LETTER V.] 



A TROPICAL FOREST. 



47 



the natives make garlands, and glossy leaved climbers hung 

 from tree to tree, and to brighten all, great morning glories of 

 a heavenly blue opened a thousand blossoms to the sun, and 

 gave a tenderer loveliness to the forest. Here trees grow and 

 fall, and nature covers them where they lie with a new vegeta- 

 tion which altogether obliterates their hasty decay. It is four 

 miles of beautiful and inextricable confusion, untrodden by 

 human feet except on the narrow track. " Of every tree in this 

 garden thou mayest freely eat," and no serpent or noxious thing 

 trails its hideous form through this Eden. 



It was quite intoxicating, so new, wonderful, and solemn 

 withal, that I was sorry when we emerged from its shady depths 

 upon a grove of cocoanut trees and the glare of day. Two very 

 poor-looking grass huts, with a ragged patch of sugar-cane beside 

 them, gave us an excuse for half an hour's rest. An old woman 

 in a red sack, much tattooed, with thick, short, grey hair brist- 

 ling on her head, sat on a palm root, holding a nude brown 

 child ; a lean, hideous old man, dressed only in a malo, leaned 

 against its stem, our horses with their highly miscellaneous gear 

 were tethered to a fern stump, and Upa, the most picturesque 

 of the party, served out tea. He and the natives talked inces- 

 santly, and from the frequency with which the words " wahine 

 hao/e" (foreign woman) occurred, the subject of their conversa- 

 tion was obvious. Upa has taken up the notion from something 



Air. S said, that I am a "high chief," and related to 



Queen Victoria, and he was doubtlessly imposing this fable on 

 the people. In spite of their poverty and squalor, if squalor 

 be a term which can be applied to aught beneath these 

 sunny skies, there was a kindliness about them which they 

 made us feel, and the aloha with which they parted from us 

 had a sweet, friendly sound. 



From this grove we travelled as before in single file over an 

 immense expanse of lava of the kind called pahoehoe, or satin 

 rock, to distinguish it from the a-a, or jagged, rugged, impass- 

 able rock. Savans all use these terms in the absence of any 

 equally expressive in English. The pahoehoe extends in the 

 Hilo direction from hence about twenty-three miles. It is the 

 cooled and arrested torrent of lava Avhich in past ages has 

 flowed towards Hilo from Kilauea. It lies in hummocks, in 

 coils, in rippled w r aves, in rivers, in huge convolutions, in pools 

 smooth and still, and in caverns which are really bubbles. 

 Hundreds of square miles of the island are made up of this 

 and nothing more. A very frequent aspect of pahoehoe is the 



