The Hawaiian Archipelago by Isabella Lucy Bird (best fiction novels to read txt) 📕

their development. In the same house the date and sugar-palms are tolerable specimens, but the cocoa-nut trees are most truly "palms in exile."

I suppose that few people ever forget the first sight of a palm-tree of any species. I vividly remember seeing one for the first time at Malaga, but the coco-palm groves of the Pacific have a strangeness and witchery of their own. As I write now I hear the moaning rustle of the wind through their plume-like tops, and their long slender stems, and crisp crown of leaves above the trees with shining leafage which revel in damp, have a suggestion of Orientalism about them. How do they come too, on every atoll or rock that raises its head throughout this lonely ocean? They fringe the shores of these islands. Wherever it is dry and fiercely hot, and the lava is black and hard, and nothing else grows, or can grow, there they are, close to the sea, sending their root-fibres seawards as if in search of salt water. Their long, curved, wrinkled, perfectly cylindrical stems, bulging near the ground like an apothecary's pestle, rise to a height of from sixty to one hundred feet. These stems are never straight, and in a grove lean and curve every way, and are apparently capable of enduring any force of wind or earthquake. They look as if they had never been young, and they show no signs of growth, rearing their plumy tufts so far aloft, and casting their shadows so far away, always supremely lonely, as though they belonged to the heavens rather than the earth. Then, while all else that grows is green they are yellowish. Their clusters of nuts in all stages of growth are yellow, their fan-like leaves, which are from twelve to twenty feet long, are yellow, and an amber light pervades and surrounds them. They provide milk, oil, food, rope, and matting, and each tree produces about one hundred nuts annually.

The pandanus, or lauhala, is one of the most striking features of the islands. Its funereal foliage droops in Hilo, and it was it that I noticed all along the windward coast as having a most striking peculiarity of aerial roots which the branches send down to the ground, and which I now see have large cup-shaped spongioles. These air-roots seem like props, and appear to vary in length from three to twelve feet, according to the situation of the tree. There is one variety I saw to-day, the "screw pine," which is really dangerous if one approached it unguardedly. It is a whorled pandanus, with long sword-shaped leaves, spirally arranged in three rows, and hard, saw-toothed edges, very sharp. When unbranched as I saw them, they resemble at a distance pine-apple plants thirty times magnified. But the mournful looking trees along the coast and all about Hilo are mostly the Pandanus odoratissimus, a spreading and branching tree which grows fully twenty-five feet high, supports itself among inaccessible rocks by its prop-like roots, and is one of the first plants to appear on the newly-formed Pacific islands. {62} Its foliage is singularly dense, although it is borne in tufts of a quantity of long yucca-like leaves on the branches. The shape of the tree is usually circular. The mournful look is caused by the leaves taking a downward and very decided droop in the middle. At present each tuft of leaves has in its centre an object like a green pine-apple. This contains the seeds which are eatable, as is also the fleshy part of the drupes. I find that it is from the seeds of this tree and their coverings that the brilliant orange leis, or garlands of the natives, are made. The soft white case of the leaves and the terminal buds can also be eaten. The leaves are used for thatching, and their tough longitudinal fibres for mats and ropes. There is another kind, the Pandanus vacoa, the same as is used for making sugar bags in Mauritius, but I have not seen it.

One does not forget the first sight of a palm. I think the banana comes next, and I see them in perfection here for the first time, as those in Honolulu grow in "yards," and are tattered by the winds. It transports me into the tropics in feeling, as I am already in them in fact, and satisfies all my cravings for something which shall represent and epitomize their luxuriance, as well as for simplicity and grace in vegetable form. And here it is everywhere with its shining shade, its smooth fat green stem, its crown of huge curving leaves from four to ten feet long, and its heavy cluster of a whorl of green or golden fruit, with a pendant purple cone of undeveloped blossom below. It is of the tropics, tropical; a thing of beauty, and gladness, and sunshine. It is indigenous here, and wild, but never bears seeds, and is propagated solely by suckers, which spring up when the parent plant has fruited, or by cuttings. It bears seed, strange to say, only (so far as is known) in the Andaman Islands, where, stranger still, it springs up as a second growth wherever the forests are cleared. Go to the palm-house, find the Musa sapientum, magnify it ten times, glorify it immeasurably, and you will have a laggard idea of the banana groves of Hilo.

The ground is carpeted with a grass of preternaturally vivid green and rankness of growth, mixed with a handsome fern, with a caudex a foot high, the Sadleria cyathoides, and another of exquisite beauty, the Micropia tenuifolia, which are said to be the commonest ferns on Hawaii. It looks Elysian.

Hilo is a lively place for such a mere village; so many natives are stirring about, and dashing along the narrow roads on horseback. This is a large airy house, simple and tasteful, with pretty engravings and water-colour drawings on the walls. There is a large bath-house in the garden, into which a pure, cool stream has been led, and the gurgle and music of many such streams fill the sweet, soft air. There is a saying among sailors, "Follow a Pacific shower, and it leads you to Hilo." Indeed I think they have a rainfall of from thirteen to sixteen feet annually. These deep verandahs are very pleasant, for they render window-blinds unnecessary; so there is nothing of that dark stuffiness which makes indoor life a trial in the closed, shadeless Australian houses.

Miss Karpe, my travelling companion, is a lady of great energy, and apparently an adept in the art of travelling. Undismayed by three days of sea-sickness, and the prospect of the tremendous journey to the volcano to-morrow, she extemporised a ride to the Anuenue Falls on the Wailuku this afternoon, and I weakly accompanied her, a burly policeman being our guide. The track is only a scramble among rocks and holes, concealed by grass and ferns, and we had to cross a stream, full of great holes, several times. The Fall itself is very pretty, 110 feet in one descent, with a cavernous shrine behind the water, filled with ferns. There were large ferns all round the Fall, and a jungle of luxuriant tropical shrubs of many kinds.

Three miles above this Fall there are the Pei-pei Falls, very interesting geologically. The Wailuku River is the boundary between the two great volcanoes, and its waters, it is supposed by learned men, have often flowed over heated beds of basalt, with the result of columnar formation radiating from the bottom of the stream. This structure is sometimes beautifully exhibited in the form of Gothic archways, through which the torrent pours into a basin, surrounded by curved, broken, and half-sunk prisms, black and prominent amidst the white foam of the Falls. In several places the river has just pierced the beds of lava, and in one passes under a thick rock bridge, several hundred feet wide. Often, where the water flows over beds of dark grey basalt, masses of trachyte, closely resembling syenite, have formed "potholes," and by mutual action have been worn to pebbles. At Pei-pei there are three circular pools, each about fifty feet in diameter, and separated by walls six feet thick, in a bed of columnar basalt. {65} During freshets the river sometimes rises thirty feet, and hides these pools, but during the dry season the upper bed is bare, and after a succession of cascades of various heights the stream pours into the first basin, filling it with foam. From this there is no apparent outlet, but leaves thrown in soon appear in the second basin, whose tranquillity is only disturbed by a few bubbles. Between this and the third there are two subterranean passages, and the water there leaps over a fall about forty feet high, nearly covering a perfect Gothic arch which is the entrance to a shallow cave. The scene is enclosed by high and nearly perpendicular walls. {66}

Near the Anuenue Fall we stopped at a native house, outside which a woman, in a rose-coloured chemise, was stringing roses for a necklace, while her husband pounded the kalo root on a board. His only clothing was the malo, a narrow strip of cloth wound round the loins, and passed between the legs. This was the only covering worn by men before the introduction of Christianity. Females wore the pau, a short petticoat made of tapa, which reached from the waist to the knees. To our eyes, the brown skin produces nearly the effect of clothing.

Everything was new and interesting, but the ride was spoiled by my insecure seat in my saddle, and the increased pain in my spine which riding produced. Once in crossing a stream the horses have to make a sort of downward jump from a rock, and I slipped round my horse's neck. Indeed on the way back I felt that on the ground of health I must give up the volcano, as I would never consent to be carried to it, like Lady Franklin, in a litter. When we returned, Mr. Severance suggested that it would be much better for me to follow the Hawaiian fashion, and ride astride, and put his saddle on the horse. It was only my strong desire to see the volcano which made me consent to a mode of riding against which I have so strong a prejudice, but the result of the experiment is that I shall visit Kilauea thus or not at all. The native women all ride astride, on ordinary occasions in the full sacks, or holukus, and on gala days in the pau, the gay, winged dress which I described in writing from Honolulu. A great many of the foreign ladies on Hawaii have adopted the Mexican saddle also, for greater security to themselves and ease to their horses, on the steep and perilous bridle-tracks, but they wear full Turkish trowsers and jauntily-made dresses reaching to the ankles.

It appears that Hilo is free from the universally admitted nuisance of morning calls. The hours are simple--eight o'clock breakfasts, one o'clock dinners, six o'clock suppers. If people want anything with you, they come at any hour of the day, but if they only wish to be sociable, the early evening is the recognized time for "calling." After supper, when the day's work is done, people take their lanterns and visit each other, either in the verandahs or in the cheerful parlours which open upon them. There are no door-bells, or solemn announcements