letter x.] CROSSING THE GULCHES. 



89 



guava with its obtuse smooth leaves, sweet, white blossoms on 

 solitary, axillary stalks, and yellow fruit was universal. The 

 novelty of the fruit, foliage, and vegetation is an intense delight 

 to me. I should like to see how the rigid aspect of a coniferous 

 tree, of which there is not one indigenous to the islands, would 

 look by contrast. We passed through a long thicket of sumach, 

 an exotic from North America, which still retains its old habit 

 of shedding its leaves, and its grey, wintry, desolate-looking 

 branches reminded me that there are less favoured parts of the 

 world, and that you are among mist, cold, murk, slush, gales, 

 leaflessness, and all the dismal concomitants of an English 

 winter. 



It is wonderful that people should have thought of crossing 

 these gulches on anything with four legs. Formerly, that is, 

 within the last thirty years, the precipices could only be 

 ascended by climbing with the utmost care, and descended by 

 being lowered with ropes from crag to crag, and from tree to 

 tree, when hanging on by the hands became impracticable to 

 even the most experienced mountaineer. In this last fashion 

 Mr. Coan and Mr. Lyons were let down to preach the gospel 

 to the people of the then populous valleys. But within recent 

 years, narrow tracks, allowing one horse to pass another, have 

 been cut along the sides of these precipices, without any 

 windings to make them easier, and only deviating enough from 

 the perpendicular to allow of their descent by the sure-footed 

 native-born animals. Most of them are worn by water and 

 animals' feet, broken, rugged, jagged, with steps of rock some- 

 times three feet high, produced by breakage here and there. 

 Up and down these the animals slip, jump, and scramble, some 

 of them standing still until severely spurred, or driven by some 

 one from behind. Then there are softer descents, slippery 

 with damp, and perilous in heavy rains, down which they slide 

 dexterously, gathering all their legs under them. On a few of 

 these tracks a false step means death, but the vegetation which 

 clothes the pali below, blinds one to the risk. I don't think 

 anything would induce me to go up a swinging zigzag — up a 

 terrible pali opposite to me as I write, the sides of which are 

 quite undraped. 



All the gulches for the first twenty-four miles contain running 

 water. The great Hakalau gulch which we crossed early yester- 

 day, has a river with a smooth bed as wide as the Thames at Eton. 

 Some have only small quiet streams, which pass gently through 

 ferny grottoes. Others have fierce, strong torrents dashing 



