The Hawaiian Archipelago - Six Months Among The Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, And Volcanoes Of The Sandwich Islands By Isabella L. Bird
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Our Accustomed Horses Leaped Into A
Ferry-Scow Provided By Government, Worked By A Bearded Female Of
Hideous Aspect, And Leaped Out On The Other Side To Climb A Track
Cut On The Side Of A Precipice, Which Would Be Steep To Mount On
One's Own Feet.
There we met parties of natives, all flower-
wreathed, talking and singing, coming gaily down on their sure-
footed
Horses, saluting us with the invariable "Aloha." Every now
and then we passed native churches, with spires painted white, or a
native schoolhouse, or a group of scholars all ferns and flowers.
The greenness of the vegetation merits the term "dazzling." We
think England green, but its colour is poor and pale as compared
with that of tropical Hawaii. Palms, candlenuts, ohias, hibiscus,
were it not for their exceeding beauty, would almost pall upon one
from their abundance, and each gulch has its glorious entanglement
of breadfruit, the large-leaved ohia, or native apple, a species of
Eugenia (Eugenia Malaccensis), and the pandanus, with its aerial
roots, all looped together by large sky-blue convolvuli and the
running fern, and is marvellous with parasitic growths.
The distracting beauty of this coast is what are called gulches -
narrow deep ravines or gorges, from 100 to 2,000 feet in depth, each
with a series of cascades from 10 to 1,800 feet in height. I
dislike reducing their glories to the baldness of figures, but the
depth of these clefts (originally, probably, the seams caused by
fire torrents), cut and worn by the fierce streams fed by the snows
of Mauna Kea, and the rains of the forest belt, cannot otherwise be
expressed.
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