40 



HA WAIL 



[LETTER IV. 



tainly a malignant caricature, with its long straggling branches, 

 and widely- scattered tufts of poverty-stricken foliage. The 

 bananas and plantains in the same palm-house represent only 

 the feeblest and poorest of their tribe. They require not only 

 warmth and moisture, but the generous sunshine of the tropics 

 for their development. In the same house the date and sugar- 

 palms are tolerable specimens, but the cocoa-nut trees are 

 most truly "palms in exile." 



I suppose that few people ever forget the first sight of a 

 palm-tree of any species. I vividly remember seeing one for 

 the first time at Malaga, but the coco-palm groves of the 

 Pacific have a witchery of their own. As I write now I hear the 

 moaning rustle of the wind through their plume-like tops ; and 

 their long, slender stems and crisp crown of leaves rising above 

 the trees with shining leafage which revel in damp, have a sug- 

 gestion of Orientalism about them. How do they come too, 

 on every atoll or rock that raises its head throughout this 

 lonely ocean? They fringe the shores of these islands. 

 Wherever it is dry and fiercely hot, and the lava is black and 

 hard, and nothing else grows, or can grow, there they are, close 

 to the sea, sending their root-fibres seawards in search of salt 

 water. Their long, curved, wrinkled, perfectly cylindrical 

 stems, bulging near the ground like an apothecary's pestle, 

 rise to a height of from sixty to one hundred feet. These 

 stems are never straight, and in a grove lean and curve every 

 way, and are apparently capable of enduring any force of wind 

 or earthquake. They look as if they had never been young, 

 and they show no signs of growth, rearing their plumy tufts so 

 far aloft, and casting their shadows so far away, always lonely, 

 as though they belonged to the heavens rather than the earth. 

 Then, while all else that grows is green they are yellowish. 

 Their clusters of nuts in all stages of growth are yellow, their 

 fan-like leaves, which are from twelve to twenty feet long, are 

 yellow, and an amber light pervades and surrounds them. 

 They provide milk, oil, food, rope, and matting, and each tree 

 produces about one hundred nuts annually. 



The pandanus, or lauhala, is one of the most striking 

 features of the islands. Its funereal foliage droops in Hilo, 

 and it was it that I noticed all along the windward coast as 

 having a most striking peculiarity of aerial roots which the 

 branches send down to the ground, and which I now see have 

 large cup-shaped spongioles. These air-roots are props, and 

 appear to vary in length from three to twelve feet, according to 



