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HAWAIIAN GUIDE BOOK 



ages, a space of time whereof the mind of man runneth 

 not to the contrary, it affords a view of the marvelous 

 which no lover of nature should fail to obtain. The 

 bowl of this crater is oblong in shape, and so immense 

 as to surpass in extent the entire city of New York, 

 below Central Park, which is of a somewhat simi- 

 lar form. Trinity steeple would be a toy cane by the 

 side of one of its sixteen sub-crater cones, some of 

 which are larger than Punch Bowl that overlooks Hon- 

 olulu, and five hundred and fifty feet in tight. The 

 shape of this huge crater of Haleakala, must, in former 

 ages, have been that of an egg seven miles in length 

 and two thousand feet deep. 



The sides of the external crater are in some places a 

 perfect wall ; in others abutments of lava rocks flanked 

 by slides of scoriae, or red and black sand. On the east 

 and north two black rivers, perhaps two miles wide, run 

 out of the center of the crater, each current making a 

 deep gap through the solid external wall, one running 

 north-easterly towards Hamakua, the other towards 

 Kaupo, both reaching the sea, and showing the course 

 of the streams throughout their entire length. The 

 lava is as fresh as if the eruption was yesterday, 

 and suggests, why not again to-morrow ? At some 

 period this immense bowl was undoubtedly filled with 

 lava, when the mountain must, by a heavy earthquake, 

 have been broken into the gaps through which these 

 livers run, and the sixteen cones at the bottom of the 

 large crater been formed since that grand rupture. 



The absence of familiar objects to give a relative size 

 to other objects embarrasses any attempt at description. 

 Everything is so immense at this elevation that craters 



