LETTER XXIX.] 



A DESOLATE REGION. 



275 



passive in eveiy way. The loneliness was absolute. For 

 several hours I saw no trace of human beings, except the very 

 rare print of a shod horse's hoof. It is a region for ever 

 " desolate and without inhabitant," trackless, waterless, silent, 

 as if it had passed into the passionless calm of lunar solitudes. 

 It is composed of rough hummocks of pahoehoe, rising out of 

 a sandy desert. Only stunted ohias, loaded with crimson tufts, 

 raise themselves out of cracks : twisted, tortured growths, 

 bearing their bright blossoms under protest, driven unwillingly 

 to be gay by a fiery soil and a fiery sun. To the left, there 

 was the high, dark wall of an a-a stream ; further yet, a tre- 

 mendous volcanic fissure, at times the bed of a fiery river, and 

 above this the towering dome of Mauna Loa, a brilliant 

 cobalt blue, lined and shaded with indigo where innumer- 

 able lava streams have seamed his portentous sides : his 

 whole beauty the effect of atmosphere, on an object in itself 

 hideous. Ahead and to the right were rolling miles of a 

 pahoehoe sea, bounded by the unseen Pacific 3000 feet below, 

 with countless craters, fissures emitting vapour, and all other 

 concomitants of volcanic action ; bounded to the north by 

 the vast crater of Kilauea. On all this deadly region the sun 

 poured his tropic light and heat from one of the bluest skies I 

 ever saw. 



The (direction given me on leaving Kapapala was, that after 

 the natives left me I was to keep a certain crater on the 

 south-east till I saw the smoke of Kilauea; but there were 

 many craters. Horses cross the sand and hummocks as 

 nearly as possible on a bee line; but the lava rarely indi- 

 cates that anything has passed over it, and this morning a 

 strong breeze had rippled the sand, completely obliterating 

 the hoof-marks of the last traveller, and at times I feared that 

 losing myself, as many others have done, I should go mad with 

 thirst. I examined the sand narrowly for hoof-marks, and every 

 now and then found one, but always had the disappointment of 

 finding that it was made by an unshod horse, therefore not a 

 ridden one. Finding eyesight useless, I dismounted often, and 

 felt with my finger along the rolling lava for the slightest marks 

 of abrasion, which might show that shod animals had passed 

 that way, got up into an ohia to look out for the smoke of 

 Kilauea, and after three hours came out upon what I here 

 learn is the old track, disused because of the insecurity of the 

 ground, 



It runs quite close to the edge of the crater, there 1000 



T 2 



