In the mid-afternoon we took the train for Glenwood, thirty miles on
our way to the volcano of Kilauea. A large part of the way the road
leads through sugar plantations, newly carved out of the koa and
tree-fern wilderness that originally covered the volcanic soil.
Clusters of the little houses of the Japanese laborers, perched high
above the ground on slender posts, were passed here and there.
Everywhere we saw wooden aqueducts, or flumes, winding around the
contours of the hills and across the little valleys, often on high
trestle-work, and partly filled with clear, swift-running water, in
which the sugar-cane was transported to the mills.
At Glenwood stages meet the tourists and convey them over a fairly
good road that winds through the tree-fern forests to the Volcano
House, ten miles away. The beauty of that fern-lined forest, the
long, stately plumes of the gigantic ferns meeting the eye
everywhere, I shall not soon forget. I saw what appeared to be a
large, showy red raspberry growing by the roadside, but I did not
find it at all tempting to the taste.
It was dark when we reached the Volcano House, and we saw off to the
left a red glow upon the fog-clouds, like the reflected light from
a burning barn or house in the country, and inferred at once that it
came from the volcano, which it did. From my window that night, as I
lay in bed, I could see this same angry glow upon the clouds. The
smell of sulphur was in the air about the hotel, and very hot steam
was issuing from cracks in the rocks. A party of tourists on
horseback, in the spirit of true American hurry, visited the volcano
that night, but we chose to wait until the morrow.
The next morning the great crater of Kilauea was filled with fog,
but it lifted, and the sun shone before noon. We passed a pleasant
forenoon strolling along the tree-fringed brink, looking down eight
or nine hundred feet upon its black lava floor, and plucking ohelo
berries, which grew there abundantly, a kind of large, red
huckleberry that one could eat out of hand, but that one could not
get excited over. They were better in a pie than in the hand. Their
name seemed to go well with the suggestion of the scenes amid which
they grew. Kilauea is a round extinct crater about three miles
across and seven or eight hundred feet deep. It has been the scene
of terrific explosions in past ages, but it has now dwindled to the
small active crater of Halemaumau, which is sunk near the middle of
it like a huge pot, two hundred or more feet deep and a thousand
feet across.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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