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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