222 



HA WAIL 



[LETTER XXIV. 



women and two foreigners had got a whisky bottle, and be- 

 haved disgracefully. We went round by the Leper Island. 



I landed at Maaleia, on the leeward side of the sandy 

 isthmus which unites East and West Maui, got a good horse, 



and, with Mr. G , rode across to the residence of " Father 



Alexander," at Wailuku, a flourishing district of sugar planta- 

 tions. Mr. and Mrs. Alexander were among the early mission- 

 aries, and still live on the mission premises. Several of their 

 sons are settled on the island in the sugar business, and it was 

 to the Heiku plantation, fifteen miles off, of which Mr. S. 

 Alexander is manager, that I went on the following day, still 



escorted by Mr. G . Here we heard that captains of 



schooners which had arrived from Hawaii, report that a light 

 is visible on the terminal crater of Mauna Loa, 14,000 feet 

 above the sea, that Kilauea, the flank crater, is unusually 

 active, and that several severe shocks of earthquake have been 

 felt. This is exciting news. 



Behind Wailuku is the Iao valley, up which I rode with two 

 island friends, and spent a day of overflowing, satisfied admi- 

 ration. At Iao people may throw away pen and pencil in equal 

 despair. The trail leads down a gorge dark with forest trees, 

 which then opens out into an amphitheatre, walled in by preci- 

 pices, from three to six thousand feet high, misty with a thousand 

 waterfalls, plumed with kukuis, and feathery with ferns. A 

 green-clad needle of stone, one thousand feet in height, the 

 last refuge of an army routed when the Wailuku (waters of 

 destruction) ran red with blood, keeps guard over the valley. 

 Other needles there are ; and mimic ruins of bastions, ram- 

 parts, and towers came and passed mysteriously : and the 

 shining fronts of turrets gleamed through trailing mists, changing 

 into drifting visions of things that came and went in sunshine 

 and shadow, mountains raising battered peaks into a cloudless 

 sky, green crags moist with ferns, and mists of water that could 

 not fall, but frittered themselves away on slopes of maiden- 

 hair, and depths of forest and ferns through which bright 

 streams warble through the summer years. Clouds boiling up 

 from below drifted at times across the mountain fronts, or lay 

 like snow masses in the unsunned chasms 1 and over the grey- 

 crags and piled up pinnacles, and glorified green of the mar- 

 vellous vision, lay a veil of thin blue haze, steeping the whole 

 in a serenity which seemed hardly to belong to earth. 



The track from Wailuku to Heiku is over a Sahara in minia- 

 ture, a dreary expanse of sand and shifting sandhills, with a 



