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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It Was One Of The
Worst And Steepest Of The Palis That We Had To Ascend; But I Can't
Remember Anything About The Road Except That We Had To Leap Some
Place Which We Could Not Cross Otherwise.
Deborah, then thoroughly
alive to a sense of risk, said that there was only one more bad
gulch to cross before we reached Onomea, but it was the most
dangerous of all, and we could not get across, she feared, but we
might go and look at it.
I only remember the extreme solitude of
the region, and scrambling and sliding down a most precipitous pali,
hearing a roar like cataract upon cataract, and coming suddenly down
upon a sublime and picturesque scene, with only standing room, and
that knee-deep in water, between a savage torrent and the cliff.
This gulch, called the Scotchman's gulch, I am told, because a
Scotchman was drowned there, must be at its crossing three-quarters
of a mile inland, and three hundred feet above the sea. In going to
Waipio, on noticing the deep holes and enormous boulders, some of
them higher than a man on horseback, I had thought what a fearful
place it would be if it were ever full; but my imagination had not
reached the reality. One huge compressed impetuous torrent, leaping
in creamy foam, boiling in creamy eddies, rioting in deep black
chasms, roared and thundered over the whole in rapids of the most
tempestuous kind, leaping down to the ocean in three grand broad
cataracts, the nearest of them not more than forty feet from the
crossing.
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