flank of Haleakala, 
pointed out the place of his own homestead, twenty 
or more miles away. From this point the great 
mountain appeared like a vast landscape tilted up 
at an easy angle against the horizon. One could 
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