From Mr. Aiken's house one has a view of the great wall of mountains
that form the western and older--older geologically--end of the
island, in which lies the famous Iao Valley, which I have already
described. We judge, from the much deeper marks of rain erosion,
that this end of the island is vastly older than the butt end upon
which Haleakala is situated. Haleakala is eroded comparatively
little. On all its huge northern slope there is only one
considerable gash or gully, and this is probably not many thousand
years old; but the northwestern end of the island is worn and carved
in the most striking manner. Looking at it that morning, I compared
it to my extended, relaxed hand, the northern end being gashed and
grooved like the sunken spaces between the fingers, while the
southwest end, not more than ten miles distant, was only slightly
grooved and more like the solid wrist and back hand. All the rains
brought by the northeast trades fall upon the northeast end of the
islands. The mountain-peaks on the end hold the clouds and strip
them dry, so that little or no rain falls upon the south and
southwest sides. This is true of all the islands. One end of each is
arid and barren, while the other is wet and verdant. One of the
smaller islands, Kahoolawe, I believe, dominated by Maui on the
northeast, is said to be drying up and blowing away by inches.
What a spell the mountains do lay upon the clouds everywhere,--the
robber mountains,--in these islands exacting the last drop of water
of all the ocean-born vapors that pass over them! On the northeast
side of the Lahaina district there are valleys four or five thousand
feet deep; on the southwest side there are no valleys worth
mentioning. The difference in this respect was forcibly brought home
to me when, later in the day, we made an automobile trip from
Wailuku to Lahaina on the southwest side; in going less than twenty
miles we quickly passed from the region of verdant valleys and
mountain-slopes into a hard, raw, barren, unweathered region, where
there was no soil, and where the rocks looked as crude and
forbidding as they must have looked the day they flowed out from the
depths as molten lava. In outline the island of Maui suggests a
truncated statue, the west end representing the head, very old and
wrinkled and grooved by time and trouble, the peninsula the
well-proportioned neck, and broad-breasted Haleakala forming the
trunk. What a torso it is, fire-born and basking there in the
tropic seas!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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