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Updated: June 10, 2025
In spite of the garrulous assemblage, I was asleep before eight, and never woke till I found myself in a blaze of sunshine this morning, and in perfect solitude. It was very hot and serene down there between those palis 700 and 800 feet high. The huts of the village were all shut, and not a creature stirred.
We rode through forests lighted up by crimson flowers, through mountain valleys greener than Alpine meadows, descended steep palis, and forded deep, strong rivers, pausing at the beautiful Wailua Falls, which leap in a broad sheet of foam and a heavy body of water into a dark basin, walled in by cliffs so hard that even the ferns and mosses which revel in damp, fail to find roothold in the naked rock.
Palis 3000 feet in height walled in its head with a complete inaccessibility. It lay in cool dewy shadow till the sudden sun flushed its precipices with pink, and a broad bar of light revealed the great chasm in which it terminates, while far off its portals opened upon the red eastern sky. This little lonely world had become so very dear to me, that I found it hard to leave it.
I rode into Hilo the next day in time for morning service, and the mare, after a good gallop, subsided into a staidness of demeanour befitting the day. Just as I was leaving, they asked me to take the news to the sheriff that a man had been killed a few hours before. He was riding into Hilo with a child behind him, and they went over by no means one of the worst of the palis.
It was one of the worst and steepest of the palis that we had to ascend; but I can't remember anything about the road except that we had to leap some place which we could not cross otherwise.
Dense forests of various shades of green fill up the greater part of the valley, concealing the basins into which the cascades leap, and the grey basalt of the palis is mostly hidden by greenery.
This is a wonderful place: a ravine about three miles long and three-quarters of a mile wide, without an obvious means of ingress, being walled in by precipices from 2000 to 4000 feet high. Five cascades dive from the palis at its head, and unite to form a placid river about up to a horse's body here, and deep enough for a horse to swim in a little below.
The rain came down, if possible, yet more heavily, and coursed fiercely down each pali track. Hundreds of cascades leapt from the cliffs, bringing down stones with a sharp rattling sound. We crossed a bridge over one gulch, where the water was thundering down in such volume that it seemed as if it must rend the hard basalt of the palis.
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