letter xxix.] EARTHQUAKES. 



259 



We only travelled two miles an hour, and the mules kept 

 getting up rows, kicking, and entangling their legs in the lariats, 

 and one peculiarly malign animal dealt poor Kahele a gratuitous 

 kick on his nose, making it bleed. 



It is a strange, unique country, without any beauty. The sea- 

 ward view is over a great stretch of apparent table-land, spotted 

 with craters, and split by cracks emitting smoke or steam. The 

 whole region is black with streams of spiked and jagged lava, 

 meandering over it, with charred stumps of trees rising out of 

 them. 



The trail, if such it could be called, wound among koa and 

 sandalwood trees occasionally, but habitually we picked our way 

 over waves, coils, and hummocks of pahoehoe surrounded by 

 volcanic sand, and with only a few tufts of grass, abortive okelos, 

 and vigorous sow-thistles (much relished by Kahele') growing in 

 their crevices. Horrid cracks, 50 or 60 feet wide, probably 

 made by earthquakes, abounded, and a black chasm of most 

 infernal aspect dogged us on the left. It was all scrambling up 

 ^nd down. Sometimes there was long, ugly grass, a brownish 

 green, coarse and tufty, for a mile or more. ' Sometimes clumps 

 •of _ wintry-looking, dead trees, sometimes clumps of attenuated 

 -living ones ■ but nothing , to please the eye. We saw neither 

 man nor beast the whole way, except a wild bull, which, tearing 

 down the mountain side, crossed the trail just in front of us, 

 causing a stampede among the mules, and it was fully an hour 

 before they were all caught again. 



The only other incident was an earthquake, the most severe, 

 the men here tell me, that has been experienced for two years. 

 One is prepared for any caprices on the part of the earth here, 

 yet when there was a fearful internal throbbing and rumbling, 

 and the trees and grass swayed rapidly, and great rocks and 

 masses of soil were dislodged, and bounded down the hillside, 

 and the earth reeled, and my poor horse staggered and stopped 

 short, far from rising to the magnitude of the occasion, I 

 thought I was attacked with vertigo, and grasped the horn of 

 my saddle to save myself from falling. After a moment of 

 profound stillness, there was again a subterranean sound like a 

 train in a tunnel, and the earth reeled again with such violence, 

 •that I felt as if the horse and myself had gone over. Poor K. 

 was nervous for some time afterwards. The motion w T as as 

 violent as that of a large ship in a mid-Atlantic storm. There 

 1 were four minor shocks within half an hour afterwards. 



After crawling along for seven hours, and for the last two in 



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