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Winding round the bases of tossed up, fissured hummocks of pahoehoe, leaping from one broken hummock to another, clambering up acclivities so steep that the pack-horse rolled backwards once, and my cat-like mule fell twice, moving cautiously over crusts which rang hollow to the tread; stepping over deep cracks, which, perhaps, led down to the burning fathomless sea, traversing hilly lakes ruptured by earthquakes, and split in cooling into a thousand fissures, painfully toiling up the sides of mounds of scoriae frothed with pumice-stone, and again for miles surmounting rolling surfaces of billowy ropy lava so passed the long day, under the tropic sun, and the deep blue sky.
We soon entered on vast uplands of pahoehoe which ground away the animals' feet, a horrid waste, extending upwards for 7000 feet.
PAHOEHOE AND AA. When the crust of highly fluid lava remains unbroken after its first freezing, it presents a smooth, hummocky, and ropy surface known by the Hawaiian term PAHOEHOE. On the other hand, the crust of a viscid flow may be broken and splintered as it is dragged along by the slowly moving mass beneath.
They certainly put me on a track which could not be mistaken, for it was a narrow, straight path, cut and hammered through a broad horrible a-a stream, whose jagged spikes were the height of the horse. But beyond this lie ten miles of pahoehoe, the lava-flows of ages, with only now and then the vestige of a trail.
Professor Alexander, of Honolulu, supposes them to be from the beginning less fluid than pahoehoe, and that they advance very slowly, being full of solid points, or centres of cooling: that a- a, in fact, grains like sugar. Its hardness is indescribable. It is an aggregate of upright, rugged, adamantine points, and at a distance, a river of it looks like a dark brown Mer de Glace.
A very frequent aspect of pahoehoe is the likeness on a magnificent scale of a thick coat of cream drawn in wrinkling folds to the side of a milk-pan. This lava is all grey, and the greater part of its surface is slightly roughened. Wherever this is not the case the horses slip upon it as upon ice.
It is a region for ever "desolate and without inhabitant," trackless, waterless, silent, as if it had passed into the passionless calm of lunar solitudes. It is composed of rough hummocks of pahoehoe, rising out of a sandy desert.
Also he liberated his aku and opelu fish in the new waters, where today their progeny teem in countless millions. Very soon he built himself a grass hut for a home, and was careful to protect the pili grass, which grew rapidly and before long spread to other parts of the big island, where it throve even better than on the scant soil of the pahoehoe rock.
Hawaii is actually at the present time being built up from the ocean, and this great sea of pahoehoe is not to be regarded as a vindictive eruption, bringing desolation on a fertile region, but as an architectural and formative process. These crimson tassels deftly strung on thread or fibres, are much used by the natives for their leis, or garlands.
We had a delicious gallop over the sands to the Waiakea river, which we crossed, and came upon one of the vast lava-flows of ages since, over which we had to ride carefully, as the pahoehoe lies in rivers, coils, tortuosities, and holes partially concealed by a luxuriant growth of ferns and convolvuli.
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