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Updated: May 8, 2025
When I arrived on the platform that morning, I saw the Island of Hawaii two miles to leeward, the largest of the seven islands making up this group. I could clearly distinguish the tilled soil on its outskirts, the various mountain chains running parallel with its coastline, and its volcanoes, crowned by Mauna Kea, whose elevation is 5,000 meters above sea level.
No automobiles. And the horse for myself! It was Hilo. You don't remember him. You were away at school then, and before you came home, the following year, he'd broken his back and his rider's neck wild-cattle-roping up Mauna Kea. You heard about it that young American naval officer." "Lieutenant Bowsfield," Martha nodded. "But Hilo! I was the first woman on his back.
Above the cliffs there were grassy uplands with park-like clumps of the screw-pine, and candle-nut, and glades and dells of dazzling green, bright with cataracts, opened up among the dark dense forests which for some thousands of feet girdle Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, two vast volcanic mountains, whose snowcapped summits gleamed here and there above the clouds, at an altitude of nearly 14,000 feet.
Indeed, bunting to my mind never looked so well as when floating and fainting among cocoa-nut palms and all the shining greenery of Hilo, in the sunshine of a radiant morning. It was bright and warm, but the cool bulk of Mauna Kea, literally covered with snow, looked down as winter upon summer.
I remember the rainbow-coloured harbour of Honolulu Hilo, the simply joyous Arcadie at the foot of Mauna Loa, and Mauna Kea which lifted violet shoulders to the morning, the groves of cocoa-palms and tamarinds, the waterfalls dropping over sheer precipices a thousand feet into the ocean, the green embrasures where the mango, the guava, and the lovi lovi grow, and where the hibiscus lifts red hands to the light.
The sun was just setting: the tooth-like peaks of Mauna Kea, cold and snow slashed, which were blushing red, the next minute turned ghastly against a chilly sky, and with the disappearance of the sun it became severely cold; yet we were able to remain there till 9.30, the first people to whom such a thing has been possible, so supremely favoured were we by the absence of wind.
No one ever noticed it except Stephen Kaluna, and I did not know that till afterward. But I saw it coming, the whole damnable, unnamable awfulness of it; but I refused to think about the future. I was afraid. I could not. And of nights I cried over it. "He was my friend. We fished sharks on Niihau together. We hunted wild cattle on Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa.
The mountains, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, could be plainly seen from top to bottom, their giant crests rising nearly 14,000 feet above our heads, their tree and fern clad slopes seamed with deep gulches or ravines, down each of which a fertilising river ran into the sea.
But the kea is also a wretched pest, for it has learned how to kill sheep since the sheep-herders came to New Zealand. The kea darts out of the air, fastens its talons in the side of the sheep, and quickly makes a gaping hole into the animal's vitals. Thousands of sheep are thus killed every year.
Mauna Kea, and the forests which skirt his base, are the resort of thousands of wild cattle, and there are many men nearly as wild, who live half savage lives in the woods, gaining their living by lassoing and shooting these animals for their skins. Wild black swine also abound.
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