letter xxx.] LAST ERUPTION OF HUALALAI. 285 



since r8oi, when there was a tremendous eruption from it, 

 which flooded several villages, destroyed many plantations and 

 fishponds, filled up a deep bay 20 miles in extent, and formed 

 the present coast The terrified inhabitants threw living hogs 

 into the stream, and tried to propitiate the anger of the gods 

 by more costly offerings, but without effect, till King Kame- 

 hameha, attended by a large retinue of priests and chiefs, cut 

 off some of his hair, which was considered sacred, and threw 

 it into the torrent, which in two days ceased to run. This 

 circumstance gave him a greatly increased ascendancy, from 

 his supposed influence with the deities of the volcanoes. 



I have explored the country pretty thoroughly for many 

 miles round, but have not seen anything striking, except the 

 remains of an immense heiau in the centre of the desert table- 

 land, said to have been built in a day by the compulsory labour 

 of 25,000 people : a lonely white man who lives among the 

 lava, and believes he has discovered the secret of perpetual 

 motion: and the lava-flow from Mauna Loa, which reached 

 the sea 40 miles from its exit from the mountain. 



I was riding through the brushwood with a native, and not 

 able to see two yards in any direction, when emerging from the 

 thick scrub, we came upon the torrent of 1859 within six feet 

 of us, a huge, straggling, coal-black river, broken up into 

 streams in our vicinity, but on the whole, presenting an 

 iridescent, uphill expanse a mile wide. We had reached one 

 of the divergent streams to which it had been said after its 

 downward course of 9000 feet, " Hitherto shalt thou come and 

 no further," while the main body had pursued its course to the 

 ocean. Whatever force impelled it had ceased to act, and the 

 last towering wave of fire had halted just there, and lies a 

 black, arrested surge 10 feet high, with tender ferns at its feet, 

 and a scarcely singed ohia bending over it. The flow, so far 

 as we scrambled up it, is heaped in great surges of a fierce 

 black, fiercely reflecting the torrid sun, cracked, and stained 

 yellow and white, and its broad glistening surface forms an 

 awful pathway to the dome-like crest of Mauna Loa, now 

 throbbing with internal fires, and crowned with a white smoke 

 wreath, that betokens the action of the same forces which pro- 

 duced this gigantic inundation. Close to us the main river 

 had parted above, and united below a small mama?ie tree with 

 bracken under its shadow, and there are several oases of the 

 same kind. 



I have twice been down to the larger world of the woolshed, 



