When the sun rose amidst showers and rainbows (for this is the
showery season), I could hardly believe my eyes. Scenery,
vegetation, colour were all changed. The glowing red, the fiery
glare, the obtrusive lack of vegetation were all gone. There was a
magnificent coast-line of grey cliffs many hundred feet in height,
usually draped with green, but often black, caverned, and fantastic
at their bases. Into cracks and caverns the heavy waves surged with
a sound like artillery, sending their broad white sheets of foam
high up among the ferns and trailers, and drowning for a time the
endless baritone of the surf, which is never silent through the
summer years. Cascades in numbers took one impulsive leap from the
cliffs into the sea, or came thundering down clefts or "gulches,"
which, widening at their extremities, opened on smooth green lawns,
each one of which has its grass house or houses, kalo patch,
bananas, and coco-palms, so close to the broad Pacific that its
spray often frittered itself away over their fan-like leaves. Above
the cliffs there were grassy uplands with park-like clumps of the
screw-pine, and candle-nut, and glades and dells of dazzling green,
bright with cataracts, opened up among the dark dense forests which
for some thousands of feet girdle Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, two vast
volcanic mountains, whose snowcapped summits gleamed here and there
above the clouds, at an altitude of nearly 14,000 feet.
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