This circumstance gave him a greatly increased ascendancy,
from his supposed influence with the deities of the volcanoes.
I have explored the country pretty thoroughly for many miles round,
but have not seen anything striking, except the remains of an
immense heiau in the centre of the desert tableland, said to have
been built in a day by the compulsory labour of 25,000 people: a
lonely white man who lives among the lava, and believes he has
discovered the secret of perpetual motion: and the lava-flow from
Mauna Loa, which reached the sea 40 miles from its exit from the
mountain.
I was riding through the brushwood with a native, and not able to
see two yards in any direction, when emerging from the thick scrub,
we came upon the torrent of 1859 within six feet of us, a huge,
straggling, coal-black river, broken up into streams in our
vicinity, but on the whole, presenting an iridescent uphill expanse
a mile wide. We had reached one of the divergent streams to which
it had been said after its downward course of 9000 feet, "Hitherto
shalt thou come and no further," while the main body had pursued its
course to the ocean. Whatever force impelled it had ceased to act,
and the last towering wave of fire had halted just there, and lies a
black arrested surge 10 feet high, with tender ferns at its feet,
and a scarcely singed ohia bending over it.
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