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 
