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Updated: May 17, 2025
It was magnificent sport. We wore ourselves out at it. The crater of Vesuvius, as I have before remarked, is a modest pit about a thousand feet deep and three thousand in circumference; that of Kilauea is somewhat deeper, and ten miles in circumference. But what are either of them compared to the vacant stomach of Haleakala?
At the ranch there was great festival of cattle- driving, branding, and horse-breaking. Overhead Ukiukiu and Naulu battled valiantly, and far above, in the sunshine, towered the mighty summit of Haleakala. Sandwich Islands to Tahiti. There is great difficulty in making this passage across the trades. The whalers and all others speak with great doubt of fetching Tahiti from the Sandwich islands.
But the chief pride of Maui is her dead volcano of Haleakala which means, translated, "the house of the sun." We climbed a thousand feet up the side of this isolated colossus one afternoon; then camped, and next day climbed the remaining nine thousand feet, and anchored on the summit, where we built a fire and froze and roasted by turns, all night.
Somehow, one expects to pass through some ulterior stage of blackness up to the summit. It is no such thing; and the great surprise of Haleakala to me was, that when according to calculation there should have been a summit, an abyss of vast dimensions opened below.
All are of volcanic origin, mountainous, and Hawaii contains the largest active crater in the world Kilauea one of the craters of Mauna Loa; while Maui contains the largest known extinct crater, Haleakala, the House of the Sun a pit thirty miles in circumference and two thousand feet deep.
Last night I dreamed I was a lark bird, a beautiful singing lark of the sky like the larks on the upland pastures of Haleakala. And I flew up, up, toward the sun, singing, singing, as old Kohokumu never sang. I tell you now that I dreamed I was a lark bird singing in the sky. But may not I, the real I, be the lark bird?
I thought it might be two hundred feet high. "It is eight hundred," said our guide; yet its summit was more than a thousand feet below the rim upon which we sat. There has been no eruption in Haleakala since early in the last century. Over a large area of the interior the black lava, cracked and crumpled, meets the eye.
And all the while the ragged little skirmishers, stray and detached, sneak through the trees and canyons, crawl along and through the grass, and surprise one another with unexpected leaps and rushes; while above, far above, serene and lonely in the rays of the setting sun, Haleakala looks down upon the conflict. And so, the night.
That had been her first glimpse of Steve. He had been the youngest man on the committee, a youth, himself, of twenty. He had not entertained by speechmaking, nor had he shone decoratively at receptions. It was in the breakers at Waikiki, in the wild cattle drive on Manna Kea, and in the breaking yard of the Haleakala Ranch that he had performed his share of the entertaining.
I am pointing out that he was no coward, in order that you may appreciate what happens later on. I've seen him in the breaking yard at the Haleakala Ranch, conquering a four-year-old brute that for two years had defied the pick of Von Tempsky's cow-boys. And I must tell of one other thing. It was down in Kona, or up, rather, for the Kona people scorn to live at less than a thousand feet elevation.
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