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An old palace, the remains of a fort, a custom-house, and a native church are the most conspicuous buildings. The stores and dwellings of the foreign residents are scattered along the shore, and the light frame house, with its green verandah, buried amid gorgeous exotics and shaded by candlenut and breadfruit, looks as seemly and in keeping as in far-off Massachusetts, under hickory and elm.
It is but a narrow strip of land between the ocean and the red, flaring, almost inaccessible, Maui hills, which here rise abruptly to a height of 6,000 feet, pinnacled, chasmed, buttressed, and almost verdureless, except in a few deep clefts, green and cool with ferns and candlenut trees, and moist with falling water.
The route hugged the sea, but at every turn I saw inland the laughing, green valleys, deserted of inhabitants, climbing slowly between massive walls of rock to which clung great tree ferns, with magnificent vert parasols, enormous clumps of feis, with huge, emerald or yellow upstanding bunches of fruit; candlenut- and ironwood-trees.
They puffed it; they spat; they put their heads together, and he threw down his cards. Then calmly the Tahitian laid down his own, and they saw that they could have beaten him. They shouted in dismay, and withdrew Kivi, who after some palaver went away with them into the darkness. One or two candlenut torches dimly illumined the figures of the squatting women who remained.
At our first night's camp, in the Keanae Gulch, we counted thirty-two waterfalls from a single viewpoint. The vegetation ran riot over that wild land. There were forests of koa and kolea trees, and candlenut trees; and then there were the trees called ohia-ai, which bore red mountain apples, mellow and juicy and most excellent to eat.
His ghoulish laughter rose in the dark stillness of the jungle, and the hair stirred on my scalp. To my vision the high black seats were filled with shadowy figures, the light of candlenut torches fell on tattooed faces and gleaming eyes.
Their architecture is absolutely unostentatious, and their one beauty is that they are embowered among trailers, shadowed by superb exotics, and surrounded by banks of flowers, while the stately cocoanut, the banana, and the candlenut, the aborigines of Oahu, are nowhere displaced.
At that height a shower of rain falls on nearly every day in the year, and the result is a green sward which England can hardly rival, a perfect sea of verdure, darkened in the valley and more than half way up the hill sides by the foliage of the yellow-blossomed and almost impenetrable hibiscus, brightened here and there by the pea-green candlenut.
His eyes were barely openable, and his face, indeed, his whole body, was a coppery green, the soot of the candlenut, black itself, but blue upon the flesh, having turned by age to a mottled and hideous color. Only the striking patterns, where they branched from the biceps to the chest, were plain.
My destination was the industrial training and boarding school for girls, taught and superintended by two English ladies of Miss Sellon's sisterhood, Sisters Mary Clara and Phoebe; and I found it buried under the shade of the finest candlenut trees I have yet seen.
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