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In others the landscape presented the soft beauty of undulating, grove-like scenery, in which, amid a profusion of bright green herbage, there rose conspicuous the tall stems and waving plumes of the cocoanut palm; the superb and umbrageous ko-a, with its laurel-green leaves and sweet blossoms; the kukui, or candlenut tree; the fragrant sandal-wood, and a variety of other trees and shrubs for which there are no English names.
One of the conspicuous trees of the Hawaiian forests is the Kukui or candle-nut. Its pale green foliage gives the mountain sides sometimes a disagreeable look; though where it grows among the Ko trees, whose leaves are of a dark green, the contrast is not unpleasant.
Suddenly, almost at our very feet, a little bowl-shaped valley about half a mile in circumference opened to view. The upper rim all around was covered with smooth green grass, and the sides were hidden by the foliage of dark-green mango trees, light-green kukui, bread-fruit and banana.
The brief duty visit over, Martha arose and accompanied her back to the bungalow, putting money into her hand, commanding proud and beautiful Japanese housemaids to wait upon the dilapidated aborigine with poi, which is compounded of the roots of the water lily, with iamaka, which is raw fish, and with pounded kukui nut and limu, which latter is seawood tender to the toothless, digestible and savoury.
We again rode up the river in that slow and solemn fashion in which horses walk in water, galloped over a stretch of grass, crossed a bright stream several times, and then entered a dense jungle of Indian shot, plantains, and sadlerias, with breadfruit, kukui, and ohia rising out of it. There were thousands of plantains, a fruit resembling the banana, but that it requires cooking.
We returned to the harbour by way of the King's palace, which is in the centre of the town, and may be known by the royal flag floating over it. The palace is built of coral stone, and is an unpretending building, reminding one of a French maison de campagne. It stands in about an acre of ground, ornamented with flowers, shrubs, and an avenue of kukui and koa-trees.
From its abundance I supposed the candle-nut might be made an article of export; but the country is so rough that the gathering of the nuts is very laborious; and several persons who have experimented in expressing the oil from the nut have discovered that it did not pay cost. Only two thousand pounds of Kukui nuts were exported in 1872. Sandal-wood was once a chief article of export.
My room opened on a veranda shaded with kukui trees, and as the "coo-coo-ee coo-coo-ee" of the doves in the branches came to my ears I thought that the trees had received their name from the notes of the doves, but afterward learnt that kukui in the Hawaiian language meant "light," and that the nuts, being full of oil, were strung on bamboo poles by the natives and used as torches.
We could see miles of the road we had come silvery-green cane-plantations, little villages with white church-spires, rich groves of palm, kukui and koa, and the sea rising like a dark blue wall all around the horizon. Then we mounted and turned our faces toward Honolulu. On either side were lofty mountain-walls, with perpendicular sides clothed with vivid green and hung with silvery waterfalls.
Though in some gulches the kukui preponderates, in others the lauhala whose aerial roots support it in otherwise impossible positions, and in others the sombre ohia, yet there were some grand clefts in which nature has mingled her treasures impartially, and out of cool depths of ferns rose the feathery coco-palm, the glorious breadfruit, with its green melon-like fruit, the large ohia, ideal in its beauty, the most gorgeous flowering tree I have ever seen, with spikes of rose-crimson blossoms borne on the old wood, blazing among its shining many-tinted leafage, the tall papaya with its fantastic crown, the profuse gigantic plantain, and innumerable other trees, shrubs, and lianas, in the beauty and bounteousness of an endless spring.
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