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Far above towered the huge bulks of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, seeming to blot out half the starry sky. Two miles and a half above our heads they reared their own heads, white with snow that the tropic sun had failed to melt. "Thirty miles away, right now, I'll wager, it is blowing forty miles an hour." I smiled incredulously. Cudworth stepped to the lanai telephone.
"Jon and Loa lived with their father and mother far to the north of the Island of Fire, and when the children looked from their windows they saw only wild scaurs and jagged lava rocks, and a distant, deep gleam of the sea. They caught the shine of the sea through an eye-shaped opening in the rocks, and all the long night of winter it gleamed up at them, like the eye of a dead witch.
I had some grog last night, but then grog, d'y'see, is is a seaman's native element, as the newspapers say, though I never read 'em now, it's such a plague." He lay quiet for a short time, considering in his own mind what was best to he done, and what was the proper course to pursue, and why he should dream. "Hilloa, hilloa, hil loa!
In fact, the only volcano now active in the Hawaiian Islands is Mauna Loa, in the southern section of the Island of Hawaii. A striking feature of this is that it has two distinct and widely disconnected craters, one on its summit, the other on its flank, at a much lower level. The latter is the vast crater of Kilauea, the largest active crater known on the face of the globe.
The name of the white boy was William Harrison, though he was always called Billy, and his father, an American merchant in Honolulu, owned the house near which the boys were playing. The name of the brown boy was Manua Loa, or something like that, but he was always called Cocoanut, the nickname agreeing perfectly with his general solid, nubbinish appearance.
Monday morning we were close to the island of Hawaii. Two of its high mountains were in view Mauna Loa and Hualaiai. The latter is an imposing peak, but being only ten thousand feet high is seldom mentioned or heard of. Mauna Loa is said to be sixteen thousand feet high.
A gentleman who slept at the summit in September, 1873, told me the ice made over two inches thick during the night. If Mauna Loa is active, a traveler on the Islands ought by all means to see it; for Dr. Coan assures me that it is then one of the most terrific and grand sights imaginable. I did not visit it, as it was not active while I was on the Islands, though its fires were alive.
But on her way, while off the mouth of the river Loa, she fell in with the Peruvian ships Union and Pilcomayo, with which she fought a running action for over two hours, when, owing to her superior speed, she effected her escape.
Dr Ried accomplished the whole distance without once dismounting. The stream is called Loa, and has its source in the snows of the mountain-tops. In the neighbourhood of a small Indian village called Chiuchiu, it is fed by a little volcanic stream, which contains a large quantity of salt in a state of dissolution, besides copper, arsenic, sulphur, and other matters.
We cannot offer a better description of the aspect of this lava abyss than to give Miss Bird's eloquent description of her adventurous descent into it: "The abyss, which really is at a height of four thousand feet on the flank of Mauna Loa, has the appearance of a pit on a rolling plain. But such a pit!
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